Freedom of Information Act 2000 (Amendment)

1st reading
Tuesday 14th July 2026 Commons Chamber

Motion for leave to bring in a Bill (Standing Order No. 23)

14:01

[Siân Berry (Brighton Pavilion) (Green)]

I beg to move,

That leave be given to bring in a Bill to omit section 37 of the Freedom of Information Act 2000; to provide that the Sovereign, the Royal Family, the Royal Household, the Royal Archives and the Duchies of Cornwall and Lancaster are public authorities for the purposes of that Act; and for connected purposes.

I am grateful to have the chance to introduce this Bill alongside colleagues from parties across the House. I am very grateful for the breadth of support across many parties for the measures that it contains; that shows how much Members of the House recognise the importance of transparency and accountability in public office.

Today the people of France celebrate Bastille Day, to commemorate when they were driven to revolt because they were fed up of an aloof regime that they had no way of holding to account. One particular member of the royal family was travelling to shady destinations to meet secretly with foreign men of extreme wealth for reasons that would have shocked the common people if they had known. There is no record we can find to say whether or not Marie Antoinette spent three days visiting any of these men to tell them that she could not be their friend any more. Meanwhile, the elected representatives of the country—the Third Estate—were being blocked from having any say in the behaviour of the French royal family or even being able to investigate what members like that were up to.

To be clear, at this stage I do not believe that we in this place should be calling for an insurrection, as the Third Estate did then. Instead, the Bill I present today will go some way to adding a brick of transparency to the wall of secrecy and privilege that surrounds our own monarchy nearly 250 years later. The Bill also has support from the Campaign for Freedom of Information, Republic, the general committee of Labour International, and the National Union of Journalists.

There are two questions that we must ask in connection with the royal family and freedom of information. Under our constitution, which needs modernising in so many ways, are the royal family public servants or not? If they are, is it reasonable for one set of public servants to have such a blanket exemption from the rules that all others have to follow?

As MPs and Ministers, we are expected to follow the Nolan principles of public life, as are all public bodies and servants. The fifth Nolan principle is openness. It says:

“Information should not be withheld from the public unless there are clear and lawful reasons for doing so.”

Clearly, the Freedom of Information Act 2000 was created in that spirit. But despite meeting the criteria of a public body, and despite the royal family unarguably being public servants, the monarchy has its own special exemption carved out in the Act. Can that in any way be right? Some right hon. and hon. Members may be concerned that the Bill is not perfectly reasonable in what it asks for, but I assure them that it is. It is about providing the bare minimum of accountability to the royal family and closing loopholes that I think we all agree should not be carved out just for members of one privileged lineage.

The Bill will address section 37 of the Freedom of Information Act 2000, which gives a more or less blanket exemption to communications between relevant authorities and members of the broader royal family, not just the King. That provision too often prevents communications from being released under freedom of information requests to other public authorities. In practice, the section 37 exemption has meant that perfectly reasonable questions about trips on the RAF’s royal flight have been refused, including the question of who flew with Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor when he was not only a member of the royal family but employed as our trade envoy.

We now have a former Prime Minister pressing for information about whether Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor used taxpayer-funded jets or RAF bases to meet the paedophile and trafficker Jeffrey Epstein. Countless other questions along those lines should have been answered long ago.

Andrew Lownie, who wrote the biography of Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor, has seen the exemption at work time and again. He told me last week:

“It’s a scandal the royal family are exempt from the Freedom of Information Act—this was never intended to be an absolute exemption, and in practice the public interest test that should be applied has never come down in favour of disclosure, in my experience from scores of requests over a decade.”

This is really just one arbitrary and absurd rule for the rich and powerful and another for the rest of us. My Bill would remove section 37 from the Freedom of Information Act completely.

The second part of my Bill would add a number of relevant institutions to the list of public authorities in the 2000 Act. That is because none of the main royal institutions is listed in the Act, so freedom of information requests cannot be made of them directly. My Bill proposes to fix that by adding the royal family, the royal household, the Royal Archives, and the ex-officio royal duchies of Cornwall and Lancaster to the list of public authorities covered by the Act. We should be able to ask questions to those undoubtedly public authorities.

Currently listed in schedule 1 of the 2000 Act are such institutions as the Advisory Board on the Registration of Homoeopathic Products, the British Wool Marketing Board, the Commissioners of Northern Lighthouses and the Government Hospitality Advisory Committee for the Purchase of Wine. The Act is very comprehensive, because we rightly expect transparency from the whole range of public bodies that owe us the Nolan duty of openness in exchange for our funding, patronage and respect—and we should of the royal family too.

All the usual exemptions would still apply—those relating to junior staff and national security, for example—but my Bill would go further. With reasonable measures similar to those that protect MPs from disclosures that might pose a danger to us from a security perspective, my Bill will allow for non-disclosure where data such as future travel details appear.

Finally, I want to say a few words about the uses and abuses of the secrecy currently afforded to the Royal Archives and why that must be included in schedule 1 to the 2000 Act. Under the Public Records Act 1958, UK Government Departments must identify records of historic interest and release all possible content to the National Archives. Many closed Government records have been made public this way through the 30-year rule—now the 20-year rule. MI5 now declassifies and releases historical records to the National Archives after 50 years, but the royal family operates with no such rule around its own archives.

The Royal Archives operates broadly reign by reign, but nearly four years after the death of Queen Elizabeth II, still no historical records since 1952 can currently be accessed from the archives. Even when records are unlocked within the archives, as those from previous monarchs have been, it is still left to the archive gatekeepers to decide which historians can be given the keys—in private and without the public interest tests of the Freedom of Information Act.

History should not be curated, but the preservation of royal image—even many years after a monarch’s death—seems to take precedence over academic inquiry. We need all historians, not just those within a certain circle, to have access to these records so that we can have a truthful account of our own history.

This sounds like a Bill only for republicans, but I believe that monarchists should be its most fervent supporters. No one has damaged the reputation of the monarchy in this country and abroad more than Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor, who was able to carry on his nefarious activities in the comfort of knowing that he was protected by this shroud of secrecy. Yes, we found him out many years later and took away his offices, but the sunlight of Nolan is not only disinfectant in retrospect, but also preventive. If he had had to be open, would he have been as bad? We will never know.

Question put and agreed to.

Ordered,

That Siân Berry, Ian Byrne, Rachael Maskell, Tom Gordon, Pete Wishart, Kirsty Blackman, Claire Hanna, Jeremy Corbyn, Dr Ellie Chowns, Hannah Spencer, Liz Saville Roberts and David Davis present the Bill.

Siân Berry accordingly presented the Bill.

Bill read the First time; to be read a Second time on Friday 13 November, and to be printed (Bill 119).

Public Office (Accountability) Bill

Report stage & 3rd reading
Tuesday 14th July 2026 Commons Chamber

Consideration of Bill, as amended in the Public Bill Committee

[Madam Deputy Speaker (Ms Nusrat Ghani)]

In the circumstances following the late change to today’s business, Mr Speaker has selected amendments tabled after what would have been the usual deadline.

New Clause 8

Information contained in public records

“(1) This section applies to information contained in a record that is transferred to a relevant authority under—

(a) the Public Records Act 1958,

(b) the Public Records (Scotland) Act 1937,

(c) the Public Records Act (Northern Ireland) 1923, or

(d) any other enactment or arrangement under which records are transferred to a relevant authority for their care and preservation.

(2) For the purposes of this Chapter, the information is not to be treated as information that is held by—

(a) the relevant authority, or

(b) persons who work for the authority.

(3) Each of the following is a ‘relevant authority’—

(a) the Public Record Office;

(b) the Keeper of Public Records;

(c) an authority responsible for records deposited at a place of deposit appointed under section 4 of the Public Records Act 1958;

(d) the Keeper of the Records of Scotland;

(e) the Public Record Office of Northern Ireland;

(f) any other person with responsibility for the care and preservation of records under arrangements made with an authority within any of paragraphs (a) to (e).

(4) In this section references to a record being ‘transferred’ to a relevant authority include references to it being transmitted to, or accepted or acquired by, the authority.”—(Catherine Atkinson.)

This new clause provides for an exemption from the duty of candour and assistance for bodies such as the National Archives so far as relating to their statutory responsibilities of holding public records.

Brought up, and read the First time.

14:11

[The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Justice (Catherine Atkinson)]

I beg to move, That the clause be read a Second time.

[Madam Deputy Speaker]

With this it will be convenient to discuss the following:

Government new clause 9.

New clause 1—Post-legislative assessment of the legal duty of candour for public authorities and public officials—

“(1) The Secretary of State must, within 12 months of the passing of this Act, publish a report into—

(a) the impact of the Act’s provisions on increasing public confidence that public authorities’ internal processes are fit for purpose in identifying and investigating failures when they first arise following a major incident.

(b) the role of the standing public advocate in assessing public authorities’ responses to affected individuals and relatives of bereaved victims following a major incident or where there is a major public concern that public authorities may not be acting in the best interests of those affected by a major incident.

(2) The report must assess—

(a) extending the public advocate’s powers to facilitate the gathering of information from those people affected by a major incident to support official inquiries and investigations to help ensure that all public authorities and officials are acting in accordance with the duty of candour set out in this Act.

(b) the case for facilitating a mechanism whereby the public advocate can instigate an independent panel to collate evidence and information following a major incident to support the oversight of public authorities and officials’ responses to major incidents.

(c) the costs of establishing independent panels as compared to non-statutory inquiries, or statutory inquiries under the Inquiries Act 2005 in line with paragraph (b).

(3) The Secretary of State must lay a copy of the report before Parliament.”

New clause 2—Offence of wilfully destroying information or records relevant to an inquiry or investigation—

“(1) A public authority or public official commits an offence if—

(a) they deliberately destroy relevant information or records relevant to an inquiry, investigation, or inquest;

(b) they know that, or are reckless as to whether, the information is relevant to or required by an inquiry, investigation, or inquest.

(2) A public official who commits an offence under this section is liable—

(a) on summary conviction in England and Wales, to imprisonment for a term not exceeding the general limit in a magistrates’ court or a fine (or both);

(b) on summary conviction in Scotland, to imprisonment for a term not exceeding 12 months or a fine not exceeding the statutory maximum (or both);

(c) on summary conviction in Northern Ireland, to imprisonment for a term not exceeding six months or a fine not exceeding the statutory maximum (or both);

(d) on conviction on indictment, to imprisonment for a term not exceeding two years or a fine (or both).”

This new clause introduces an offence for wilfully destroying relevant records after a major incident that may lead to an inquiry or inquest.

New clause 3—Monitoring compliance with duties under the Act—

“(1) The Secretary of State must commission and publish annually an independent report which monitors public authorities’ compliance with their duties under the Act.

(2) The report must assess—

(a) public authorities’ record-keeping, disclosures and responses to inquiries and investigations;

(b) the effectiveness of enforcement and sanctions provisions in the Act in helping to ensure that public authorities and public officials perform their functions in line with the duty of candour in their dealings with inquiries and investigations; and

(c) the effectiveness of the provisions in the Act for supporting persons, including public officials, making protected disclosures and for reporting wrongdoings to an inquiry or investigation following a major incident.

(3) The Secretary of State must lay a copy of each report before both Houses of Parliament.

(4) The first report must be laid within the period of 12 months of the passing of this Act.

(5) Each subsequent report must be laid annually beginning with the day on which the previous report was laid.”

This new clause requires the Secretary of State to commission and publish annually an independent report with the purpose of providing an oversight mechanism to monitor compliance with duties under the Act.

New clause 4—Conduct of public authorities and access to legal aid for seriously injured survivors who are participating in inquests or inquiries—

“(1) Legal aid must be made available, without a means test, to seriously injured survivors who are participating in inquests or inquiries where there are reasonable grounds for believing the matter under investigation relates to the conduct of public authorities tasked with carrying out public functions, or public officials working for bodies in a public capacity, in connection with the discharge of their public duties.

(2) The Secretary of State must, within three months of the Act receiving Royal Assent, make regulations to—

(a) add civil legal services to Part 1 of Schedule 1 of the Legal Aid, Sentencing and Punishment of Offenders Act 2012 in connection with proceedings relating to seriously injured survivors who are participating in inquests or inquiries as under subsection (1);

(b) amend the Civil Legal Aid (Merits Criteria) Regulations 2013 (S.I. 2013/104) for the purposes of providing criteria for a determination for legal representation in respect of cases under subsection (1).

(3) This section comes into force on the day on which this Act is passed.”

This new clause would extend civil legal aid to seriously injured survivors who are participating in inquests or inquiries where the conduct of public bodies or public officials is in question.

New clause 5—Review of the merits of establishing a national oversight mechanism for ensuring candour and transparency of public authorities in respect of inquests and inquiries—

“The Secretary of State must, within six months of the passing of this Act, carry out a review to determine the merits of establishing an independent oversight mechanism to help ensure candour, transparency and follow up with respect to the actions of a public authority arising from the conclusions and recommendations of inquests and inquiries.”

New clause 6—Monitoring the standards of ethical conduct of officials in response to the recommendations from inquests and inquiries—

“In discharging its duty under section 9(1) of this Act a public authority must monitor the standards of officials in response to the recommendations from inquests and inquiries to ensure they are acting with candour, transparency and frankness.”

New clause 7—Public interest—

“(1) Within six months of the passing of this Act, the Secretary of State must define in regulations what constitutes the “public interest” for the purposes of section 1(1)(b).

(2) Regulations under subsection (1) may not be made unless a draft has been laid before and approved by a resolution of each House of Parliament.”

This new clause would require the Secretary of State to define public interest for the purposes of this Act by regulations.

New clause 10—Expected standards of conduct and duty of NHS boards to report medical malpractice or serious wrongdoings—

“(1) This section sets out a duty for boards of NHS trusts and NHS foundation trusts in England to adopt codes of conduct mandating reporting of concerns in relation to systemic medical malpractice or serious wrongdoings relating to patient safety within an NHS body.

(2) A member of the board of directors of an NHS trust or an NHS foundation trust in England must report any evidence or reports they have seen of systemic medical malpractice or serious wrongdoings relating to patient safety within the trust to—

(a) the Care Quality Commission,

(b) the Department of Health and Social Care, and

(c) the Health Services Safety Investigations Body.

(3) The board of directors of an NHS trust or NHS foundation trust in England has a collective duty to—

(a) refer the trust to the Care Quality Commission, and

(b) alert the Department of Health and Social Care and the Health Services Safety Investigations Body, if staff employed by, or acting on behalf of, the trust raise concerns of systemic medical malpractice or serious wrongdoings relating to patient safety.

(4) In discharging its duties under subsection (1), an NHS trust board must, in particular—

(a) adopt a code of conduct which sets standards expected of members who serve on the boards of an NHS trust or NHS foundation trust, and

(b) ensure that the code of conduct is published.

(5) An NHS trust’s code of conduct must in particular—

(a) require members of a board of an NHS trust or NHS foundation trust to act in accordance with the duty of candour in reporting concerns relating to systemic medical malpractice or serious wrongdoings relating to patient safety within a trust,

(b) require members of the trust’s board to promote ethical conduct, candour, transparency and frankness within all parts of the NHS trust or foundation trust for which they work,

(c) contain information about the steps that a person who works for an NHS trust should take if they believe that a member of a trust’s board has failed to act in accordance with the code of conduct.

(6) In this section—

‘systemic medical malpractice’ means an action or omission in the provision of health care that falls below the expected standard of care and indicates a widespread, patterned, or recurring failure within the systems, processes, or governance of the trust.

‘wrongdoing’ includes abuse of authority, perverting the course of justice, neglect of duty and the exploitation of vulnerable people.”

This new clause sets a duty for boards of NHS trusts and foundation trusts in England to adopt codes of conduct mandating reporting of concerns in relation to systemic medical malpractice or serious wrongdoings relating to patient safety within a trust.

New clause 11—Duty of candour and enforcement of standards of ethical conduct in DHSC—

“(1) In discharging its duties under section 9 of this Act, the Department of Health and Social Care (DHSC), must, in particular—

(a) set out the steps DHSC will take to ensure that legal services provided to NHS bodies and other relevant health-related organisations are consistent with the statutory duty of candour and the principles of openness, transparency and learning following patient safety incidents.

(b) set out which oversight body is responsible for ensuring the standards set out in DHSC code of ethical conduct are adhered to and enforced.

(c) set out provisions to allow a relevant oversight body to examine on its own initiative suspected serious or systemic breaches of DHSC’s code of ethical conduct.

(d) set out a mechanism for ensuring that any breaches of DHSC’s code of ethical conduct are recorded and that proper data is kept and published that records the extent to which complaints have been made regarding its ethical conduct and their outcome.”

This new clause would set out additional requirements for the DHSC in respect of the statutory requirements it must fulfil under section 9 of this Act.

Amendment 13, in clause 1, page 2, line 1, after “public authorities” insert

“, Members of both Houses of Parliament”

This amendment is connected to Amendment 14.

Government amendments 151 and 152.

Amendment 1, in clause 2, page 2, line 35, at end insert—

“(ca) where the authority or official has relevant records, including digital messages and communication, retain and disclose those records;”

This amendment would add the disclosure of digital messages and communication to the assistance that a public authority or official must provide to an inquiry or investigation.

Amendment 3, page 2, line 39, at end insert—

“(f) ensure all relevant public officials can safely disclose information to an inquiry, investigation or inquest.”

This amendment requires public authorities or officials who are assisting an inquiry, investigation or inquest to demonstrate that they have taken steps to ensure relevant persons can safely disclose information relevant to an investigation.

Amendment 150, page 2, line 39, at end insert—

“(4A) Where in exercise of its duties under subsections (1) to (4) a public authority or public official intends to provide information to the inquiry or investigation, and that information includes information about a person who has or may have been caused harm in the incident under inquiry or investigation it must, subject to subsection (4B) below, provide to that person, or if deceased, the person administering their estate, such part of that information as is relevant to the nature and cause of the harm they have or may have sustained.

(4B) The obligation described in subsection (4A) above does not apply if the chair of the inquiry or investigation directs, either on application or their own motion, that the subsection should not apply, or where the chair directs that subsection (4A) shall apply subject to conditions specified in the direction, the subsection shall apply subject to those conditions.”

This amendment would require a public authority or public official to provide information to a person, or the relatives of that person, who was affected by an incident under investigation subject to the chair of an inquiry or investigation directing otherwise.

Government amendment 153.

Amendment 4, in clause 4, page 4, line 19, after “authority” insert

“or any sub-contractor in any chain of provision to a service provider”

This amendment ensures that any person involved in providing a service to a service provider which was subcontracted will fall under the duty to comply with the duty of candour and assistance to an inquiry or investigation.

Amendment 5, in clause 5, page 5, line 21, at end insert—

“(1A) Where an offence under this section is committed by—

(a) a public authority, or

(b) a body corporate with relevant public responsibility under section 4 of this Act,

the chief officer or chief executive (as well as the public authority or body corporate) is guilty of the offence and liable to be proceeded against and punished accordingly.”

This amendment would place a personal responsibility on the chief officer or chief executive of a public authority or a corporate body with public responsibility under Clause 4 for an offence of failing to comply with the duty of candour and assistance.

Government amendments 26, 28 and 154 to 157.

Amendment 20, in clause 6, page 6, line 3, at end insert—

“(2A) Where an obligation to give notification would have arisen under section 2(3), save for the exemptions in subsection (2), the head of the relevant intelligence service must provide a written notification to the Intelligence and Security Committee of the UK Parliament summarising the acts that may be relevant to an inquiry or investigation.”

This amendment aims to provide accountability for intelligence services and their operations in relation to the duty of candour and its exemptions from them.

Amendment 199, page 6, line 3, at end insert—

“(2A) Where, in compliance with the obligation under section 2(4), a person who works for an intelligence service, a military intelligence service, the National Crime Agency, Counter Terrorism Command, or one of the armed forces, would be required to provide security or intelligence information, the obligation applies in respect of that information only if the head of the service or agency consents to it being provided.

(2B) The head of an intelligence service, the head of military intelligence service, the head of the National Crime Agency, the head of Counter Terrorism Policing UK, or the head of one of the armed forces may withhold consent under subsection (2A) only if it appears to the head that either of the following conditions is met.

(2C) The first condition is that it is necessary for consent to be withheld in the interests of national security or otherwise for the purposes of the proper exercise of the functions of the service.

(2D) The second condition is that the information would not be of assistance to the inquiry or investigation in meeting its objectives.

(2E) Where the head of an intelligence service, the head of military intelligence service, the head of the National Crime Agency, the head of Counter Terrorism Policing UK, or the head of one of the armed forces withholds consent under subsection (2A), the head must notify the person leading the inquiry or investigation of that fact.”

This amendment ensures that the duty of candour and assistance may require a person who works for an intelligence service, military intelligence, the NCA, Counter Terrorism Command or the armed forces to provide security or intelligence information with the consent of the head of their service.

Government amendments 32 and 33, and 158 to 168.

Amendment 2, in clause 9, page 8, line 3, after “work” insert

“including the retention and disclosure of digital records including messages relevant to their public functions”

This amendment ensures that digital messages and records are added to the duty of candour in relation to inquiries and inquests.

Government amendment 37.

Amendment 6, page 8, line 18, after “disclosures” insert

“and to whom such disclosures should be made;

(ba) how a person making a protected disclosure under paragraph (b) is protected;

(bb) a list of prescribed people and bodies to whom a potential whistleblower may speak to in confidence about a relevant concern.”

This amendment would require that a public authority’s code of ethical conduct includes information on whom a person can make a protected disclosure to and how that person would be protected.

Amendment 7, page 8, line 23, leave out subsection (6) and insert—

“(6) The Secretary of State must introduce a standard template for ethical code of conduct for completion by public authorities which satisfies the requirements in this section and which may be added to by public authorities to include information specific to their organisation or function.”

This amendment would require the Secretary of State to introduce a standard template to ensure a consistent and high standard approach to completion of code of ethical conduct documentation across public authorities.

Government amendments 38 and 39.

Amendment 14, in clause 11, page 9, line 22, after “public authority” insert

“, Member of either House of Parliament”

This amendment expands the offence of misleading the public to apply to Members of either House of Parliament.

Amendment 15, page 9, line 23, after “authority” insert “, Member”.

This amendment is connected to Amendment 14.

Amendment 25, page 9, line 26, at end insert—

“(1A) An act under subsection (1)(a) includes the provision of misleading information to a person acting for the purposes of journalism (as described in subsection (4)(b)) carried out via a press statement, media briefing, or other communication intended for dissemination by a recognised news publisher.”

This amendment would ensure that the offence of misleading the public would include a public authority or public official providing misleading information to a recognised news publisher.

Amendment 16, page 9, line 38, after “authority” insert

“, Member of either House of Parliament”

This amendment is connected to Amendment 14.

Government amendment 40.

Amendment 8, page 10, line 5, leave out paragraph (b).

Amendment 17, page 10, line 8, at end insert

“, or

(c) in furtherance of the privileges of either House of Parliament.”

This amendment is connected to Amendments 13 to 16 and 18. It provides that the offence of misleading the public does not apply to any act done in furtherance of the privileges of either House of Parliament.

Government amendments 41 and 42.

Amendment 19, page 10, line 23, at end insert—

“(7A) A prosecution for an offence under this section shall not be instituted except by or with the consent of the Attorney General.”

This amendment requires the Attorney General to consent to the prosecution of anyone for the offence of misleading the public.

Amendment 18, page 10, line 37, at end insert—

“(8A) A certificate signed by the appropriate authority (as defined in section 34 of the Freedom of Information Act 2000) certifying that an act is done in furtherance of the privileges of either House of Parliament shall be conclusive evidence of that fact.”

This amendment is connected to Amendments 13 to 17.

Government amendments 43 to 51.

Amendment 12, in clause 15, page 13, line 7, at end insert—

“(2A) References in this Part to a person who ‘holds public office’ include references to an individual who was, but is no longer, such an office holder, in respect of conduct occurring while they held such office.”

This amendment would ensure that public officials would still be liable for misconduct during their time in public office if they resign or retire.

Government amendments 52 to 69.

Amendment 11, in clause 23, page 22, line 20, at end insert—

“(6) For the purposes of this Act, any duty or liability imposed on a public official or a person holding public office applies in respect of any act or omission occurring while the person held that office or performed those functions, notwithstanding that the person has subsequently resigned, retired, or otherwise ceased to hold that office or perform those functions.”

This amendment would ensure that the duties and liabilities in this Bill apply to public officials during their time in public office even if they have since resigned, retired or ceased to hold a public office.

Government amendments 70 and 71.

Amendment 9, in clause 25, page 22, line 30, leave out subsections (1) to (8) and insert—

“This Act shall come into force on Royal Assent, save for sections 9, 10 and 18, which will come into force six months thereafter.”

This amendment clarifies that the Act should come into force straightaway except for those sections which require the provision of codes or guidance.

Government amendments 72, 76 and 169 to 178.

Amendment 10, in schedule 1, page 29, line 9, after “an inquiry” insert

“, independent panel or review established by a Minister”

This amendment ensures that the statutory duty of candour and assistance extends automatically to independent panels and reviews established by Ministers of the Crown.

Amendment 146, page 29, line 9, after “an inquiry” insert

“, independent panel, review established by a Minister, or independent panel or review established by a local authority.”

This amendment ensures that the statutory duty of candour and assistance extends automatically to independent panels and reviews established by Ministers of the Crown and by local authorities.

Government amendments 78 to 80, 91, 93 to 97, and 179 to 198.

Amendment 149, in schedule 2, page 47, line 22, at end insert—

“(4A) Notwithstanding regulations made under sub-paragraph (4) a statutory water company holding an appointment under Chapter I of Part II of the Water Industry Act 1991 as a water undertaker (company) must meet the obligations set out in Chapter 2 of Part 2 of this Act for public functions in connection with their duties to—

(a) provide water supply within their area;

(b) supply water that is wholesome for domestic or food production purposes;

(c) provide, improve, and extend a system of public sewers and to treat sewage within their area;

(d) comply with water quality regulations;

(e) ensure long-term resilience of water supply and sewage networks against climate change, population growth, and consumer behaviour changes;

(f) maintain their assets to prevent sewage from polluting watercourses; and

(g) reduce sewage pollution.”

This amendment would place privatised water companies in England and Wales under the obligations of Chapter 2 of Part 2 on the face of the Bill for the functions for which they are responsible of a public nature.

Government amendments 98 to 142.

[Catherine Atkinson]

It is an absolute privilege to bring the Bill back to the House on Report. I know that Members across the House have long supported it and have been waiting for its return.

At its heart, this legislation is about what people should expect from the state when the worst happens: honesty, transparency and a system that stands with victims and families, not against them. For too long, that has not been the experience of too many people in this country; bereaved and traumatised families have been forced into exhausting, heartbreaking battles to uncover the truth. Institutions have closed ranks and ordinary people have been left to fight the full weight of the state at the very moment when they most needed its support. The Bill seeks to put an end to that. It will drive the culture change that the country so desperately needs so that when public bodies fail, the response is candour, not cover-up.

[Yasmin Qureshi (Bolton South and Walkden) (Lab)]

Will the Minister give way?

[Catherine Atkinson]

I am going to make some progress, but I will give way.

It is essential that there is accountability, not denial, so that those affected get the support they need, not obstruction. We often refer to this Bill as the Hillsborough law. Without the determination of the Hillsborough families, we would not be debating this legislation today. Their determination has been driven by a selfless belief that no other families should ever go through the ordeal that they have suffered. But sadly their story is not unique: we have seen scandal after scandal and cover-up after cover-up, where families have had to fight for the truth and their trust in the state to be forthcoming and truthful has been shattered.

The Bill began with the Hillsborough families, but in the last decade their fight has become a movement, with a coalition of families and campaigns and those searching for the truth; the Bill belongs to every one of them. I am sure that the House joins me in thanking every single family member and campaigner from the Hillsborough families, the Manchester Arena families, Grenfell, the Post Office scandal and many other campaign groups, as well as many other individual cases that fall outside those campaigns.

[Vikki Slade (Mid Dorset and North Poole) (LD)]

Will the Minister give way?

[Catherine Atkinson]

I will make some progress, and then I will take interventions.

Many have graciously—often at huge personal and emotional cost—shared their experiences with us to shape the Bill. The changes that it brings forward are so needed. It is thanks to their campaigning, perseverance and willingness to work with us to find solutions that the Bill is back before the House today. The House and the country owe them a debt of gratitude. I know that some of them are in the Gallery with us today—thank you.

Before I turn to the Government amendments, I must pay tribute to the work of my predecessor, my hon. Friend the Member for Pontypridd (Alex Davies-Jones). I was on the Bill Committee, and I know how hard she worked to get us to this point. I also thank the Attorney General, the Minister for the Cabinet Office and colleagues across Government for coming together to resolve these complex issues, so that we could bring the Bill back before the House today.

From the start, we have been clear that this is a Bill for the families concerned. That means listening to their views, and ensuring that the legislation delivers and has their confidence. It was in that spirit that the Manchester Arena families raised their concerns about the duty of candour and how it would apply to the intelligence services; I thank them for doing so. It is right that when a concern is raised, we pause, take stock and, where necessary, change course. The process has not been easy, and it has taken some time, but we had to get this right, and assess all possible implications and unintended risks resulting from how the duty would work in practice. I thank Pete Weatherby KC, the Intelligence and Security Committee and experts across our national security community, campaigners and Members of both Houses.

[Liz Saville Roberts (Dwyfor Meirionnydd) (PC)]

I am proud to have sponsored the original proposal, promoted by the hon. Member for Liverpool West Derby (Ian Byrne), and I salute the survivors and the victims’ families. I am glad that the UK Government have listened to them, and that the Bill reflects the level of accountability required of our public authorities. Plaid Cymru stands in firm solidarity with the Hillsborough families and other families in their long campaign for justice. Considering the Labour Government’s reset next week, will the Minister assure me that this law will be implemented in partnership with devolved Governments, and that constructive engagement with Wales and elsewhere will be ensured throughout the legislative process?

[Madam Deputy Speaker (Ms Nusrat Ghani)]

Order. I know that this is a highly sensitive debate, but interventions must be short and to the point. Lots of colleagues want to get in on the debate.

[Catherine Atkinson]

I thank the right hon. Member for her intervention. She has my assurance that we are clear that the Bill needs to apply across the United Kingdom, and we are working with devolved nations to ensure that happens.

[Colum Eastwood (Foyle) (SDLP)]

The Minister is making a passionate and important speech about a long-overdue piece of legislation. Freddie Scappaticci was the agent known as Stakeknife in the IRA. He was involved in lots of murders, but the Government have yet to unmask him as Scappaticci. Will the Bill put an end to the ridiculous position we are in by doing that? Would the Bill have stopped MI5 doing everything in its power to prevent the public from finding out about his crimes?

[Catherine Atkinson]

I thank my hon. Friend for his intervention. We are seeking a full culture change, and are trying to prevent any kind of attitude of covering things up. I am happy to meet him further to discuss that specific case.

All the work that has been undertaken has enabled us to find a solution that provides full application of the duty, while protecting national security, which is absolutely essential.

[Nadia Whittome (Nottingham East) (Lab)]

Will the Minister give way?

[Catherine Atkinson]

I am going to make some progress, and then I will take interventions again.

The amendments before the House ensure that the duty of candour and assistance applies to all individual intelligence officers, while establishing secure procedures for the disclosure of sensitive information. First, the Bill as introduced did not allow compliance directions to be issued to individual intelligence officers; rather, they were issued to the organisation that officers worked for. There were concerns that this effectively amounted to a carve-out for the intelligence services. Our amendments allow compliance directions to be issued to individual intelligence officers, so that the duty applies consistently across the public sector.

Secondly, the amendments establish secure models for the disclosure of sensitive national information. The Government’s objective has always been clear—it has been to ensure that where information can be disclosed, it should be disclosed, while ensuring that proper protections are in place. We have therefore adopted the approach proposed by my hon. Friend the Member for Liverpool West Derby (Ian Byrne), which is to apply existing safeguards to the new provisions. When an individual working for a national security body receives a request for protected information, they must pass that information to the head of the authority, not directly to the inquiry or investigation. The head of the authority is then responsible for sharing it with the inquiry or investigation, subject to all existing arrangements for protecting information in law and practice. Restrictions on disclosure can still be sought, where necessary. Existing arrangements for secure inquiries remain available, and established practices, such as the use of security-vetted counsel, can continue.

Under these arrangements, national security bodies will now be under the same duty to notify as other public authorities, but we have a limited provision to ensure that the right public authority is making the notification, and that this happens in an orderly and secure manner. While the Government support removing this exemption, nothing in this Bill, and none of its practical effects, change our position, which is that national security and the safety of our citizens and public servants must never be compromised.

[Vikki Slade]

I am grateful to the Minister for giving way on the matter of the safety of our citizens. I have been contacted over the last couple of years by the family of Major Anthony Hornby MBE, who was a victim of the Chinook crash. Today, the Ministry of Defence is in the High Court, fighting for them not to have rights under the duty of candour. Will the Minister step in and ensure that the victims of the Chinook crash are given the same dignity and respect as others, and that their case can come under a full public investigation?

[Catherine Atkinson]

I am very happy to meet the hon. Member and others, specifically in relation to the Ministry of Defence, and to give reassurance on how this can work and be done safely.

[Yasmin Qureshi]

Will the Minister give way on the point about the duty of candour?

[Catherine Atkinson]

If it is specifically in relation to security services, and to security at the moment—

[Yasmin Qureshi]

It is on the duty of candour.

[Catherine Atkinson]

If I can just wait—

[Madam Deputy Speaker (Ms Nusrat Ghani)]

Order. Minister, either you take an intervention or do not. Please do not continue a conversation when Members are seated.

[Catherine Atkinson]

It is important to stress that nothing in this Bill, and nothing about its practical effect, changes our position in relation to national security. Many in our public services work in sensitive roles, and revealing their identity could put them or others at risk. The Bill does not require anyone to breach any other law. It expressly states that it does not override existing legislation, including the Official Secrets Act 1989. The Bill contains a specific protection from the requirement to notify for employees of the intelligence services and other select bodies, where they cannot come forward.

However, there may be other situations where notifying may carry a similar risk. I want to make it clear that a public servant does not have to come forward until it is safe to do so, but steps must be taken without delay to ensure that a notification can be made safely. The Bill requires notification to be made as soon as reasonably practicable, after the authority or official becomes aware of the investigation. The explanatory notes will clarify that it would not be considered reasonably practicable if that meant a person was at risk of harm in making that notification. In those rare circumstances, the official must contact their current or former employer, or another third party if necessary, so that arrangements can be made with the inquiry or investigation for a notification to be made safely. Those actions must be taken without delay. Those leading inquiries and inquests must act reasonably, and authorities have a responsibility to protect their current and former employees.

We will also set out guidance to accompany the duty. It will explain what individuals should do, and will make it clear that public authorities and investigations must work together to put arrangements in place for authorities and individuals to meet their duties while protecting personal safety and national security. If the investigation cannot provide those means, existing legal processes already provide ways to convert it into a form of investigation that can.

Now that we have the right model for applying the duty in a national security context, we are extending that model to Defence Intelligence, the National Crime Agency and Counter Terrorism Policing, where the same considerations about the sensitivity of their information and work apply. Clause 8 includes them in the list of relevant public authorities for the purpose of clause 6. We have also made several amendments to ensure that the compliance directions operate as intended. The explanatory notes for schedule 1 clarify that directions should be made only where the person leading the investigation believes that a compliance direction would genuinely assist, and that they are not, for example, obliged to issue multiple directions to individuals who may all have the same information.

We have also made a small change to clause 2 to make it clear that we are not inviting individuals to speculate on what may or may not be relevant. It is for the inquiry or investigation to define relevance through its terms of reference or equivalent. Finally, we have amended schedule 1 to require the investigation lead to consult the head of the public authority before issuing a compliance direction to an individual employee where national security is concerned. This aligns the new duty process with existing practice, in which public authorities and chairs of inquiries work together to determine how protected information can be provided safely. This will assist inquiries or investigations in practice because, given the way national security bodies operate, they will not usually know which individuals hold the relevant information, or how to receive it without creating unnecessary risks.

The Bill also includes a power to extend the duty of candour to other types of investigations. We intend to make broad use of this power, and will bring forward secondary legislation, following consultation with the relevant sectors and investigatory bodies. I can confirm that that will extend the duty to investigations into police misconduct; to serious healthcare incidents, including major maternity reviews, such as the Leeds and Sussex maternity services reviews; to serious health and safety investigations; and to key ombudsman investigations, transforming the ability of these investigations to get to the truth.

[Florence Eshalomi (Vauxhall and Camberwell Green) (Lab/Co-op)]

I pay tribute to everyone who has pushed and cajoled the Government to enable us to get to this stage. The Minister mentioned secondary legislation. One of the key areas mentioned in the Grenfell inquiry by Grenfell United and Justice for Grenfell was a national oversight mechanism to make sure that the Government are not marking their own homework when it comes to recommendations from public inquiries. Will that be included in the consultation?

[Catherine Atkinson]

It is absolutely right that recommendations are tracked and that we ensure there is a clear way of giving everyone confidence that recommendations will be implemented. The Cabinet Office is doing a significant piece of work to ensure that that is put in place, and both the Cabinet Office and I will be happy to meet my hon. Friend to share with her the work that is happening, both on recommendations from inquiries and on the prevention of future deaths and inquests.

14:30

[Andy Slaughter (Hammersmith and Chiswick) (Lab)]

I appreciate the way in which the Minister has responded on the national oversight mechanism, but if this is to have teeth, and if it is to deal with both inquiries and inquests, do we not need a separate public body? It is a substantial piece of work.

[Catherine Atkinson]

The Government have already taken steps to improve transparency in response to inquiry recommendations, including launching the new gov.uk dashboards, which demonstrate progress in delivering accepted inquiry recommendations. The Public Administration and Constitutional Affairs Committee is currently considering how the implementation of recommendations resulting from future public inquiries should be scrutinised, and we welcome that.

[Chris Coghlan (Dorking and Horley) (LD)]

I have given the Government evidence that hundreds of children with special educational needs and disabilities are avoidably killing themselves because of public authority negligence and misconduct, including my constituent Jen Bridges-Chalkley. Does the Minister agree that the first step in tackling this problem is knowing how many of these suicides there are? We cannot do that unless we have a national oversight mechanism and a preventable death tracker that measure it.

[Catherine Atkinson]

The Office of the Chief Coroner has continued work to improve access to prevention of future deaths reports, while the Government seek to strengthen arrangements for responding to concerns raised through them, including better and more strategic use of technology. In addition to the work that the Public Administration and Constitutional Affairs Committee is undertaking, there is clearly work to be done in relation to inquests and in relation to inquiries and their recommendations, and I look forward to working on that.

[Clive Efford (Eltham and Chislehurst) (Lab)]

Do the Minister and the Government agree with the principle that an independent body should oversee the Government’s performance in responding to inquiry recommendations? Is that the way we are going to go forwards? The way that the Government—not just this one, but others in the past—have responded to recommendations from inquiries has, to say the least, required improvement for a very long time. Can we be assured that independence will be introduced into the scrutiny process?

[Catherine Atkinson]

It is clear that there needs to be public confidence about what happens to any recommendations, and this is therefore an area of work that is being considered. I am happy to ensure that my hon. Friend is kept up to date with the work as it continues.

I will now make some progress. Transforming the ability of investigations to get to the truth is essential, and I hope that the House recognises how far we have come. On Second Reading, the Prime Minister said that we would only strengthen this Bill, while affirming that we would always protect national security. The amendments I have mentioned do both.

I now turn to the Government’s remaining amendments. On legal aid, families attending inquests have for too long found themselves, in their darkest moments, facing public authorities represented by large legal teams while they have been left to navigate complex proceedings without legal representation. The Bill finally addresses that imbalance through the largest expansion of legal aid in a generation, granting access to non-means-tested legal aid to families at any inquest where a public authority is an interested person.

We have tabled amendments to ensure that this new entitlement operates as intended—first, to make it clear that legal aid will also be available when an individual is named as an interested person on behalf of a public authority or Government Department and, secondly, to simplify how the legal aid system operates so that it is more effective and easier to manage for providers and the Legal Aid Agency. The amendments mean that the expansion will operate efficiently from the outset.

[Maria Eagle (Liverpool Garston) (Lab)]

I think there is widespread welcome in the House for the expansion of legal aid, but does the Minister agree that allowing advocacy for each family only to the first person who manages to apply for it might cause some problems subsequent to disasters like Hillsborough? What will she do to try to improve the mechanism for who gets the legal aid?

[Catherine Atkinson]

I am grateful to my right hon. Friend for the time she has spent with me in raising this and other issues. Under our proposed expansion, multiple family members will be able to receive non-means-tested legal help to prepare for an inquest hearing where a public authority is an interested person, and that includes help with preparing documents to send to the inquest. Increasing the number of legal representatives when it comes to advocacy is an area of some concern. Inquests are fact-finding proceedings designed to determine the circumstances of a death, and we would hope that, in general, one legally aided advocate would be sufficient to support each family through an inquest hearing. However, we have heard her concerns, and I hope for her assistance in continuing to look at the issue as the Bill progresses. [Interruption.]

[Sarah Russell (Congleton) (Lab)]

Will my hon. Friend give way?

[Catherine Atkinson]

I will—my hon. Friend assists me in finding my place in my notes again, so I thank her.

[Sarah Russell]

My hon. Friend is most welcome. I am grateful for all the amendments that the Government have tabled, but I remain concerned that the current civil legal aid rate is £40 an hour. She has referred to security-vetted counsel. Is it likely that security-vetted counsel will be prepared to work for £40 an hour, when those of us who have done legal aid work know that, frankly, half the work that we do is unremunerated?

[Madam Deputy Speaker (Ms Nusrat Ghani)]

Order. Before the Minister responds, I just point out that many colleagues wish to contribute to the debate, so I hope she is coming to her conclusion soon.

[Catherine Atkinson]

My hon. Friend has been a passionate advocate in relation to legally aided work, and I know that she will take every opportunity to raise concerns about the rates. The amendments mean that the expansion will operate efficiently from the outset, giving bereaved families the support that they need while avoiding delay.

Let me turn to the amendment relating to archivists. They play an important role in preserving historical records, but do not account for the actions within them, so we have tabled Government new clause 8 to ensure that public record officers and keepers of public records are not subject to the duty of candour in relation to their record-keeping duties.

We have worked closely with the devolved Governments on the Bill, and I am grateful for their co-operation and collaboration. We have tabled amendments to ensure that the offence of misleading the public and the two statutory misconduct in public office offences apply on a UK-wide basis. Those are amendments 40 to 42 and 70, and new clause 9 and amendments 44 to 51 respectively. At the request of the Scottish Government, we have also extended access to legal aid in Scotland for fatal accident inquiries where the state is represented. That will include a power for regulations to establish detailed criteria, which will be agreed by the Scottish Parliament.

Before I close, let me address concerns that have been raised about implementation. The Government are well aware that the Bill is long overdue. Families and victims rightly deserve no further delay, but this is about cultural change, and change of such breadth and depth cannot be achieved by legislation alone. Some measures can come into force quickly; others depend on guidance and systems being in place to ensure that they work as intended. We are therefore stress-testing the earliest possible commencement points for each measure. We will update the House as soon as possible and publish a clear timeline for implementation.

We are, as we have been throughout, absolutely committed to working with the families and other stakeholders to ensure that the Bill delivers real change. Everyone should be able to expect honesty from the state when the worst happens. They should expect a system that helps them establish the truth, rather than forcing them to fight for it. That is the purpose of this Bill.

[Yasmin Qureshi]

You are probably aware, Madam Deputy Speaker, of the fact that I have chaired the all-party parliamentary group on Primodos for the last 14 years. The Minister may well be aware that earlier in the Bill’s consideration I asked for reassurance that independent panels established by Ministers would be covered, such as the expert working group report on Primodos, which was set up by the Medicines and Healthcare products Regulatory Agency as part of the Department of Health and Social Care. Can the Minister point to where that can be found in the Bill and, if not, will reassurances be given through secondary legislation that those panels are covered by this legislation?

[Catherine Atkinson]

The Bill allows a Minister to extend the duty and allows the flexibility to apply it to reviews where it would be most beneficial. I know that my hon. Friend has campaigned long on this point, and I would be happy to talk to her about how that takes place.

In conclusion, the Bill is about restoring trust between the public and the state, ensuring that when public bodies fail, they respond with openness rather than defensiveness and with support rather than obstruction. Above all, it is a testament to the families who have, despite every setback, courageously campaigned for change and their determination to ensure that no other families ever again suffer as they have. I know the whole House will join me in paying tribute to their extraordinary bravery. I commend the Government amendments to the House.

[Madam Deputy Speaker (Ms Nusrat Ghani)]

I call the shadow Secretary of State.

[Nick Timothy (West Suffolk) (Con)]

I was nine years old at the time of the Hillsborough tragedy, and I remember listening to the news of the terrible events on the radio, sitting behind my parents in the car. I was 32 when, while working in the Home Office, I received a copy of the report by the Hillsborough independent panel, which detailed the full horror of that terrible tragedy. In my time in the Home Office I saw many intelligence reports and papers about serious crimes and terror plots, but the Hillsborough report was undoubtedly the most shocking thing I read.

More than two decades passed between the tragedy itself and that moment of truth and transparency, and we can only imagine the pain felt by the victims and their families who fought for years for justice. I pay tribute to them and would like to associate myself with the remarks made by the Minister. They have known grief and suffering none of us would ever wish to experience.

This is not a debate about the need for transparency. I am proud to have played a modest part in bringing that about when I worked in the Home Office. Nor is this a debate about the need for accountability. I have spent many years in different roles making the case for better police accountability and, indeed, working with those who lead and work in our security and intelligence agencies. They themselves would be the first to say—though their work is by definition often secret—that they need to be accountable. They are only citizens of this country, just like everyone else. I am sure that everyone here today agrees on the need for accountability.

The question is, how should this accountability work? Today we are considering one specific issue among several: is the proposal to extend the duty of candour to the intelligence agencies, the military, military intelligence, Counter Terrorism Policing and the National Crime Agency, which all necessarily work to some degree in secret, appropriate? Does it deliver accountability, and does it allow these sensitive services to do their work to the best of their abilities? Our job today is to consider that question and that question alone.

Of course, we may be informed by the trauma, pain and emotion that come from terrible tragedies—tragedies that have, in some instances, been compounded by undue secrecy and even outright dishonesty from the state itself—but it is our job in this place to get the law right, for if we do not, we may find ourselves back here in future debating another tragedy that could have been stopped had it not been for the unintended consequences of what we are debating today.

11:30

It is our job in the House of Commons to get this right. It is also the Government’s job to put their proposed law to us in a timely, considered and responsible manner, but that is not what Ministers have done. The Prime Minister adopted the Hillsborough law as policy in 2022. He put it in his manifesto in 2024, promising that it would be one of his first acts in office, and announced its introduction at the Labour party conference in 2025. But he never worked out how the Bill should apply to the intelligence services and others who work to ensure our national security. The Bill was introduced without a carry-over motion, which meant the Government believed that it would pass during the last Session of Parliament. Then it had to be carried over when they ran out of time, and now we are being asked to approve another motion to extend the carry-over motion because the Bill has taken so long.

We were supposed to give the Bill its Report stage and Third Reading in January, but it was pulled at the last minute because campaigners told the Government that they were unhappy with its provisions relating to the intelligence agencies. Now we have the Report stage, and Members are being asked to give the Bill’s new provisions scrutiny—all with less than 24 hours’ notice. Those who had been briefed on the contents of the Bill found out over the last day or two that what is now being proposed bears no resemblance to what they had been told to expect. It is, I am afraid, a shambles, and the reason it is a shambles is that the Government originally made contradictory promises to the campaigners for this law and to the intelligence agencies and others who work to keep us safe. They knew they had created this problem, which is why they pulled the Bill in January, but now they pretend there is no problem.

Desperate for a legacy and to claim the credit before the right hon. Member for Makerfield (Andy Burnham) takes over, the Prime Minister has chosen; the Government have watered down the protections they specifically proposed back in January for MI5, MI6 and GCHQ. Today they pretend that those protections are not necessary, but in January, Ministers believed that they were vital. Those protections would have allowed those in charge of the agencies to determine whether secret information could be revealed to an investigation or an inquiry, giving them the power to withhold information if it was considered unnecessary for the investigation or inquiry, or if it was necessary for national security to keep the information secret.

Our security and intelligence agencies, as with soldiers and others such as those working in counter-terrorism policing and the National Crime Agency, all necessarily deal in secrets. They have to protect their sources, methods and capabilities. They have to protect information provided to them by agencies from allied countries, which are equally concerned with protecting their sources, methods, capabilities and, in some cases, live operations. But now this Bill takes decisions about which secrets should be shared over their heads, and gives that responsibility to those leading investigations and inquiries. These people may be non-experts, potentially lacking understanding of serious national security issues. That could lead to intelligence that should, for good reasons, remain secret being published, undermining the way in which the intelligence agencies and others work.

[Alex Davies-Jones (Pontypridd) (Lab)]

The shadow Secretary of State will know, given his background working in the Home Office, that a duty of candour is not the same as the duty to disclose sensitive information. The two should not be conflated, and he should not be doing so on the Floor of the House.

[Nick Timothy]

I am confused by that intervention from the hon. Lady, who was the Minister in charge of this Bill. The argument I am making is consistent with the position she brought to the House in January, only to back down when it became controversial.

As I was saying, this could lead to intelligence that should, for good reasons, remain secret being published, which undermines the way the intelligence agencies and others work. We know this is a matter of grave concern for the agencies, the military and those in law enforcement because they have told us that. The Government know this, because the same people have told Ministers, and we know that the Government accepted this, because that was why they tabled the amendment in January, which they have since dropped.

Allied military and intelligence partners—most notably, the US and other Five Eyes partners—will look at what the Government are doing today and question what can be done to protect them and their methods. The Justice Secretary is once again not here today.

[Derek Twigg (Widnes and Halewood) (Lab)]

Could the hon. Member point to current legislation that has a gap and does not give the protection to the intelligence services that we all wish to see?

[Nick Timothy]

I am not sure I follow the hon. Member’s question. If he wants to repeat it more clearly, I will happily listen.

[Derek Twigg]

The hon. Member is saying that the intelligence services are not protected under the current legislation. Could he say why?

[Nick Timothy]

The point is that this is a new duty, which is backed by criminal sanction, and that is why it is different from the status quo.

As I was saying, the Justice Secretary is a Privy Counsellor. He is the Deputy Prime Minister. He was once the Foreign Secretary—the man to whom MI6 and GCHQ were accountable. He knows that these sources of intelligence from allies are essential. They support our national interest, protect our way of life and save the lives of innocent people. Neither he nor the Minister can, hand on heart, stand here today and say that they know for sure that this Bill does not endanger that intelligence. Nobody can say that, because this Bill will change the behaviour, decisions and actions of those we ask to keep us safe, because it might change the terms of the relationships with our allies, and because we cannot anticipate the decisions made by individual heads of future investigations and inquiries.

[Jess Brown-Fuller (Chichester) (LD)]

Does the hon. Gentleman recognise that chairs of inquiries and inquests already have the power to hold closed sessions in private if they are looking at information that is sensitive or potentially poses a risk to our national security? That already exists, and the measures in the Bill do not impact that at all—it is already done on a daily basis in inquiries.

[Nick Timothy]

What the hon. Lady says is not entirely relevant to this proposition. This is about the provision of information to particular investigations and inquiries, and we do not know—indeed, we cannot know—the identities of the people who lead those investigations and inquiries. That is one of the reasons why this is such a step into the dark.

[Yasmin Qureshi]

I used to be a prosecutor before coming to this place. We were able to find perfectly good ways of dealing with confidential sources of information—informants and others. There are procedures already in place for that.

[Nick Timothy]

We are sent here to scrutinise legislation. That is what we are doing. We have talked to people in the intelligence agencies, the police and others who are very concerned about this. The concerns that I am expressing were shared by Ministers themselves, which is why the amendment we are proposing today reflects the amendment that the Government themselves brought to the House in January.

[Mr Andrew Snowden (Fylde) (Con)]

The interventions and the shadow Secretary of State’s responses are indicative of what he said earlier: we should not be discussing something as technically complex as this, which could have wide-reaching ramifications, with 24 hours’ notice and without any opportunity to have a proper discussion and raise these points.

[Nick Timothy]

My hon. Friend is exactly right. The Prime Minister said this was going to be one of his first acts as Prime Minister; it turns out it is going to be his final act as Prime Minister. He is only doing it by the skin of his teeth, because he is presenting a proposal to the House that none of us got to see even this weekend, and those who had been drawn into the consultation process and had been privately consulted say that this bears no relation at all to what they have been shown, even very recently. The Government are clearly doing this on the hoof, and it is very worrying.

It is no exaggeration to say that some of those people who may be appointed to lead investigations and inquiries might be influenced or pressured by those whose purpose is the destruction of the British state and British sovereignty itself.

[Sarah Russell (Congleton) (Lab)]

The people who lead these inquiries are leading public figures and have usually held significant judicial office. Is the hon. Member honestly suggesting that they are going to be successfully pressured by people who want to destroy the British state?

[Nick Timothy]

I am tempted to say that the hon. Lady should have a conversation with the Attorney General, who used to prosecute British soldiers and was still appointed to one of the highest offices in the land.

Irish republicans, Islamist extremists, useful idiots deployed by Putin’s Russia—they will all see the opportunity in this law, as we know they have seen the opportunity in examples of lawfare fought elsewhere, including Northern Ireland. These are known unknowns, but there are also unknown unknowns. [Interruption.] There is an additional risk that the security services will be tied up in court cases, thanks to differing interpretations of the legislation, or that the scope of the Bill and the information that must be disclosed will be widened over time. I can hear sighs and complaints from Government Members, but they do not seem to understand that new laws—especially when they are to be taken in balance with existing laws—are tested in the courts, and their interpretation widens. That is a fact, and it is one of the concerns expressed by the intelligence agencies, the police and others. If Government Members think they are above listening to those people, I am very sorry about that.

There are questions, too, about the role of investigations and inquiries set up by the devolved Governments, including in Northern Ireland. I was alarmed by the Minister’s earlier answer to a question about the need to reveal information about intelligence agency sources in that context. These are the reasons that my party proposes an amendment, informed in part by the Government’s own proposed amendment back in January, to give control of secret material back to service leaders, who are rightly then accountable to elected Ministers, in not only the intelligence services but the armed forces, the National Crime Agency and counter-terrorism policing.

[Tessa Munt (Wells and Mendip Hills) (LD)]

One of the hon. Gentleman’s former colleagues went to Downing Street just a month ago with a letter that says he believes he was misled by his own Department when he was the Secretary of State for Defence, so why on earth is the hon. Gentleman arguing this particular case? If Defence Secretaries are misled by their Departments, I do not really understand his faith in leaders of intelligence services and others not being able to hide the truth purely to defend their own Departments.

[Nick Timothy]

I think the hon. Lady, whether it is by design or by mistake, misunderstands my point. Of course, there should be accountability and transparency, and there are many ways in which we can do that, but there are ways of doing it that do not jeopardise the operations of the most sensitive organisations in the country by revealing their sources, their methods and their technological capabilities.

There are also serious flaws in the proposals to create a new duty to prevent death or serious injury and the new crime of misleading the public. Senior police officers are concerned that the new duty will have a chilling effect on operations. Police officers may be deterred from taking vital split-second decisions to give chase or to restrain, for fear of being sued or charged, placing their careers and livelihoods in jeopardy. Those employed in other parts of the public sector, such as the welfare system or the health service, might also be affected. These measures also risk snarling up the police and others in time-consuming and costly litigation.

There is also a serious risk that the new crime of misleading the public could stifle legitimate political disagreement and debate, criminalise honest mistakes, or punish people for making statements that we only later learn are wrong when the facts change. That is why a lock on such prosecutions, with a requirement for the Attorney General to approve them, is absolutely essential, and we invite hon. Members to support our amendment to ensure that this evening.

15:00

No one denies that there have been tragedies, abuses and cover-ups in the past—I have worked to expose some of them myself. Official cover-ups are always completely unacceptable, but where matters of national security and safety are at stake, responsibility for sensitive information must remain with operational leaders who are accountable to their elected bosses. That is something the Government once accepted. As I have said, we can have a serious discussion about the ways in which the accountability of agencies and others can be improved, and I would be happy to talk to Ministers in a responsible cross-party manner about my own thoughts, based on my own experience. But what the Government propose today does not get close to getting the balance right between transparency and accountability on one hand, and the necessarily secret work that is done to keep us safe on the other.

To seek to make major changes to laws affecting the safety and security of our citizens in the dying days and hours of a premiership, and without sufficient thought or scrutiny, is irresponsible. It is not leadership; it is reckless. The first duty of any Government is to place the safety and security of the British people first—above politics, above pressure, and above the hopes of a short-lived Prime Minister looking for a legacy. That is why, if the Government do not listen to us today, we will make the same argument in the other place. They should take responsibility and they should listen.

[Paula Barker (Liverpool Wavertree) (Lab)]

I rise to support new clauses 5 and 6, tabled by my hon. Friend the Member for Hammersmith and Chiswick (Andy Slaughter). I welcome the Prime Minister’s remarks, and I am relieved that the Government have listened, so that the duty of candour will apply in full to members of the security services, and the Bill will finally reach the statute book.

I pay tribute to all those who have fought so long and so hard for this Bill, including the families, the Hillsborough Law Now campaign, and my fellow Merseyside MPs, in particular my right hon. Friend the Member for Liverpool Garston (Maria Eagle) and the hon. Member for Liverpool West Derby (Ian Byrne). I also thank Pete Weatherby KC, Elkan Abrahamson, and my right hon. Friend the Member for Makerfield (Andy Burnham), who introduced the first Hillsborough law Bill in 2017, after addressing the 20th anniversary in 2009 when he was Culture Secretary.

I was stood on the Kop that day, when a lone voice shouted out “Justice”, and it then turned into a chorus of voices that was the catalyst for the Hillsborough independent panel. The report of the Independent Office for Police Conduct in December recounted once again the horrifying events that took place, and the disgraceful attempt to blame the victims and hide the truth, as well as the appalling response to the report from South Yorkshire Police Federation. It showed exactly why this legislation is so desperately needed, and why new clauses 5 and 6 are so important.

In the 2017 Manchester Arena attack, MI5 was found by a public inquiry not to have given an accurate picture of the key intelligence that it held on the suicide bomber who carried out the attack. New clause 6 would mandate that the duty of candour and assistance applies to the intelligence services as it does to other public authorities. However, it establishes safeguards for sensitive information, and adjusts individual reporting obligations for intelligence personnel, routeing candour requirements through agency record-keeping arrangements and the head of the organisation. New clause 7 would require the Secretary of State to commission and publish an independent report annually. That would serve as a formal oversight mechanism to monitor compliance with the statutory duties outlined in the Bill.

The passage of the Bill has been too long delayed, and we have finally reached this point only because of the strength and bravery of the families of the 97 who died as a result of what happened on 15 April 1989. I am particularly thinking today of my constituents Keith McGrath, who died aged just 17, and Andrew Devine, who was 22 when he suffered horrendous injuries that day, and who died as a result of them in 2021 aged 55, after being cared for devotedly in the years after the disaster by his family, in particular his parents.

The families of the 97 who died have continued to fight for accountability and justice, despite the years of official denials, and the deliberate attempt to hide the truth of what occurred that day. They have fought for a Hillsborough law worthy of the memory of the 97, but not just for them, which shows their decency, resilience, and wider sense of public spirit. They refused to accept legislation that would have allowed an exemption for the security services because of their concern for others who have suffered injustice: the families of victims and survivors of the Manchester Arena bombing, the Grenfell Tower fire, nuclear test veterans, the Post Office Horizon scandal, and so many other tragedies where it has taken far too long for the truth to emerge.

As my right hon. Friend the Member for Liverpool Garston said in her intervention, there are still points to address. For example, the Bill does not provide for full equity of arms, funding, and legal resources for public authorities and bereaved families. Nevertheless, it is important that the Bill will finally pass into law before the summer recess. The families of all those who died or were injured at Hillsborough should not have had to wait 37 years for this legislation. They have been cruelly denied accountability and justice, but they have fought with incredible courage to ensure that in future other families will never have to fight for decades, as they have had to fight for the truth to come to light. This is their day, and I pay tribute to them once again. Justice for the 97.

[Madam Deputy Speaker (Judith Cummins)]

I call the Liberal Democrat spokesperson.

[Jess Brown-Fuller]

I wish to speak to the amendments and new clauses tabled in my name on behalf of my party. Up and down the country, those who have been failed by state institutions, unheard and ignored for years, will today be relieved that this hurdle has been cleared and the Hillsborough law can finally progress. I pay tribute to those campaigners, many of whom are with us in the Gallery, for their courage and perseverance through years of campaigning, and for never saying, “That’ll do”, and instead making sure that the Hillsborough law was delivered in full.

This is known affectionately as the Hillsborough law, but it represents many victims and their loved ones. Be it the Post Office scandal, the Manchester Arena attack, the contaminated blood scandal, Grenfell Tower, nuclear weapons testing veterans, the pelvic mesh scandal, LGBT veterans, or any of the many others, those individuals have stood up for the voiceless and demanded change. These are scandals in which countless individuals have lost their lives or livelihoods, or suffered life-changing injuries.

[Liz Jarvis (Eastleigh) (LD)]

My constituent Gary is one of the victims of the infected blood scandal. He was a pupil at Treloar’s College, and 120 boys from Treloar’s were given contaminated blood. Will my hon. Friend join me in paying tribute to those boys who have fought so hard for justice, and does she agree that it has taken far too long?

[Jess Brown-Fuller]

My hon. Friend has been a tireless campaigner on behalf of her constituents and the victims of the contaminated blood scandal, and she is right to highlight how long it has taken to get here. I commend the Government for ensuring that we eventually got to this point.

These scandals have been uncovered despite the best efforts of public institutions to keep them buried. Institutions that should have been transparent and accountable instead used public money to protect their reputations and deflect blame. Every single victim deserved better. The efforts of campaigners are what have brought us to the point at which we can begin to level the playing field and address the imbalance between the power of the state and that of the ordinary individual. That is why we Liberal Democrats have, at every stage, welcomed the provisions in the Bill, but it was clear at the beginning of this year that there were major gaps in relation to the carve-out for the security services that needed to be addressed.

Campaigners rightly pointed to the role that the intelligence services have played in the past in covering up mistakes and failing to take accountability. Last week there were reports that MI5 had lied in court about Agent X, who had violently abused his partner. Likewise, last year we had the Stakeknife inquiry—Operation Kenova—which raised serious questions about the running of, and collusion with, British informants, while once again highlighting the immense difficulties of obtaining information from the security services. It is clear that these organisations have at times suffered from the same protectionist, inward-looking faults that other public organisations have suffered from. It would have been completely unacceptable for there to have been a carve-out, especially considering that mechanisms already exist to allow for information with national security implications to be heard behind closed doors.

The breakthrough announced over the weekend is welcomed by the Liberal Democrats and will come as a relief to all those wanting to see this Bill progress. I commend Members on the Government Front Bench who secured it, and those no longer there, particularly the hon. Member for Pontypridd (Alex Davies-Jones), who worked so hard to get the legislation to the place it is today. I know from her contributions in debates, her willingness and openness to meet me and Liberal Democrat colleagues to hear our concerns, and her engagement with campaign organisations and families, that she has fought to deliver the Hillsborough law as it was intended by those involved in the campaign.

The Bill Committee took place eight months ago, so it was fun going through all the notes to remind myself exactly what was said. I pay tribute to hon. Members from across the House who scrutinised the legislation, including my hon. Friends the Members for Cheadle (Mr Morrison) and for Wells and Mendip Hills (Tessa Munt). I know they sought to ensure that victims and their loved ones remained at the centre of the Bill and that their concerns regarding the drafting were heard. We have worked alongside them to ensure that no stone has been left unturned in seeking to secure the best possible outcomes in this legislation. Our amendments are all aimed at tightening the gaps that we can see in the legislation.

First, there is the importance of whistleblowers, who, in many of the tragedies mentioned today, have provided vital information at great personal risk for the public good. The Liberal Democrats have long called for stronger whistleblowing protections to ensure that wrongdoing within organisations and public bodies is swiftly exposed and brought to justice. Amendment 3 ensures that public authorities involved in an inquiry or investigation demonstrate that they have taken steps to ensure that individuals can safely disclose information relevant to that investigation.

Amendment 6 would require that a public authority’s code of ethical conduct includes information about to whom a person can make a protected disclosure and how that person will be protected. The Minister talked about additional guidance being provided with the legislation, so will she, when she sums up, set out whether there will be an expectation that that will include how to make a protected disclosure? We would have liked this Bill to go further on whistleblower protection, but much of what we proposed was considered out of scope for the Bill. I urge the Government and the new Administration to look more widely at what can be done to protect those who attempt to expose wrongdoing in the future.

A statutory duty of candour in the NHS has existed since 2014, yet we know that there remains a culture of retiring or firing staff who dare to speak up. Our new clause 2 would create an offence for anyone who wilfully destroys relevant records after a major incident that could lead to an inquest or inquiry. New clause 3 is aimed at providing a national oversight mechanism through the publication of an annual independent report on compliance with the Act, as has been mentioned multiple times already in the debate. Many hon. Members spoke of the need to have an overnight mechanism, and similar amendments have been tabled by the right hon. Member for Liverpool Garston (Maria Eagle) and the Chair of the Justice Committee, the hon. Member for Hammersmith and Chiswick (Andy Slaughter).

Amendments 1 and 2 would ensure that the legislation is fully up to date with modern investigations by making it clear that digital messages must be provided as evidence to investigations. The Bill includes provisions for the inclusion of subcontractors under the duty of candour, but we do not believe that they go far enough. Amendment 4 would therefore extend those provisions to all subcontractors throughout the chain of provision. We need only look at the way local authorities subcontract to understand that most working within the public sector are subcontractors of subcontractors of subcontractors. We believe that the scope needs to be extended to include those.

The extension of non-means-tested legal aid to bereaved families at inquests is also long overdue and greatly needed. For too long the system has been weighted against ordinary people seeking justice. Those attempting to bring these scandals to light have faced well-resourced and highly motivated public bodies intent on protecting their reputations, but we do not believe that the provisions go far enough and we will be seeking to amend them in the other place. Amendments 11 and 12 would ensure that public officials do not escape their responsibilities when they cease to hold public office, and that they remain accountable for their actions even if they have since resigned, retired or been shuffled out.

15:15

The Hillsborough Law Now group has raised the lack of command responsibility within the Bill. Amendment 5 addresses that by placing responsibility for breaches of the duty of candour on the chief executive of the relevant public body. Amendment 9 ensures that the Act comes into force immediately upon Royal Assent, save for a small number of sections that require supporting codes. We see no reason for any unnecessary delay in the process.

Finally, I would like to mention the amendment tabled by my hon. Friend the Member for Henley and Thame (Freddie van Mierlo), which places privatised water companies under the duty of candour. It serves as an important reminder of the harms caused by companies on which the public are wholly reliant.

For too long, victims and survivors of horrendous tragedies across the country have been prevented from receiving the justice that they deserve. They have been denied the truth, denied accountability and denied the confidence that what happened to them will not happen to someone else in future. I hope that today will be a day of celebration for many of those families, who have fought tirelessly—not for their own gain, but to ensure that nobody else suffers in the way they have. I am pleased that we have reached an important milestone in the journey of this legislation, and I look forward to seeing the Bill return from the other place in the strongest form possible.

[Derek Twigg]

I support the Bill and the amendments put forward by the Government. Back in May 1998, when I first spoke in a debate about the Hillsborough disaster, I could never have imagined that 28 years later I would be debating new legislation to address the state’s failings in respect of that disaster. My right hon. Friend the Member for Liverpool Garston (Maria Eagle) was there with me. She and I first uncovered the altered statements in the House of Commons Library; she played a very important role in getting to the stage we did and in getting justice for the Hillsborough families.

I speak from a unique position, in that I was at the Hillsborough disaster, I have worked closely with the Hillsborough families to obtain justice and there are families in my constituency who lost loved ones or were injured at the Hillsborough disaster and in the Manchester Arena bombing. More recently, I have become a member of the Intelligence and Security Committee, which has oversight of the intelligence community. I am pleased to see my hon. Friend the Member for Bootle (Peter Dowd), also a member of the ISC, in his place, although unfortunately he is unable to speak in today’s debate because he co-chaired the Bill Committee.

I will keep my comments primarily to aspects of intelligence and controversies around the Bill. Our intelligence services keep us safe every day. Our intelligence officers and agents do difficult and sometimes dangerous work so that we can live safely. They deserve our sincere thanks and praise for the job that they do and it is right that we hold them to the highest standards. As a member of the ISC, which has oversight of the intelligence services, I been involved in trying to find a way forward with colleagues in addressing the concerns about the impact of the Bill on the intelligence services.

I support the Government amendments and the Bill as a whole. It is welcome that the Government have listened to the campaigners and the ISC. I particularly praise Pete Weatherby KC, who has always been available to talk to me and others about the issues, and help us get to the point where the legislation gives clear protections. As I say, we have listened to the campaigners and the ISC has accepted a way forward that addresses the concerns raised in respect of the security services. However, I believe that could have been achieved much earlier, and I would like to make a few comments about that.

I genuinely believe that if the ISC had not got involved in these matters, we would not be discussing the Bill today. That is not to take anything away from all those who had been working so hard on the Bill before that, but it had reached an impasse. I praise the work of the ISC Chair, Lord Beamish, and the Deputy Chair, the right hon. and learned Member for Kenilworth and Southam (Sir Jeremy Wright), who is in his place.

It is the view of the ISC that the concerns about the Bill could have been addressed much sooner, as I have said. There has been a lack of direction and grip, with no one taking control. It seemed all too difficult for some, and that has caused the lengthy delays that we have endured. We should not ignore the fact that that has added to the anxiety and concerns of the families and campaigners.

As I stated earlier, the ISC has oversight of the intelligence community. If it felt that the Bill did not address the concerns aired about the impact on the intelligence services or threatened the safety of agents or officers and the security of our country, we would say so—and I, for one, would not vote for it. I do not believe that that is the case; I believe that this Bill, with its amendments, addresses those concerns. Establishing a new duty of candour is key, but I am particularly pleased that the Bill will also bring forward the largest expansion of legal aid in a decade, so that any family facing the might of the state will no longer have to beg and borrow to afford a lawyer, as the Hillsborough families know too well from the early stages of their campaign.

Many of my colleagues have made important contributions to the Bill and ensured that we got to this stage; my right hon. Friend the Member for Liverpool Garston and my hon. Friend the Member for Liverpool West Derby (Ian Byrne) have been instrumental in that. I put on the record my thanks to them. There has also been support from the Prime Minister. Whatever the problems faced by the Government in getting to this stage, they clearly wanted the Bill to go through and have worked very hard to try to do that. It could have been done better, but I believe that, in the long run, we will look back on the tenacity and drive of the families as being what got us to this stage.

Today is a landmark day for the Hillsborough families and other campaigners. It will help to ensure that the truth will out in the future. The state will not be able to repeat the appalling cover-up that we saw with Hillsborough. This landmark Bill will have a profound influence in helping prevent future injustices.

[Sir Jeremy Wright (Kenilworth and Southam) (Con)]

It is a privilege to follow the hon. Member for Widnes and Halewood (Derek Twigg), my colleague on the Intelligence and Security Committee. I agree with everything that he has said.

It is important to begin by recognising the remarkable determination of everyone who has sought to translate immense personal pain into an improvement in the way in which the state treats its citizens. That applies to the families who have campaigned so hard and to Members of this House who have applied their own determination to that task.

As the hon. Member for Widnes and Halewood and many who have spoken in this debate have said, the obstacle to delivering this legislation has really very clearly been the extent to which the duty of candour should apply to the intelligence services and to others for whom full candour may be inconsistent with professional duties, as well as the additional safeguards and modifications that would need to apply to the Bill to enable it to safely cover such people without preventing them from doing their vital work effectively.

As the hon. Gentleman said, the Government asked members of the Intelligence and Security Committee, including me, to become involved in the process of resolving that challenge. As the House would expect, we engaged with that process as diligently as we could, with no partisan politics, in an effort to make good law in the pursuit of greater state transparency while preserving our national security equities. As the hon. Gentleman will recall, we spent many hours on the task, engaging with both the Government and those representing the Hillsborough families.

It probably would not be right or practical, in the time available, to go into the detail of all the positions taken over many months, but it is fair and important to say that throughout that time, those representing the Hillsborough families have maintained that measures and protections in existing law would prevent national security from being jeopardised if the duty of candour applied to the intelligence services. The Government, for their part, have maintained throughout this period of many months both consistently and robustly that that is not so.

The Government have maintained that the only way to protect national security is to build additional safeguards, protections and exemptions into the Bill. That appeared still to be their position until very recently. Even yesterday, Government amendment 147, which gives the head of an intelligence agency the right to withhold information altogether in certain circumstances, appeared in the amendment paper for the Bill, as it had done in many previous iterations of that document. In today’s version of the amendment paper, for the first time, that amendment has disappeared and been replaced not with the detailed compromise that Intelligence and Security Committee members, who have been engaged with this process, have been working towards, along with many others, but with Government amendment 157.

Government amendment 157 says, in effect, that protections already existing in the law are good enough after all—the Minister made that clear in what she said—and that no substitute further protections or exemptions need to be built into the Bill. That is a remarkable change of position, and a remarkably fast one. It is up to the Government to decide what legislation they propose to this House, and it is perfectly within their rights to propose amendments to their own legislation. We can all cynically speculate about the reasons why this sudden about-turn has taken place this week, but, as my hon. Friend the Member for West Suffolk (Nick Timothy), who spoke from the Front Bench, said earlier, it is our job to scrutinise this legislation and to ensure that whatever we put in place does justice to the determination of the Hillsborough families and everybody else to put in place a law that does not just sound good, but does good—makes real change and sticks in that task.

I simply have to observe to the Minister and the House that, after all the painstaking work and hours spent, until late last week, on the basis that further safeguards were required—all the amendments drafted, redrafted and redrafted again—the Government have suddenly said that none of that is necessary. What on earth is going on? It seems to me that there are two possibilities. The first is that, for whatever reason, the Government have now cobbled together a rushed compromise that does not adequately protect our national security and that, inevitably and logically, does the job less effectively than their previous amendments sought to do. The Minister has been very clear that that is not the case. I want to take her at her word, because this is an important subject.

That leaves us with the second possibility, which is that the settlement before us—a settlement that effectively replicates what the advocates for the Hillsborough families have been saying for months—could have been delivered to this House a very long time ago. That needless delay has brought a waste of ministerial time, official time, the ISC’s time, frankly, and the time of the intelligence agencies. That time could certainly have been better spent. But, far, far worse than any of that, it has brought an additional, agonising wait for the Hillsborough families and others for the law that they were promised—an additional wait that, it seems, they did not need to endure. I appreciate that the Minister has come to this matter reasonably late, but, whatever else she may need to answer, I am afraid she needs to explain all that to us and to the Hillsborough families.

[Madam Deputy Speaker (Judith Cummins)]

I call the Chair of the Justice Select Committee.

[Andy Slaughter]

I welcome the Bill, and thank the Government for introducing it and bringing it back to the House before the summer recess. It is the result of years of committed campaigning, led by the families of the victims and survivors of Hillsborough. Many of the worst corporate miscarriages of justice, from infected blood to Grenfell, would have been exposed years or even decades ago, had the Bill become law sooner. We should celebrate a landmark piece of legislation that—like the Human Rights Act 1998 and the Freedom of Information Act 2000, introduced under the last Labour Government—gives power to the citizen and makes the state accountable.

I will focus my remarks on two new clauses that I have tabled, which build on growing calls for a national oversight mechanism. This would be a new, independent public body that collated, analysed and followed up on the conclusions and recommendations made after official investigations into deaths and state failings, in order to improve oversight and implementation of them. At present, there is a critical gap in accountability between the issuing of a report or recommendation and its eventual implementation. It can be extremely difficult for bereaved families, victims and the general public to get information on what changes have actually been made following the identification of failings.

15:30

In her last annual report for 2024, the chief coroner noted that 713 prevention of future death reports had been issued. Those reports identify key issues that contributed to someone’s death and need rectifying to prevent the same thing happening again. There is a duty to respond to those reports, but evidence from the charity INQUEST and others, such as the independent advisory panel on deaths in custody, has shown that responses are often absent or delayed. Further, as the previous Justice Committee said in 2021,

“there is no follow-up to see if coroners’ reports have had the desired impact.”

It is often the case that no change has in fact been made by a public authority. That has drawn serious concern from coroners and inquiry chairs.

My new clauses are supported by INQUEST and over 40 organisations, including the Law Society, Amnesty International UK and JUSTICE. The need to improve systems for monitoring action on inquests and inquiries has been raised repeatedly during debates on this Bill. The Prime Minister himself stated on Second Reading that

“when there are inquiries, there needs to be a better way of ensuring that they are followed through.”—[Official Report, 3 November 2025; Vol. 774, c. 654.]

However, despite Government interest in this area, there has been no formal commitment to implement this proposal. My new clauses would ensure that the Bill extends to the aftermath of inquiries. There needs to be candour and transparency in how public authorities respond to, and act on, findings and recommendations by improving central oversight; otherwise, these costly, lengthy legal processes are futile.

A further step that the Government may want to consider is creating and maintaining a database, so that all information gathered by coronial investigations is recorded and analysed to prevent future deaths. Dr Georgia Richards from King’s College London has been doing vital work in that area, and I recommend that the Government use her expertise to find a solution for how to harness all the information gathered by coroners to protect public health. Beyond that, the coronial service needs to be more responsive and proactive, as successive reports from the Justice Committee have urged.

In the light of the number of people who wish to speak, I do not have time to go through the other amendments and new clauses that I support, but I will mention new clause 1, which is in the name of my right hon. Friend the Member for Liverpool Garston (Maria Eagle) and calls for the independent public advocate to have a greater role. Earlier in the year, the Select Committee interviewed the current—and first—independent public advocate, Cindy Butts. She is an excellent appointment, but she needs more powers and resources to ensure that she can play her full role in making sure that the provisions of this Bill come into effect. I will also mention amendment 4, tabled by the Liberal Democrats, which deals with the role of subcontractors. In my view, the lack of provisions on subcontractors is an omission from the Bill; it is worth noting that during the Horizon scandal, Fujitsu relied heavily on subcontractors to maintain and operate its services.

Finally, I will mention amendment 25, which is in the name of the hon. Member for Cheadle (Mr Morrison). It would extend the offence of misleading the public to

“a public authority or public official providing misleading information to a recognised news publisher.”

South Yorkshire police defamed the Hillsborough families and survivors, but it did not do so alone—its lies and smears were promoted by several newspapers. It was the culture and the connections between the newspapers and the police that enabled that to happen, and there is no evidence that this has changed. Just as South Yorkshire police was protected by The Sun after Hillsborough, the Metropolitan police was responsible for astonishing oversights in the investigations into phone hacking at the News of the World. This Bill’s focus on the role of public officials is welcome, but the Government should also look at collaboration between public officials and the media.

Finally, may I say what a relief it is to see a compromise reached between the Hillsborough families and the Government on the application of the duty of candour to the security services? While I understand the Government’s desire to strike a balance in this area, a carve-out would erode the effectiveness of the Bill. As we have seen on multiple occasions, including in the investigation of the Manchester Arena bombing, the Stakeknife case in Northern Ireland and the Attorney General v. the BBC—the “Beth” case, as it is known—it is vital for public confidence and accountability that there is transparency in cases where there have been failings in the conduct of the security services. In the Attorney General v. the BBC, I note that MI5 was found to have provided false evidence to the courts, and it paid damages to “Beth”, alongside giving an apology, but that was only after repeated interventions by the BBC and the courts. That demonstrates the importance of the duty of candour applying to the intelligence services.

[Tessa Munt]

Can the hon. Member spot the irony in the fact that today, while the Government are considering this legislation, which is designed to prevent public bodies from obstructing the truth, the Ministry of Defence is in the High Court in London, trying very hard to silence the Chinook families by saying that they are out of time in seeking an independent inquiry on why their loved ones were allowed to board a Chinook helicopter that the Ministry of Defence knew was unairworthy, positively dangerous and not to be relied on in any way? There is surely an irony in that. It is absurd. I know that the hon. Member was talking about the intelligence services, but the Bill surely has to cover the Ministry of Defence and how it behaves, too, because it is utterly inappropriate.

[Andy Slaughter]

I know that case means a huge amount to the hon. Lady as a constituency MP, and I thank her for all the work she does on the Justice Committee. I think we have only begun to scratch the surface. This Bill will be a transforming piece of legislation.

I will make one final comment. Several Members have welcomed, as I do, the huge increase in the provision of legal aid that will come, but for that to be effective, we have to look at legal aid rates and the availability of legal aid practitioners. Simply having the funding available does not ensure that there will be representation and equality of arms, which I think we all wish for.

[Tessa Munt]

My sense is that we could have some equity in the amount of legal aid given to families and individuals fighting big organisations, such as public bodies. If the rates of the specialists and professionals who are supporting the public bodies came down, and matched the rising rate of legal aid for the support of those individuals and families, we might be in a situation where could be some equity. That would make investigation much simpler for the courts and inquests dealing with such cases, because they would have people who understood the process better.

[Andy Slaughter]

I think I have taken enough time, but I thank the Member for that intervention. This afternoon, the Justice Committee signed off a new major report on legal aid, which will be published on Friday. Those who are interested can read more there. In conclusion, this is a landmark piece of legislation, which we should all welcome, and I commend it to the House.

[Sir Jeremy Hunt (Godalming and Ash) (Con)]

I will speak to two amendments, but first, I pay tribute to the Hillsborough families, and to two people in particular, with whom I have dealt personally. The first is Margaret Aspinall. As a new Culture Secretary in 2010, I made some ill-chosen comments about the Hillsborough tragedy, and I met Margaret Aspinall afterwards. I apologised, and she graciously accepted that apology. I have always been struck by not just her tenacity, but her dignity and decency. Today has been a long journey, but if the Bill saves lives, as we all want it to, she will deserve more credit than any politician, as will every one of the families of the 97.

I also want to mention Bishop James Jones, who was chair of the independent panel. He gave the world the phrase that summed up more than any other what went wrong: the patronising disposition of unaccountable power. What is remarkable about Bishop James is that he did not hang up his hat after publishing the report in 2012, but went on to advise successive Home Secretaries on how to implement his recommendations, and then chaired the Hillsborough families’ experiences review panel. I asked for his help in chairing the Gosport independent panel, and he went on to chair the Gosport family forum, from which he has just stepped down for health reasons. To me, he exemplifies Senator John McCain’s famous words about

“the honor we earn and the love we give if at a moment in our lives we sacrifice for something greater than self-interest.”

I know that the whole House will want to mark his public service.

Let me turn to my new clause and amendment. New clause 11 addresses a profound failure in the way that the duty of candour works in the NHS. In 2014, I put in place the regulations that applied that duty to the NHS, and when I tell the House what those regulations require of the NHS, Members will immediately see why they are failing so badly. They state that if severe harm or death is caused to a patient, the hospital must tell the patient or their family promptly, or as soon as is practically reasonable. It must give a truthful account of what is known and what happened, and it must offer a sincere apology. As witnesses to countless subsequent inquiries affecting the constituents of many Members here have said, that simply does not happen. Families have to fight for years to find the truth about what happened to a loved one, and all too often, they find that mistakes are ignored or covered up. When a tragedy is covered up, it is then repeated time after time, which is precisely what those families are campaigning to stop.

Why do those cover-ups happen? There are many reasons, but one in particular is that trust lawyers advise trusts not to say anything at all when there is a risk of legal action. Let me tell the House about baby Ben Condon, who died at eight weeks old in 2015, when I was Health Secretary, after delays in giving him antibiotics. His father Allyn says that consultants apologised to him privately, saying that they had got it wrong, and then said the exact opposite at an inquest a few months later. I believe that that was a breach of the duty of candour regulations that were already in place, and that lawyers, even today, are giving unlawful advice to clinicians and trusts. As a result, the duty of candour in the NHS is being widely bypassed, and that will continue until we deal with this loophole. New clause 11 requires the Department of Health and Social Care

“to ensure that legal services provided to NHS bodies…are consistent with the statutory duty of candour and the principles of openness”.

It requires the Department or designated body to ensure that those standards are met, and that the situation be dealt with appropriately when they are not.

Amendment 150 does a different job. The Bill requires people working for public bodies to tell the truth to those conducting investigations or reviews, but it does not require them to tell the truth to families, who then have to wait, often for years, until the review is published. The amendment requires that information to be provided to a person or family who has, or may have been, harmed.

I recognise that the House will not divide on either the new clause or the amendment, so neither will become law as part of this Bill. My request to Ministers is that they include them in the Health Bill; they would be in scope, and would have a dramatic impact in preventing the anger of NHS-bereaved families, which is absolutely the equal of the anger of the Hillsborough families that we are trying to address today. My reason for wanting to do that is straightforward. A Health Secretary can pass new laws, introduce new technology and bring down waiting lists, but the only real change that stands the test of time is culture change. Culture change means replacing cover-ups, buck-passing and a blame culture with openness, trust and learning, but there will not be trust if patients and families are not told the truth. We will never learn from mistakes if we cover them up. We need real change—culture change—to put that right.

[David Baines (St Helens North) (Lab)]

I started my speech on Second Reading in November last year by saying:

“This has been a long time coming.”—[Official Report, 3 November 2025; Vol. 774, c. 681.]

Even more time has passed since then, but thanks to the determination, strength and effort of many survivors and campaigners—some of whom are in the Gallery today—and of those on the Labour Benches, and to the support of a number of dedicated people in this place, we are here at last, with the finish line in sight again.

15:44

It is a pleasure to follow the right hon. Member for Godalming and Ash (Sir Jeremy Hunt). I have a lot of sympathy for his new clause 11, and I heard him make the same point to the Health Secretary this morning. I hope that a time and a place can be found for such a provision, because what he says is important. He expressed it very well and with passion, and I certainly support him in that.

I welcome the Government amendments, and I also welcome the fact that, importantly, they have the support of the families and campaigners. I am assured by the comments that we have heard from members of the ISC, and I am certain that they will continue to keep a close eye on the Bill as it progresses and in its implementation.

I will keep my remarks relatively short, because I have spoken on this topic several times and I know that a lot of colleagues want to speak, but some things need to be said. We need to remind ourselves that this Bill and its provisions are here before us because, after suffering incredible trauma and when faced with a wall of lies, ordinary people decided to say no, including the families affected by Grenfell, the Manchester Arena attack, Primodos, Orgreave, the infected blood scandal, the Post Office/Horizon scandal and many more, such as maternity scandals in the NHS. This is their Bill, not Westminster’s Bill.

Not least among those people are the Hillsborough families and campaigners, some of whom I have had the privilege to meet. I have met lots of remarkable people in both my personal life and my professional life in politics, and I have no hesitation in saying that I have never met a group of people who have shown such bravery and resilience in the face of so many obstacles, so many lies and so much profound injustice. It is because of the efforts of families and survivors that people will be helped in the future. The truth will be easier to find, and justice will be easier to secure. We all owe the campaigners our deepest thanks.

To all those who have made this Bill possible, and to all those who have worked so hard and for so long to make the case, to reach a consensus and to win the argument, I say thank you. I hope the House will forgive me if I say once again to the Hillsborough families and campaigners in particular: you have my utmost respect, you have my deep gratitude, you are the best of us. You have been a light in the darkness. You’ll never walk alone.

[Mr Tom Morrison (Cheadle) (LD)]

I wish to speak to amendment 25, which has been tabled in my name, among others. Hillsborough, the infected blood scandal, Windrush, Grenfell and the Manchester Arena are all tragedies that everyone across the country knows too well, because the campaigners, the survivors and the families of those who have been lost have bravely made sure that we will never forget what happens when the state not only ignores them, but actively works against them to protect its own interests.

As you know, Madam Deputy Speaker, the journey to this point has been far too long for the Hillsborough families. It is 14 years since the independent panel finally confirmed that public officials had hidden the truth. It was a day of hope that, finally, we might see justice be done. I remember sitting in Liverpool’s council chamber after the news broke. I remember the joy and relief that spread throughout that room, and the way that councillors from all parties came together to unite behind the families and campaigners who fought so hard, and for so long, to get that verdict. But there were more blocks and heartbreaking moments to come.

This Bill has taken far too long to get here, but it is really important to acknowledge Members from across the House and in the Government, especially the Prime Minister, in getting us to this point. I know how much has been said about legacy over recent weeks—especially by the shadow Secretary of State, the hon. Member for West Suffolk (Nick Timothy)—but I genuinely believe that this a legacy worthy of any incumbent in No. 10. Today, it is long overdue.

What has been achieved by the families and all the campaign groups pushing for this legislation is nothing short of astounding. To take the most unimaginable heartbreak, and the most unimaginable grief and suffering, and turn it into positive action that will not only make our country safer and more just, but make the legacy of the 97 synonymous with a country that protects its people and gives them a true level playing field in the eyes of the law, is quite simply remarkable.

It must not be forgotten that the campaigners and families worked so hard to find common ground to progress this Bill, and that needs to be celebrated. The campaigners at Hillsborough Law Now have worked relentlessly to push the Government to the position they have reached, and I am sure the whole House will join me in applauding them. This Bill will change the way that this country works and operates. A legal duty of candour on all public authorities will bring groundbreaking change not only legally, but culturally, and a cover-up culture will no longer thrive.

In Committee, my hon. Friend the Member for Wells and Mendip Hills (Tessa Munt) and I analysed the Bill in detail and learned how true accountability could and should be built into institutions. It became clear that command responsibility over corporate liability was badly needed, and that no organisation should be exempt from the duty of candour, no matter how secret, important or unique their role in our society may be. I was proud to support the amendments put forward by Hillsborough Law Now to ensure that the Government properly addressed these issues.

It also became clear that there were other gaps. For example, we believed that the issues of wilfully destroying records and the provision of legal aid were not sufficiently addressed. That is why my hon. Friend the Member for Chichester (Jess Brown-Fuller) has tabled new clauses 2 and 4, to make the legislation watertight. I believe other gaps still need to be filled, so I have tabled amendment 25, which outlines explicitly that a public authority or public official providing misleading information to a recognised news publisher would be an offence of misleading the public.

We all in this House know well how intertwined the relationship is between the state and the media. There is a continuous cycle of give and take, and it is vital that this is not misused or abused. The impact of the briefings given to the press by the police and senior politicians and advisers after Hillsborough is still felt today. It was a despicable smear campaign that demonised communities and a whole city, and even worse, it made the victims of the disaster appear to be at fault and somehow to blame for what happened. All those responsible for that disgraceful act will never be forgiven. This situation can never be allowed to happen again, and amendment 25 would ensure that misleading the press has direct consequences under the legislation.

This Bill still has many stages to undergo in the other place, but today we can truly celebrate in the knowledge that we are one giant step closer to justice. We see a future where people are protected from the powers of the state when the state fails our residents and moves to protect itself over those it should serve. We see a future where victims are cared for by the state, not treated as villains. We see a future where lies and deceit can no longer cover up public scandals, and where public officials are empowered to do the right thing. Today belongs to the 97 and their families, and I could not be prouder of them.

[Maria Eagle]

Before he leaves the Chamber, I say to the right hon. Member for Godalming and Ash (Sir Jeremy Hunt) that I agree very much with what he said about transparency and its importance. He made the point that lawyers are sometimes a problem. Obviously, the legal system, in which I used to be a participant, is adversarial. A bit like in this Chamber, we have the defence and we have the prosecution, and it is not the fault of the lawyers themselves if they are perhaps not as helpful as they could be.

My new clause 1 tries to deal with some of the issues that are outwith the scope of the Bill, but it also reminds right hon. and hon. Members, and the Ministers charged with making this Bill work, that something else happened to get us to the truth of Hillsborough, and that was the Hillsborough independent panel report. That was not a legal action; it was about transparency, freedom of information and being open.

I know that the right hon. Gentleman has his frustrations about the fact that his well-intentioned health reforms are not operating as he would have wished. He mentioned Bishop James Jones, who led the Hillsborough independent panel report process so well. I believe there has to be something alongside the Bill which enables families, should they wish in the aftermath of a public disaster, to choose a transparency and freedom of information way forward, rather than just lining up to get lawyers. I am sure that each family would have a lawyer, but lawyers operate within a legal system that is adversarial and is not necessarily there to get to the truth. Each advocate supports the side they have been instructed by, for their best interests. That has led to problems in the aftermath of disasters such as Hillsborough.

My new clause 1 relates to the Independent Public Advocate, which was legislated for. I do not believe that the role has sufficient powers or resource. It has been established and set up, and the appointment of Cindy Butts has been made. She has already started to operate and was called upon in the aftermath of the attack on the Heaton Park synagogue. She does not have the powers that I envisaged in the Public Advocate Bill, which I promoted in this House from 2016. It has been promoted in the other place by Lord Wills since 2014, so Members can work out who wrote it—it was not me.

The powers in the Public Advocate Bill, which I hope my new clause will enable us to consider alongside those in the Bill before us, would enable the families, should they wish, to embark on a transparency and freedom of information process. That would be something like the Hillsborough independent panel, but at a much earlier stage in the aftermath, in order to ensure that the full gamut of possible responses that might work for the families can be pursued.

Although such powers are not in this Bill, because it is too narrow in scope for them to be included, I hope that my new clause 1 on producing a report within 12 months of the passing of this Bill on how the Independent Public Advocate is working and the impact of the Act’s provisions on increasing public confidence—a public advocate with such powers to help families can increase public confidence as well—will lead to a conclusion that she needs more powers and resource, as she has very little at the moment, so that there will be another option that some families, in the aftermath of disasters, may choose to go to, rather than just having to have a series of legal actions that may succeed and then fail, followed by appeals and different kinds of actions. That is what happened to the Hillsborough families. We must bear in mind not only the inequality of arms, but the length of time taken to get through the legal actions, even if they proceed swiftly and well. In considering that measure alongside the duty of candour and the provisions in the Bill, I hope it may, in future, aid families who get caught up in public disasters to choose the best way forward for them.

One key thing about the Hillsborough families was the way in which they organised themselves. They got themselves together, set up the Hillsborough family support group and had a democratic procedure so that the families themselves could decide the next steps. One or two families peeled off when they did not agree with the conclusions and ploughed their own furrow, sometimes very successfully. Anne Williams springs to mind. She wanted to focus very much on overturning the inquests. She was right in the end. She knew absolutely what had happened to her son, because she went and found out. She knew that the inquest verdicts were wrong, so she wanted to focus on that. But on the whole the families kept together and were able to decide how they would go forward.

Any public advocate has a role in facilitating that kind of process, to give families the collective strength to decide how they wish the aftermath of a disaster to be dealt with. Each family will have a lawyer to advocate for them, but that does not necessitate their getting together and deciding what to do among themselves in so far as they can. I think a public advocate who is looking at establishing a process like the Hillsborough independent panel could facilitate that and could assist in some instances.

15:59

Obviously, I am glad that the Bill has come back and that it is going to complete its Commons stages today. I am relieved about that. I think the duty of candour is a good thing, if it can be made to work effectively—it cannot be a bad thing. If this duty of candour already exists, it will help to focus minds, hopefully at an early stage, in the aftermath of any disaster in a way that the common-law duty that has, one assumes, always existed did not really do at the time of Hillsborough. This is, therefore, entirely good.

I am glad to see that the problem of being between a rock and a hard place that has delayed the Bill has been resolved between the campaigners and the Government. I know of and commend the work of the Intelligence and Security Committee in trying to get to a resolution of that problem. My hon. Friend the Member for Widnes and Halewood (Derek Twigg) has done a lot of work on that, as has the right hon. and learned Member for Kenilworth and Southam (Sir Jeremy Wright). I used to be on that Committee, so I know how hard it works, and I for one am willing to take at face value their assurances about what will and what will not work for the intelligence community.

I welcome the fact that that problem has, one hopes, been solved, and that the Bill can now complete its Commons stages and go off for consideration in the other place, where I am sure it will be looked at fairly closely. There are a number of people in the other place with experience of disasters—Hillsborough and Grenfell in particular—who, I know, will want to submit the Bill to some serious scrutiny. We will no doubt see how that goes in due course.

In addition to getting the Bill on to the statute book, I hope that some serious consideration will be given, perhaps through the mechanism that I suggest in new clause 1, to whether a non-legal approach might be an option for some families, should they choose to take it. I do not believe that we should just say to families in the aftermath of a disaster, “Here’s some legal help—off you go.” If we can cut short the many years and decades that many families have to endure in the aftermath of public disasters by finding a way to circumvent that, I believe we will have provided an additional option for those families that will be well worth some of them taking.

[Seamus Logan (Aberdeenshire North and Moray East) (SNP)]

I rise to speak as a member of the Bill Committee and principally in support of amendment 20 in my name, which seeks to provide a necessary layer of democratic parliamentary scrutiny of the actions of the intelligence services.

I listened very carefully to what the members of the ISC present—the hon. Member for Widnes and Halewood (Derek Twigg) and the right hon. and learned Member for Kenilworth and Southam (Sir Jeremy Wright)—had to say. Ultimately, behind my amendment was the fact that democratic accountability does not lie with a High Court or with the head of an intelligence service, but here, with us. We are where the buck of democratic accountability stops. That is why I gave prominence to the ISC in my amendment.

Before turning to my amendment, I must acknowledge the work of the Hillsborough families and their supporters for their courage, tenacity and determination over the past 37 years, which has brought us to this point today. We in the SNP and the Scottish Government fully support the aims and objectives of this legislation so that never again will people face lies, injustice and wilful cover-ups by public bodies without accountability under the law. That is why tonight, with the exception of new clause 3, which we will support, we will vote with the Government in support of this legislation.

That said, I cannot let today pass without making some reference to the fact that, considering the long journey that we have been on—considering the meetings; considering the way in which the Bill Committee was forced to truncate its work into a very limited period; considering the negotiations that followed; considering the pulling of the Bill, the series of amendments and the counter-proposals—the indecent haste of the Government these past 24 hours to push this legislation through is actively working against proper parliamentary scrutiny. That is my view.

Amendment 20 has not been selected for a vote tonight. The intent of the amendment, which is supported by Members from a wide range of parties across the House, was to ensure that we here in Parliament, who are elected by the people, would, through the Intelligence and Security Committee of the House, have had oversight of any decision by the head of an intelligence service to hide information from public scrutiny under the cover of national security.

I have concerns not about the Bill’s use today but about the possibility that a future right-wing Government of this country—perhaps even a far-right Government—might use this legislation as it currently stands to escape the scrutiny that we all seek and support. It is not scaremongering to say that. We should learn the lessons of history. I have seen in my own lifetime, in the land of my birth, how information can be hidden in the name of national security when in fact the interest is not that of the nation but of the Government of the day. That is why I believed that amendment 20 was important, and I am glad to say that 24 MPs from across the House agreed with me.

Before I conclude, I have to make reference to something that the Minister said earlier. She talked about stress-testing elements of the Bill and said that a full timetable would be brought forward in due course. It sounded to me as if, even if the Bill passes through all its final stages, some of these elements will still be subject to a future timescale. Perhaps she might address that point in her closing remarks.

The only other thing I want to say before I finish is the old French saying, “plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose”. We need to be careful about the implementation of this law, so that we do not see the repeat of these mistakes at some point in the future.

In conclusion, I reiterate our support for this legislation. I commend the work of the many determined and tenacious individuals who have brought us to this point, not least the Hillsborough families, who suffered the terrible loss of their loved ones and the industrial-scale cover-up that followed. Today is about them and everyone who will benefit from their efforts.

[Justin Madders (Ellesmere Port and Bromborough) (Lab)]

It is very welcome to see this Bill back in the Commons to complete its final stages, even though we all expected to see it on the statute book by now. While I understand why there have been frustrations and concerns about the last-minute nature of the Bill’s reintroduction, it is important that we do not let process take precedence over substance.

Fundamentally, in this debate we are considering amendments to the Bill, so it is important that we address those, but I think we should start as we always should: by recognising the unwavering determination that the Hillsborough families and campaigners have shown to this point. We should continue to recognise that they have fought so hard over decades not just to get the truth and justice for their loved ones but to bring about a structural change in the way that the state operates to ensure that public interest is paramount and is not placed behind institutional reputation.

I am delighted to see that the Government have found a way through the problems that halted the Bill’s progression earlier this year. I know that it will bring my constituents great relief that we have found a way to amend the Bill to deliver on the commitment that we made to the Hillsborough families. I welcome the amendments that the Government have put forward. The fact that they have been welcomed by the Hillsborough Law Now campaign is testament to the hard work that has been put in by so many people to get this Bill to the right place. I thank the campaigners, the Minister and the former Minister—my hon. Friend the Member for Pontypridd (Alex Davies-Jones)—and my many hon. Friends, many of whom have spoken today, who have worked closely with the Government to get the legislation to where it is today.

When this Bill was introduced, I said to the House that the standard against which it must be held is “Never again”. It is clear that in most areas the Bill had already met that standard, as it was welcomed by campaigners, but it is clear that there were still concerns about the way that the Bill treated members of the security services and the potential for them to be absolved of the duty of candour.

That is particularly important given the concerns raised by victims’ families in the aftermath of the Manchester Arena bombing about the security services not providing an accurate picture of the key intelligence they held on the bomber. Not including those officers would weaken the Bill’s central duty of candour. The Government amendments, if accepted by the House, will ensure that the security services will no longer be exempt from the duty. However, being bound by that duty, it is necessary that there are safeguards to ensure that secret and sensitive material is handled securely and that the safety of individuals working at those authorities is protected. That is an important balance to strike as it will ensure accountability and transparency in investigations while not compromising national security.

I am grateful to the Minister for explaining in detail how the amendments will work in her opening comments. However, when she winds up the debate, will she explain a little more about how amendment 157 will operate in practice—particularly the application of subsection (2G)—and who comes within the ambit of representations that will be made to the Minister?

Many concerns have been expressed both publicly and privately about how this duty might impact the workings of the security services, but I do not think for a minute that any Member in the Chamber would want to pass legislation that would, by accident or design, risk national security. I am delighted that we have found a formula that assures most hon. Members that that balance has been struck.

There have also been concerns about how the duty will impact relations with countries with whom we share information, but I took particular heart from the evidence that Pete Weatherby gave to the Bill Committee. I add my thanks to him for his work on the Bill. He said:

“The more candid that we can make this, the better the relationship with international partners.”––[Official Report, Public Office (Accountability) Public Bill Committee, 27 November 2025; c. 9, Q9.]

I found that a helpful way to look at things.

More than anything, the Bill will set new expectations for what it means to be a public servant. The vast majority of those working in our state institutions will not require the provisions of this legislation—they are already acting in this manner—but the Bill makes it clear that the duty of candour is not an optional extra; it is a core tenet of public service. Too often in the past, we have seen institutions forming a ring around people, more interested in their own reputations than in finding the truth and acting in the public interest. As we know, the Hillsborough independent panel found that 100 statements made by junior police officers had been deliberately altered by South Yorkshire police. That is as clear an example as there can be of institutional cover-up and a festering culture that we must never see again.

We have seen that culture far too often, as hon. Members have referred to: in Grenfell, Manchester Arena, the Post Office Horizon scandal, contaminated blood, Windrush, Cammell Laird, Orgreave, the Shrewsbury campaign and many others. We have all recognised in those scandals the similar patterns of institutional defensiveness, delayed disclosure and an inequality of arms. The Bill will end that pattern and culture once and for all. As the right hon. Member for Godalming and Ash (Sir Jeremy Hunt) reminded us, the law does not change things—it is the culture that needs to change—but the law gives us the basis on which we will see that change.

As hon. Members have recognised, it is incumbent on us to ensure that once the Bill gets on the statute book, it does not stay static. We must regularly ensure that it is working as intended. As my right hon. Friend the Member for Liverpool Garston (Maria Eagle) said, there is more work to do, particularly on how it works in practice. I am concerned that the legal aid provisions may not mean that we get parity of arms in reality, but let us welcome where we are, because I believe that the Hillsborough families have waited far too long to see justice.

On days like today, I think in particular about the families of Christopher Edwards, James Delaney and Jimmy Hennessy, who left Ellesmere Port on 15 April 1989 to watch a game of football and never returned. We remember all those who died and we repeat our vow: never again.

[Freddie van Mierlo (Henley and Thame) (LD)]

I start by paying tribute to the victims and survivors who have got us to this point, and to the many hon. Members across the House who have shared personal testimonies and those of their constituents from many different disasters, including Hillsborough.

If the House will allow me, I will change the context of the debate a tiny bit and talk about amendment 149, tabled in my name, which seeks to include water companies in the scope of the code of conduct and duty of candour.The amendment has been sponsored by 33 Members from across the House. Under the Bill, privately owned water companies do not have to follow the same code of conduct as publicly owned water companies in Scotland or Northern Ireland, which is absurd. Although privately owned water companies operate under the Water Industry Act 1991 and are designated as statutory undertakers, they exercise public functions of fundamental importance to health, the environment and daily life; they hold exclusive regional monopolies, meaning that consumers have no alternative provider; and they benefit from statutory powers and privileges normally associated with public authorities.

[Mike Martin (Tunbridge Wells) (LD)]

We actually have examples of water companies lying. We had South East Water coming to the Environment, Food and Rural Affairs Committee in January and giving false evidence—so much so that the Chair considered bringing it back for being in contempt of Parliament.

16:15

[Freddie van Mierlo]

My hon. Friend makes an excellent point. We have seen docudramas such as “Dirty Business”, in which water companies have sought to evade scrutiny. This amendment would correct that anomaly.

The companies are supposed to perform the same public functions with the same public impact, but without the discipline of market competition. In the Bill, publicly owned water companies such as those that exist outside of England and Wales must follow standards of ethical conduct, including following the principles of integrity, accountability and openness. They must adopt a code that sets the standards expected for those who work at the authority, and make people aware of the consequences of failing to act in accordance with it. There must be a clear way for people not working at the authority to complain about their conduct. Requiring companies in England, such as Thames Water, to adopt such a code of conduct by law is one clear and immediate way the Government could reduce the problems we currently see with such companies.

Constituents of mine tell me just how much they struggle to raise a complaint with Thames Water and are often ignored when they do so. They include Judy Washington, whose case I raised directly with the Prime Minister at PMQs. Time and again, we have seen Thames Water prioritise its own shareholders and debt, taking more from consumers in bills and delivering less in quality of infrastructure and water. These actions would simply not be acceptable under the code of conduct in this Bill. There would be ethical standards for these companies to follow and clear consequences for subverting these goals.

By holding these companies to the same standard, we can reinforce the public interest obligations inherent in their statutory role and ensure consistent ethical standards across all providers of essential services. If the Government are serious about holding the water companies to account, they must close the loopholes that allow them again and again to escape judgment for their wrongful actions. It should not be one rule for them and another for everyone else.

[Kim Johnson (Liverpool Riverside) (Lab)]

I rise in support of new clauses 5 and 6, and Government new clause 8, and I would like to declare my interest as chair of the all-party parliamentary group on miscarriages of justice. As we all know, Hillsborough stands as one of the greatest miscarriages of justice this country has ever seen.

I want to start by joining my colleagues in recognising the strength and resilience of all those who have got us to this point today, including, first and foremost, the families who fought for decades to expose the truth. Some of them have joined us in the Chamber today. They kept the flame burning for 37 long years to get us to this point. I say to them: your refusal to give up the fight for truth and justice has been a guiding light for so many in times of darkness, and today you have succeeded in making sure that other families facing the unthinkable will not have to face the same obstruction, lies, deceit and blame that you had to endure. This Bill will provide families with the certainty that state actors and those in power will be held accountable for their actions. This victory belongs to you and to the 97 who were unlawfully killed in 1989, and who we remember today.

For me, as a very proud Scouser, today is an emotional day. For the people of Liverpool, the fight for justice is deeply personal, born out of tragedy, betrayal and an unbreakable demand for truth. We are a city that knows what institutional failure looks like, and what courage, solidarity and persistence can achieve in the face of it. Too many have campaigned to get us to this point, but I pay tribute to my hon. Friend the Member for Liverpool West Derby (Ian Byrne) for his amazing job in championing the Hillsborough law campaign in Parliament and for refusing to give into pressure when it looked like the duty of candour would be watered down.

[Nadia Whittome]

My hon. Friend is making an incredibly emotional speech. I know, from the Nottingham maternity review, the harm and hurt that is caused when people with knowledge and involvement in institutional failures are allowed to dodge accountability and scrutiny. Does she agree that it is therefore vital there is no exemption from the duty of candour, including for the security services, and that campaigners, including our hon. Friend the Member for Liverpool West Derby (Ian Byrne), have been right to fight for so many years for a Hillsborough law that is worthy of the name and that can truly end cover-ups?

[Kim Johnson]

I totally agree with my hon. Friend that no one should be exempt, and I pay tribute to everybody who has got us here today.

I also pay tribute to my right hon. Friend the Member for Liverpool Garston (Maria Eagle), who has campaigned over so many years in Parliament, and my right hon. Friend the Member for Makerfield (Andy Burnham), whose relentless campaign for justice for the Hillsborough 97 has helped get us here today. I have no doubt that he will do everything he can to get us across the line. The Hillsborough Law Now legal team, Elkan Abrahamson and Pete Weatherby KC, fought very hard to ensure that the duty of candour in the Bill was strengthened and not watered down. This would not have been possible without all their tireless endeavours, and we owe them the biggest debt of gratitude.

Today is not just about the past; it is also about preventing future cover-ups, corruption and police wrongdoing. Today we ensure that no worker, family or community is ever left to fight the state alone. I add my support to new clauses 5 and 6, tabled by my hon. Friend the Member for Hammersmith and Chiswick (Andy Slaughter) and supported by Inquest, which would establish a national oversight mechanism for inquests and inquiries. The amendments are vital to ensuring that recommendations do not sit gathering dust on shelves, and that we establish a body responsible and accountable for implementing them to prevent future harms.

For too long, working-class communities and the families who should have been given the dignity of being able to grieve their loved ones in peace were instead left to deal with industrial-level cover-up. The Bill is a legacy for the victims of Hillsborough. Never again will families have to endure that level of corruption and cover-up and the fundamental failure of police who blamed victims. Never again will police and state actors be allowed to go unchallenged.

Today brings hope to the families affected by other state miscarriages of justice: the victims and survivors of Grenfell; those impacted by the infected blood, Windrush and Post Office Horizon scandals; the nuclear test veterans, who are still fighting for justice; the Cammell Laird 37; the descendants of the Chinese seafarers deported from Liverpool in the 1940s, who are still fighting for truth and an apology; the survivors of the “educationally subnormal” scandal, who are yet to be given the dignity of an apology and compensation for what they were put through; or those black families who are still seeking justice for those who died as a result of police interactions—it is a bitter injustice that, just like Hillsborough, no one has ever been held to account for, and all the police involved walked free. I fully support the campaign to have the former chief superintendent of South Yorkshire police stripped of his knighthood and to have his Queen’s policing medal rescinded.

This Bill has taken far too long to get here, but the fight is not over. More work has to be done in the other place and on implementation. For the victims and so many others, the fight goes on for the justice they deserve but for far too long have been denied. No justice, no peace.

[Ian Byrne (Liverpool West Derby) (Lab)]

Back in 2015, I had the number 96 tattooed on my wrist. It was not simply a tattoo; it was a promise. It was a promise that whenever life became difficult, I would never forget one simple truth: I was one of the lucky ones. I walked away from Hillsborough, but 96 did not. Today we remember the 97. That number on my wrist and the people it represents has become my compass. Every time I look at it, I think of those who never came home. I think of their families and of survivors like my dad, who was seriously injured. I think of every campaigner who has spent decades refusing to accept the lies, refusing to surrender to injustice and refusing to allow the truth to be buried. They have shaped my life far more than they will ever know. I owe them more than I could ever repay.

In the years after Hillsborough, one question followed me everywhere. It is a question every survivor knows—every survivor of Grenfell knows it; every survivor of a public disaster knows it. It arrives uninvited in the silence of the early hours of the morning: “Why did I get to walk away when others didn’t?” For years, that question haunted me. What responsibility do you carry when your survival comes at such a terrible cost to others? What do you owe those who never got the chance to live the life you have lived?

I began to find my answers long before I entered this place. In 2009, after finishing an early shift at my printing factory, I went with my dad and my mates—people who had stood beside me at Hillsborough—to the 20th anniversary memorial service at Anfield. We stood shoulder to shoulder with thousands of people. We remembered. Then came the chant that echoed around the stadium: “Justice. Justice. Justice.” Not because it was a slogan, but because it was all we had left. For two decades we had been lied to, families had been ignored, survivors had been smeared. Those who should have protected ordinary people protected themselves instead, and this House—with honourable exceptions—too often looked the other way. That is a stain on our democracy that I will never forget.

But that cry for justice could no longer be ignored. It forced this place and the country to confront the truth and, ultimately, it led to the Hillsborough independent panel. At last, the truth broke through. It confirmed what the people of Liverpool had always known: the supporters were innocent. The lies were exposed, the cover-up was exposed, and the culture of unaccountable power was exposed.

The families, the survivors and the people of Liverpool will never forgive those who deliberately vilified innocent people and orchestrated that cover-up. They will never forget what Rupert Murdoch, Kelvin MacKenzie, The Sun, Norman Bettison and South Yorkshire police did not only to the victims and survivors, but to an entire city. The wounds they inflicted went far beyond any newspaper headline; they damaged lives, reputations and trust in our institutions. That is why I will continue to campaign for Leveson part 2 and for Bettison to be stripped of his knighthood.

The new inquests in 2016 finally recognised what should have been stated from the very beginning: the victims of Hillsborough were unlawfully killed. Those words mattered because the truth matters. But truth without accountability is never enough. Truth without justice leaves a wound only partially healed. The families deserved justice. The survivors deserved justice. We never got it for Hillsborough.

Then, Bishop James Jones gave us not just a report, but a warning that should echo through every public institution in Britain:

“The patronising disposition of unaccountable power”.

Those six words alone should be studied by every public authority in this country, every Minister, every chief constable, every permanent secretary and every senior public official, because if we do not learn those lessons, we will carry on repeating them. Few reports have ever described the British establishment with such devastating accuracy. When power is unaccountable, truth becomes negotiable, justice becomes optional and ordinary people are sacrificed.

The Hillsborough law was born from that understanding. Its purpose is simple: never again should a grieving family have to fight the state simply to discover the truth. In 2021 I was asked by my friend, now my right hon. Friend the Member for Makerfield (Andy Burnham), to carry the baton for a Hillsborough law in Parliament and to bring the voices of the families and survivors into Parliament, to make sure no family ever again goes through what the Hillsborough families and survivors went through. There are moments in politics that define why we are here—why we have been given this privilege. This was mine. I never saw this as my campaign. It always belonged to the families; I was simply trusted to carry their voices into this House.

16:30

I cannot lie: there were moments when this journey tested me in ways I could never have imagined. There were moments when compromise was presented as victory; moments when those more powerful than me said, “Take this or leave it”; and moments when I wondered whether we would ever get here. But every time that happened, I thought about the Hillsborough memorial at Anfield. Every time I walk past it, those 97 names remind me who this fight has always been for.

I thought about the families. I thought about the survivors. I looked down at that number on my wrist. It reminded me that I was one of the lucky ones. It reminded me why compromise could never, ever be an option—not just for Hillsborough, but for Grenfell, for the infected blood campaign, for the Post Office Horizon families, for Primodos, for Truth About Zane, for the nuclear test veterans, for the Chinook families, for the Manchester arena families and for every family forced to spend years fighting the very institutions that should have stood beside them: different tragedies and different families, but the same fight for truth and justice. This law has never belonged to politicians. Politicians did not build this movement—families did. It belongs to the people. It belongs to every family that has ever buried a loved one while the state watched on and buried the truth.

Today I feel something I was not sure I would ever feel: hope. For so many years, this place was part of the problem. Today, I believe it can become part of the solution. Today is not the end of a campaign; it is the start of doing things differently. It is about people in power telling the truth. It is about public bodies remembering who they exist to serve, and it is about making sure that no family is ever again left to fight the state on their own. That is the promise before us today, and we must not waste it.

To the families of the 97—those still with us and those we have sadly lost along the way: you will never, ever be forgotten. You carried a burden that should never have been yours. You fought with dignity when others showed none. You taught this country that ordinary people can overcome the most extraordinary abuse of power. To every survivor, I hope today brings some measure of peace, not because it can erase the past—nothing ever will—but because your suffering has brought about lasting change for generations to come.

For decades, I asked myself why I survived. Today, I think I understand—not because I have done anything extraordinary, but because I was given the privilege of standing here and carrying the voices of people who could no longer speak for themselves. If, in some small way, I have honoured the memory of the 97, if I have been worthy of the trust that the families and survivors have placed in me, if this Parliament finally ensures that no grieving family ever again has to fight the state simply to uncover the truth, then every setback, every disappointment and every sleepless night will have been worth it.

This law is about far more than Hillsborough. It is about the kind of country we choose to be—a country where power tells the truth, where public servants serve the public, where justice is not delayed until campaigners grow old, and where no family is ever left to walk alone. If we pass this law in the spirit in which it was conceived, the greatest legacy of the 97 will not simply be that they are remembered; it will be that, because of them, this country has finally, finally learned the lessons of Hillsborough. Every time I look at the number on my wrist, I will not simply remember those we lost; I will remember that they changed this country for the better. Never again! [Applause.]

[Madam Deputy Speaker (Judith Cummins)]

Order. I call Alex Davies-Jones.

[Alex Davies-Jones]

It is more than a privilege to follow my hon. Friend the Member for Liverpool West Derby (Ian Byrne), and to speak in support of the Government amendments and in favour of the Bill as a whole. This law represents far more than legislation; it represents a promise—a promise that the suffering endured by the Hillsborough families, and all those who have been sadly failed by the state, will never be repeated. It is a promise that no bereaved family will ever again be forced to spend decades fighting and fundraising to challenge the very institutions that should have been helping them to uncover the truth.

For far too long, we have seen a devastating pattern emerge after major public tragedies. Families are left grieving the loss of those they love, only to find themselves caught in secondary trauma, battling against secrecy, defensiveness, delay and denial. Instead of compassion, they encounter obstruction; instead of openness, they face silence. Instead of truth they are met with half-truths—or worse, with lies, missing evidence and institutional self-protection. That is why the duty of candour matters.

A duty of candour is not about punishing honest mistakes. It is about ensuring that public authorities and officials understand that their first duty is not to protect reputations or institutions; it is to protect the truth. Because when institutions close ranks, ordinary families pay the price. When evidence is concealed, justice is delayed, and when facts are distorted, truth is destroyed. When those in positions of power fail to tell the truth, confidence in our public institutions is eroded for generations.

The Hillsborough families know that better than anyone. For 37 years they have carried a burden that should never have been theirs. They have fought not only for the memory of the 97 people who lost their lives, but for something much bigger: the principle that no institution is above accountability, and that no grieving family should ever have to fight the state simply to establish the truth about what happened to their loved one. Their courage has changed this country. They have exposed failures that many hoped would remain hidden. They challenged narratives that should never have been allowed to stand, and they refused to give up, even when the odds were stacked against them.

The Hillsborough families’ determination has become a beacon of hope for countless other families seeking justice. We owe them so much more than our admiration—we owe them action. We cannot stand here, praise their courage and thank them for their persistence, only to fail to deliver the very reforms that they have spent decades fighting for. If we do, what message does that send to every family still waiting for answers? What does it say to those affected by Grenfell, the infected blood scandal, the Post Office Horizon scandal, the Manchester Arena terror attack—and so on, sadly—and to every future family who may one day find themselves seeking truth after tragedy? It says that lessons are spoken about but not learned.

The duty of candour is the mechanism by which we begin to rebuild trust between the public and the institutions that serve them. It changes the culture from one of defensiveness to one of openness; from protecting organisations to protecting people; from asking families to prove the truth, to requiring public authorities to tell it from the very beginning. That is not, and should not be a radical principle or idea. It is the minimum standard that the public should expect from those who exercise public power. That is why I support the Government amendments, as they finally allow the Bill to have the worthy title of “the Hillsborough law”. The amendments stand as a testament to the families, victims and survivors who would never give up—the Manchester Arena attack victims, nuclear test veterans, the Chinook disaster families, and anyone who has had to fight for the truth against the army of the state, and then the intelligence services on top.

If we are to have a true principle and a true duty of candour, then that principle must be applied consistently. It cannot be the case that we champion transparency and accountability with one hand while creating an exemption with the other. A duty of candour that applies only when convenient is not a true duty at all.

[Amanda Hack (North West Leicestershire) (Lab)]

One of the things that has always struck me about this law is how we can change accountability. Just a couple of weeks ago, Donna Ockenden’s report about the Nottingham maternity scandal set out the fact that public officials did not come forward to tell the truth about those tragic incidents. Does my hon. Friend agree that the Bill addresses issues that go far wider than the Hillsborough disaster and that although the Hillsborough families have had to go through so much, many other families have suffered and endured as well?

[Alex Davies-Jones]

I totally agree with my hon. Friend. She is making a powerful point about the Nottingham maternity scandal, and I know that the Hillsborough families have been supporting those families in their fight for truth, justice and accountability. That is why this law is so important: it is so much more and has become so much more than just being about the Hillsborough families. It has encompassed everything that we know that we need regarding our public institutions and the duty of candour. That is why the Government amendments regarding the intelligence and defence services are so vital.

I recognise, of course, that the work of our security and intelligence services is unique. They perform an essential role in protecting national security, keeping our citizens safe and responding to some of the most complex threats that our country faces, some of which we will never and should never know about. I know from first-hand experience that this has not been an easy position for the Government to reach. It has been difficult to try and meet the necessary balance of maintaining and securing information that must remain confidential to protect ongoing operations, intelligence sources and national security.

I place on the record my sincere thanks to the whole army of amazing, dedicated public servants who have fought to bring the legislation to this place today, so that we are able to take forward this Bill with the Government amendments intact; and to the families who never gave up, even when the process of developing this legislation took an emotional, physical and mental toll on them. I say to the Hillsborough Law Now campaigners, and to all the campaigners and organisations who have become part of that wider family: you have been bonded by grief, trauma and the failure of the state to provide you with truth and justice, so thank you for adopting me into that family and for giving me support, friendship and inspiration to drive forward this meaningful change.

The principle at the heart of the legislation is that public authorities must act honestly, must not mislead, must not conceal wrongdoing and must co-operate fully with investigations and inquiries when, sadly, tragedy strikes. Those principles should not cease to exist simply because an institution operates in a field of national security. Indeed, where public power is exercised most extensively, the need for accountability is arguably at its greatest.

Public trust in our institutions is not strengthened by blanket exemptions. It is strengthened when the public can be confident that every institution, regardless of its status, influence or function, is subject to the same fundamental expectation of honesty and integrity. The Hillsborough families did not spend decades fighting for a culture of accountability only for Parliament to decide that accountability should have limits. They campaigned for a principle that no public body should ever be able to place institutional reputation above the truth. That principle must be universal, because once we begin carving out exceptions, we risk undermining the very foundation on which this legislation rests. We risk creating the perception that some institutions are accountable while others are not, and that candour is expected from some public servants but not from others. That cannot be right.

If the duty of candour is a moral obligation, as I believe it is, then it must be a moral obligation that applies across the whole public sector. Appropriate safeguards for national security can and should exist—and they do exist, as we have heard from the Minister. Sensitive information can and should be protected where necessary, but those safeguards must not become a shield behind which truth, accountability and justice can be denied.

All the families who have fought for this law have spent decades challenging the idea that powerful institutions should be allowed to mark their own homework. They have taught us that accountability is not a threat to public confidence; it is the foundation of it. We honour their legacy not by creating exemptions from candour, but by embedding candour as a universal principle—a principle that says no institution is above honesty, no authority is above accountability and no family should ever be denied the truth because of the organisation they happen to be seeking answers from.

If you will indulge me, Madam Deputy Speaker, I will reflect on the words that have come to symbolise not only my beloved Liverpool football club, but the Hillsborough families’ extraordinary campaign for truth and justice—“you’ll never walk alone”. For millions, that is an anthem sung from the Kop before kick-off, but for the Hillsborough families it has become something far deeper. It has become a promise that, even in the darkest moments, they would not face their fight in isolation. It was a reminder that when institutions failed them, communities stood beside them. When others sought to rewrite the truth, it was ordinary people who refused to let their voices be silenced. When grief threatened to overwhelm them, they found strength in one another. That spirit has carried them through more than three decades of heartbreak, resilience and determination.

16:45

Those words—“you’ll never walk alone”—must not remain simply a song that we sing, or a sentiment that we admire; they must become a principle that shapes how the state treats bereaved families. No family should have to walk alone through years of legal battles because public bodies refused to tell the truth. No family should have to walk alone against institutions with vastly greater resources and power. No family should have to walk alone in the search for answers, after losing someone they love. That is why the Hillsborough law matters, why the duty of candour matters, and why this legislation must apply wherever public power is exercised. No institution should be beyond accountability when the truth is owed to grieving families. If we truly believe in the words “you’ll never walk alone”, we must ensure that they are reflected not only in our compassion, but in our laws.

The Hillsborough families have walked an unimaginably long road. They have carried the weight of grief, while shouldering the burden of securing justice for generations that follow. Their courage has changed the country for the better, and today, in this place, it is our turn to finally walk alongside them. We honour the memory of the 97 not only by remembering them, but by ensuring that no family is ever left to fight alone again. That is the promise of the Hillsborough law. That is the promise of a true duty of candour. That is how we ensure that the words “you’ll never walk alone” are no longer simply an anthem of remembrance, but a lasting commitment from this Parliament to every family who seek nothing more than the truth.

[Emma Lewell (South Shields) (Lab)]

Before I speak to the Government’s new clauses and amendments, which ensure that there is no carve-out from the duty of candour for the intelligence and security services, I put on record my utmost respect for my hon. Friend the Member for Liverpool West Derby (Ian Byrne) and all my hon. and right hon. Friends who have been relentless in pushing this Bill forward. However, it is the Hillsborough families and campaigners, who have fought doggedly through their pain and heartache, who deserve all our respect. In memory of their loved ones, through their courage and refusal to be silenced or ground down, they have fundamentally changed the relationship between the state and the public, ensuring the services that are there to protect and serve us are always accountable.

There is something deeply wrong in our country that caused us to need to legislate for these services to tell the truth, and to face criminal sanctions if they do not. Telling the truth should have always been their position, not something that they were forced to do. The rest of us face reprisals for not telling the truth. At the very least, we should expect that from the state.

Chloe and Liam, the children of my dear friends and constituents, Lisa and Mark Rutherford and Caroline Curry, were killed in the Manchester terror attack. They sat through utterly agonising years, months, days and hours of inquiry hearings, which revealed that MI5 had not given an accurate picture of the key intelligence held on their children’s murderer. The chairman of the public inquiry also found that MI5 missed a significant opportunity to take action that might have prevented the attack. Lisa, Mark and Caroline were signatories to the Hillsborough Law Now campaign letter to my right hon. and learned Friend the Prime Minister earlier this year. That letter says:

“Despite MI5 lying to a public inquiry in this way, no one has been held to account. This lack of accountability needs to change. Creating a full duty of candour responsibility on MI5, MI6 and GCHQ is the clearest route to creating this change.”

The letter went on to say:

“Every security and intelligence officer should be required to tell the truth, and the leaders of the organisations should also bear full responsibility.”

That is absolutely right, and I am relieved today that the Government have listened.

Caroline, Lisa and Mark are not in the Gallery today. They told me that they feel that by not being here, they are letting their children down. They are not. Their loved ones will know that they, like everyone who has fought so hard and has been involved in getting us here today, have never, ever given up. They have fought with every breath, every single minute of every day since their loved ones were so brutally taken from them. This law will not be retrospective; it cannot right past wrongs. However, it will send a very clear signal to the state, and in doing so will instil a culture in which the truth, not the cover-up, is the primary focus. This is so important for everyone who is fighting for justice—the nuclear veterans, Chinook, Grenfell, the Post Office scandal, the infected blood scandal, the covid-19 bereaved families, and many others.

As MPs in this place, it is now our job to make sure that this Bill becomes an Act, to make sure that every single word of it is fully adhered to, and that the people we represent are never again treated in such a despicable way. In a democracy like ours, truth and justice should never have taken decades; it should never have been this hard, this relentless or this painful. It is a real honour to have met all those involved with the Hillsborough law campaign, although I wish I had met them under different circumstances. I thank all of them. We all owe them, and I sincerely hope that now they have got Parliament to this stage, they are able to find some small element of peace.

[Sarah Russell]

I join my many colleagues in paying tribute to the Hillsborough families—those in the Gallery today, and those who, for very understandable reasons, felt that they could not be here. Your quest for justice is truly inspirational to all of us, and I thank you so very much for your perseverance and everything you have done. I do not doubt that it will make the country a better place.

Many people have raised concerns about the duty of candour in this legislation, and its application to the security services. I am sure that when the right hon. and learned Member for Kenilworth and Southam (Sir Jeremy Wright) raised this issue in the Chamber, he did so in good faith, but no one who has raised those concerns has been able to point to any case in which the existing law protecting the security services and the secret information that they hold has actually failed, or to any problems resulting from the existing arrangements. Those concerns seem to be entirely hypothetical. Giving the security services a huge carve-out from the duty of candour when there were known problems with, for example, the evidence given to the inquiry on the Manchester Arena bombing seems completely unsustainable and unreasonable. There is literally no evidence to suggest that this Bill presents any risk to national security. I join my colleagues in saying that if there were evidence to suggest that the existing arrangements had ever failed us, many of us would think again about the drafting of this Bill, as it has been presented by the Government. We would all put the country first, but I cannot see anything that should prevent this law from going ahead as drafted.

It is so important to get to the truth, and I hope that the duty of candour will help to move things forward significantly. We owe it to the Hillsborough families, and the many families affected by the many other disasters that we sadly hear about too often in this place, to ask the other question: what comes next? That is why I rise to speak in support of new clauses 5 and 6, tabled by my hon. Friend the Member for Hammersmith and Chiswick (Andy Slaughter), through which he calls for a national oversight mechanism that follows up on the actions taken by public authorities in response to the conclusions and recommendations of inquests and inquiries. We must get to the truth, and we must have recommendations on how to avoid future catastrophes, disasters and unnecessary risk, but we then have to do something to stop those things happening again.

At the moment, prevention of future death reports and inquiry reports are all too often not followed up—or not followed up consistently across the board. All too often, including after the Ockenden report and the maternity scandals, systemic change has not followed from inquiry recommendations, despite the considerable resources and effort put in by individuals to improve systems. We think about justice for the Hillsborough families, the Grenfell families and many other families who have sadly lost loved ones in terrible circumstances, but we must make sure that we bring into play the mechanisms that ensure proper follow-up after all these disasters. We must follow through on inquiry outcomes, and ensure that the right mechanisms are in place.

I thank very much everyone who has worked to get us to where we are today—the many families, but also the Members of Parliament who have worked across party and for a great deal of time on bringing this legislation forward. Let us keep this work going.

[Andy McDonald (Middlesbrough and Thornaby East) (Lab)]

It is a true privilege to have been present for this debate, and to have heard some of the most incredible contributions that I have ever heard in this place.

I will be mercifully brief. I recognise that it is to the Prime Minister’s considerable credit that he has fulfilled his manifesto commitment and got the Bill to this point within a year of his remarks at the Labour party conference in Liverpool last year. I also put on record my recognition of my right hon. Friend the Member for Makerfield (Andy Burnham) for his persistent work on this subject for many years. Principally, however, it is the families of Hillsborough victims, the Hillsborough Law Now campaign, Pete Weatherby KC, my hon. Friend the Member for Liverpool West Derby (Ian Byrne) and many others who have to be recognised for not letting the matter rest, and for their tireless determination to get us to where we are today. We must not forget the Manchester Arena victims, the Grenfell families, the Chinook families, the contaminated blood families, the British nuclear test veterans, and all those who have been part of this campaign.

The duty of candour on the NHS did not deliver for the families of my constituents Christie Harnett, Nadia Sharif and Emily Moore, and many others who died in the scandal at the Tees, Esk and Wear Valleys mental health trust. I have welcomed confirmation of a public inquiry, and the information that applications have been received to chair it, but families need that inquiry to be up and running. I hope that the Health Secretary can progress that urgently this summer.

We are being asked to support dozens of Government amendments today that were tabled with little notice, and without our having been able to scrutinise them in detail, but I am led by the families to support those amendments. I recognise the calls for oversight and monitoring mechanisms, such as those set out in new clause 5, tabled by the Chair of the Justice Committee, my hon. Friend the Member for Hammersmith and Chiswick (Andy Slaughter), and in new clause 1, by my old friend and doughty campaigner, my right hon. Friend the Member for Liverpool Garston (Maria Eagle). Those measures would assure us that the new Government amendments will function effectively and, among other things, allow us to hold to account police officers and members of the armed forces and the security services, as we are led to believe.

I sense that many Members across this House would like to hear more from our Front Benchers about commitments made to ensuring oversight and monitoring. Perhaps the Minister can address that when she responds to the debate. The expectation of honesty and transparency is not, and never can be, a threat to national security. Will the Minister set out how the application of the duty of candour and the prevention of carve-outs will be applied to the work of the Northern Ireland Legacy Commission, which is being established by the Northern Ireland Troubles Bill? Perhaps the Minister can confirm that the Government will table amendments to that Bill, or can otherwise provide guarantees that the measures in the Bill cover the families who have suffered so much in Northern Ireland.

The common characteristics of these appalling human tragedies are the most unimaginable trauma, pain and grief, and the demands are the same. They are for truth, justice and accountability, and today provides the means to deliver on those demands. I echo the remarks of my hon. Friend the Member from Liverpool, West Derby: if anything tells us why we come to this place to change the country for the better, surely it is what we are doing today, and I very much welcome this landmark legislation.

17:00

[Luke Myer (Middlesbrough South and East Cleveland) (Lab)]

It is a pleasure to follow my constituency neighbour and hon. Friend the Member for Middlesbrough and Thornaby East (Andy McDonald). I share his views about the need for action on the Tees, Esk and Wear Valleys inquiry.

When I first considered running for public office, my wife said to me that she was sure that at some point I would end up voting for things with which she did not agree, but that I must promise her that I would do one thing, and that was never to engage with The Sun. That is one small snapshot of the depth of feeling in her family, who are from Wavertree and Kirkby, and in families across the Merseyside region. They are well represented today by all my colleagues from that part of the world, but in particular by my hon. Friend the Member for Liverpool West Derby (Ian Byrne), whose speech was one of the finest I have heard in this place—and outside it as well.

I also, of course, pay tribute to the Hillsborough families whose courage and determination have brought us to this point. For decades those families were forced to fight not only with their grief, but against institutions that should have served them. They faced delay, denial and the closing of ranks. They were made to prove the truth again and again, while those in positions of authority avoided responsibility. No family should ever have to endure that. It is a credit to them that they did not give up, and their campaign has changed our country’s understanding of public accountability.

The duty of candour in the Bill makes it harder for public bodies to hide the truth, mislead the public, or obstruct those seeking answers. It says that public service must mean honesty, especially when things have gone badly wrong. I pay tribute to the Ministers who have led the Bill through the House, including my hon. Friend the Member for Pontypridd (Alex Davies-Jones), who is sitting in front of me and who also made an excellent speech. It takes great bravery for the Executive to agree to restrict their own power, and I think that applying the offence they have created of misleading the public to senior members of the Government is a courageous thing for a Government to step up and agree to do. I therefore support clause 11, but I also feel strongly that it ought to apply to all of us as politicians, and I am grateful to the more than 30 Members on both sides of the House who supported my amendments 13 to 18 to that effect. In the age of disinformation and the rise of autocracy, politicians who intentionally or recklessly engage in serious or repeated dishonesty on a matter of significant public concern must face consequences, and I hope to hear more from the Minister about that.

None the less, I am firmly in support of the Bill. Nothing can bring back those 97 people who went to watch a football match on a sunny afternoon, or return the years taken from the families in their long struggle for truth, but we can learn from that injustice. We can support bereaved families at inquests, and we can ensure that future families do not face the same walls of silence and obstruction. I pay tribute again to all those who have campaigned for justice, and I am pleased to support the Bill today.

[Clive Efford]

I decided at a very late stage to speak in this debate, because I chair the all-party parliamentary group on haemophilia and contaminated blood and I wanted to add my voice on behalf of all the people who campaigned on that scandal and express their appreciation for the work of the Hillsborough families and what they have achieved for our country. Ordinary people up and down the country will have a power to take on the state in the future and not to be crushed, as the state has attempted to do in respect of so many other scandals that have been mentioned today.

I pay tribute to the MPs from the north-west—not just Liverpool—who, over the many years that I have been in this House, have campaigned consistently on this issue, particularly my right hon. Friend the Member for Liverpool Garston (Maria Eagle) and my hon. Friend the Member for Widnes and Halewood (Derek Twigg). I should also acknowledge Steve Rotheram, who spoke out very powerfully on behalf of the Hillsborough families, and my hon. Friend the Member for Liverpool West Derby (Ian Byrne), who spoke so passionately earlier. I pay tribute to all of them, but it tells us something: in spite of the fact that some very fine Members of Parliament have been raising this issue over a very long period of time, it has taken this long to get to where we are today.

That shows us how important it is that we are tenacious and stick with our campaigns, and also that we have oversight of the Government and can hold them to account, to make sure that they do not treat people in the way that they have attempted to do. The cover-up, and the opposition to the campaigns for justice, tells us that we can never drop our guard in holding people and the state to account, so I really welcome the fact that we will pass this Bill today.

I could stand here and read out many examples of the way that individuals were treated by the state in the contaminated blood scandal, but one particularly springs to mind. At the age of 18 months, a baby was experimented on, without anybody being told. The baby was infected with hepatitis, but this was not discovered until the baby became a teenager. The parent found out, and the state made her believe that she had given consent for her baby to be experimented on at the age of 18 months. That parent went on to attempt suicide. It just shows the scale and depth of the cruelty that people have had to endure in that scandal and others. It is one of the most powerful testaments that I have come across, and it shows why we need to fight for justice in this place for the people who suffered in all the scandals that we have spoken about.

I will discuss two issues. First, I see the duty of candour as part of a framework that we need to put in place, and we must have a national compensation body. The Infected Blood Compensation Authority, the independent body for the contaminated blood scandal, is a unique body that has been set up to pay out compensation. It is learning a lot about how to go through this process, and it would be wrong to have to relearn the process all over again with every subsequent scandal where compensation is paid out. We should set up a national body for compensation to perform that task, to ensure that we keep in place the knowledge and expertise that has been learned and do not lose it.

Secondly, we need a national body for oversight of the recommendations of inquiries, as my hon. Friend the Member for Hammersmith and Chiswick (Andy Slaughter) has set out in his new clauses 5 and 6, which I fully support. We have had over 400 recommendations from inquiries since 2024, but who has oversight of those recommendations and how the Government are responding to them? Sir Brian Langstaff, who chaired the contaminated blood inquiry, reported in July 2024, but he deliberately kept his inquiry open because he wanted to see how the Government reacted to his recommendations. In 2025, he reconvened that inquiry, took further evidence and gave further recommendations because of the tardy way in which the Government were responding to his recommendations. We cannot be in that position again, and we cannot rely on the Sir Brian Langstaffs of this world to be that guarded and to protect our rights in that way every time. We must have a body that is independent of Government, and that will scrutinise how they behave and how they react to the recommendations of public inquiries that we the public pay for.

Finally, I would like to congratulate the Hillsborough families. We all owe you a debt of gratitude.

[Catherine Atkinson]

With the leave of the House, it is an honour and a privilege to close today’s debate. This Bill exists because people refused to be silent, and because families who had lost everything were told to move on, stop asking questions and accept half-truths at best, bare-faced lies at worst. Instead, they chose to fight. For too long in this country when a disaster has struck, the balance of power has lain with the state, not with the people who suffered harm. The people it should have protected were left to battle institutions with limitless resources, lawyers paid for from the public purse and a culture focused on defending reputations rather than discovering the truth. This Bill will finally put that imbalance right. It shifts the system away from secrecy and defensiveness towards openness, honesty and accountability.

I want to thank Members from all parties who have contributed so passionately today and throughout the passage of the Bill. I am so grateful for the way they have worked with us constructively and collaboratively, rightly challenging us, but always with a shared purpose. That is this House at its very best, coming together to rise above party political advantage for justice and the good of the British people. That is what we have done with the Hillsborough law, and it means that we have been able to bring forward amendments that genuinely strengthen this Bill, not water it down.

I will address the points made in the debate. First, on national security, this Bill was paused to ensure we get it right. This legislation is about addressing the wrongs we have seen at Hillsborough and in so many other scandals. The duty of candour is about being honest when things go wrong; it is emphatically not about changing assessments of whether national security information can or cannot be disclosed publicly in legal proceedings, and it is a mischaracterisation to suggest that it does so. The families and campaigners have never wanted information to go into the public domain that would put people at risk. Certain types of legal proceeding can compel national security information—that happens now—and law and practice have been developed over time to protect information.

The Bill and the amendments repeatedly make it clear that the Bill does not override existing laws, but instead draws on existing safeguards. We have always had the tools in law to protect national security information—for example, restriction orders and public interest immunity applications. Determining what and how sensitive information could be published was my main area of practice as a barrister for many years before coming to this place. Nothing in this Bill takes those away, and we have used the past months to stress-test these provisions rigorously and ensure that is the case.

The right hon. and learned Member for Kenilworth and Southam (Sir Jeremy Wright) asked about the time taken and if our position had changed. The Government have been consistent that the risk comes from individuals who may not be aware of the full picture, and it has therefore been essential to be able to address that. The shadow Justice Secretary’s amendment and the Government amendments are based on the same premise: that there needs to be a corporate check on national security information going from an individual employee to an inquiry, because individuals may not know the full sensitivity. But the Government amendments provide a more precise process for what the head must do with that information, using existing national security safeguards, and so avoid the broad discretion that had caused Members concern.

17:14

Our intelligence services are best placed to assess the sensitivity of information—they do that every day. That is why we have crafted the amendments as we have, so that any information held by individual employees that may be engaged by the provisions of the Bill is routed through the service corporately, so that those proper assessments of sensitivity can take place, and so that intelligence information held by other public bodies cannot be released by other bodies, but only by the intelligence service that is able to make a proper assessment of sensitivity. All that is current practice now, but the Bill is clearer in making it law. That provides more assurance, not less, to our citizens and partners.

Concerns were raised about candour in relation to health. I am grateful to the right hon. Member for Godalming and Ash (Sir Jeremy Hunt) for his contribution. We do not disagree with the intent of his new clause 11 and amendment 150. Our concern is that the detail is not necessary on the face of the Bill and that it would be disproportionate to do so. The Bill requires public authorities to set out how a professional duty of candour must be met with clear professional sanctions. We will work with organisations on how best to fulfil those obligations and ensure full implementation.

[Tessa Munt]

Will the Minister give way?

[Catherine Atkinson]

I am afraid I will not. To respond to as many points raised as I can, I do not have time to take interventions.

The Bill is about the duty of candour to an inquiry or investigation, and the onward disclosure of information will be determined by each inquiry, inquest or investigation as to what is appropriate and relevant. I would be eager to meet the right hon. Member for Godalming and Ash to discuss what more can be done through the implementation of the Bill and separately to achieve the culture change that we want to see.

Other Members raised the Nottingham maternity review, which I have followed closely, as I have the work of the Government’s maternity adviser, my hon. Friend the Member for Sherwood Forest (Michelle Welsh), because of my experience in Nottingham when I was giving birth to my eldest son in 2014. Each contraction meant that his heartbeat stopped and what began as a normal labour suddenly turned to panic and ended with an emergency caesarean to save his life. I was one of the lucky ones, because I got to take him home. I will always hold in my mind the 500 mothers and babies who suffered potentially avoidable harm or death around that time in Nottingham. The message that we are sending with this legislation is that cover-up culture is over and that women and families must be listened to. Public bodies, including NHS trusts, must be open and candid when things go wrong. We are clear that we will apply the duty of candour to the Leeds and Sussex maternity reviews.

On the national oversight mechanism and the contribution by my hon. Friend the Member for Hammersmith and Chiswick (Andy Slaughter), we have taken steps to improve transparency in how we respond to inquiry recommendations. The Public Administration and Constitutional Affairs Committee is currently considering how the implementation of recommendations resulting from future public inquiries should be scrutinised. We welcome that and will continue to work with the Committee on next steps. The Office of the Chief Coroner is also continuing work to improve access to the prevention of future death reports while the Government seek to strengthen arrangements for responding to the concerns raised through them, including better and more strategic use of technology.

On the Independent Public Advocate, I welcome the contribution and work of my right hon. Friend the Member for Liverpool Garston (Maria Eagle). I thank my right hon. Friend and the others who have raised this, and I take on my right hon. Friend’s points. Legislation requires that there be a review on the role within 18 months of the IPA being stood up, and that is in train. The Ethics and Integrity Commission will also be developing guidance on the code of ethics and will have a role in monitoring and overseeing it.

My hon. Friend the Member for Middlesbrough South and East Cleveland (Luke Myer) raises in his amendments some serious concerns about disinformation and the risk of eroding trust in our institutions and weakening our country. While Back-Bench MPs are not included in the new offence, as they are responsible for scrutinising the decisions of the Government of the day, Parliament does already have processes for determining whether Members have misled the House and has its own arrangements for ensuring truthfulness and accuracy from Members. However, I would be keen to work with my hon. Friend to look at how we strengthen matters in relation to his concerns.

On whistleblowing and amendments 3 and 6, the Bill provides safeguards for sensitive information and whistleblowers, and the code of ethics must contain information on whistleblowing policies. We are actively exploring opportunities for reform, as set out in the anti-corruption strategy 2025, and a consultation on whistleblowing will be launched this summer.

We have heard many contributions about placing water companies under obligations of a code of ethical conduct, and although the code of conduct provisions do not apply to private water companies in England and Wales, the Bill contains a power to extend this. The Government will consult on that in due course.

The hon. Member for Aberdeenshire North and Moray East (Seamus Logan) raised concerns about the additional work needed and the additional measures coming into force being put in place as soon as possible. We are conscious that families have waited long enough for this law. Putting commencement dates on the face of the Bill could cause practical difficulties, but we are doing all we can to ensure that it is in place as soon as possible.

Members have also spoken about amendments relating to former public officials. To be clear, those individuals will remain subject to the duty of candour, provided that an investigation or inquiry relates to their former role, and the offence of misleading the public will also still apply, even if they have retired.

On subcontractors, the main contractors will be accountable for their subcontractors’ performance. The Government are open to exploring further measures to strengthen accountability and candour through supply chains.

Concerns about journalism have also been raised. The Government have already narrowed the journalism exemptions and made it clear that the offence covers misleading recognised news publishers. Sufficient safeguards are provided through the requirement for consent from the Director of Public Prosecutions before any prosecution can proceed.

I wish to thank a number of people before I conclude. I pay tribute to all those who have shaped the Bill, ensured that it delivers as intended, held us to account and made sure that we got to this point. I thank the families and campaigners for their courage and for sharing their experiences, often at great personal cost. They have challenged successive Governments and worked constructively with us, and without them we would not be here today.

I also thank the Members of this House who have stood alongside the families and campaigners over many years, championing their cause and helping to strengthen this Bill. In particular, I thank the Prime Minister, the Deputy Prime Minister, the Minister for the Cabinet Office and the Attorney General. I thank the right hon. and learned Member for Kenilworth and Southam for all his assistance and expertise on the Government amendments on the security services. I thank my hon. Friend the Member for Pontypridd (Alex Davies-Jones) and my right hon. Friend the Member for Liverpool Garston. I thank my hon. Friends the Members for Knowsley (Anneliese Midgley), for Liverpool Wavertree (Paula Barker), for Widnes and Halewood (Derek Twigg) and for Birkenhead (Alison McGovern). I thank my hon. Friend the Member for Liverpool West Derby (Ian Byrne), whose contribution was so powerful. I thank my hon. Friend the Member for St Helens North (David Baines) and my right hon. Friend the Member for Makerfield (Andy Burnham), whose passion for this matter long predates his return to this House.

Nothing can bring back those who were lost, and we can never undo the suffering that so many families have endured. But what we can and must do is ensure that the truth is never again buried by institutions whose first instinct is to protect themselves. That is what the Bill is designed to combat, and I am incredibly grateful to all involved that we have been able to bring the Bill back before the House.

As Victims Minister, I am determined to see the Bill deliver the lasting cultural change that families have fought for over so many years. I hope that in years to come it will be remembered not only for the duties and offences it creates, but because it helped to change the relationship between the state and those that it exists to serve.

We have listened, and we have acted. We will continue to listen as the Bill makes its way through the House. I commend the Bill to the House.

Question put and agreed to.

New clause 8 accordingly read a Second time, and added to the Bill.

New Clause 9

Abolition of common law offence: Northern Ireland

“(1) The offence of misconduct in public office under the common law of Northern Ireland is abolished.

(2) Subsection (1) does not apply in relation to—

(a) any act which was done before the coming into force of this section, or

(b) any act which began before the coming into force of this section and continues after its coming into force.

(3) Subsection (1) does not affect—

(a) the liability of any person for an offence other than the offence of misconduct in public office under the common law of Northern Ireland, or

(b) the civil liability of any person for the tort of misfeasance in public office.”—(Catherine Atkinson.)

This new clause provides for the abolition of the offence of misconduct in public office under the common law of Northern Ireland.

Brought up, read the First and Second time, and added to the Bill.

Clause 2

Duty of candour and assistance

Amendments made: 151, page 2, line 25, leave out “likely to be” and insert “that is”.

This amendment clarifies that information must be provided under the duty of candour and assistance if it is relevant to the inquiry or investigation concerned.

Amendment 152, page 2, line 30, leave out “likely to be”.—(Catherine Atkinson.)

See the explanatory statement to Amendment 151.

Amendment proposed: 3, page 2, line 39, at end insert—

“(f) ensure all relevant public officials can safely disclose information to an inquiry, investigation or inquest.”—(Jess Brown-Fuller.)

This amendment requires public authorities or officials who are assisting an inquiry, investigation or inquest to demonstrate that they have taken steps to ensure relevant persons can safely disclose information relevant to an investigation.

Question put, That the amendment be made.

17:27

Division 56

Question accordingly negatived.

Ayes: 93

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Liberal Democrat: 52
Labour: 8
Scottish National Party: 7
Green Party: 5
Independent: 4
Reform UK: 4
Democratic Unionist Party: 4
Plaid Cymru: 4
Your Party: 2
Social Democratic & Labour Party: 1

Noes: 323

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Labour: 321
Ulster Unionist Party: 1

Clause 3

Section 2: further provision

Amendment made: 153, in clause 3, page 3, line 17, at end insert

“(and see also paragraph 4(2A) of Schedule 1)”.—(Catherine Atkinson.)

This amendment is consequential on Amendment 179.

Clause 6

Security and intelligence information

Amendments made: 26, in clause 6, page 5, line 37, after “applies” insert “(subject as follows)—

(a)”.

This amendment is consequential on Amendments 155 and 157.

Amendment 154, in clause 6, page 5, line 37, leave out “an intelligence service” and insert “a relevant public authority”.

This amendment is consequential on Amendments 157.

Amendment 155, in clause 6, page 5, line 38, at end insert—

“(b) to a person who works for a relevant public authority as it applies to other public officials.”

This amendment clarifies that the duty of candour and assistance applies to persons working for relevant public authorities (as defined by Amendment 168) in the same way as that duty applies to other public officials, subject to certain safeguards dealt with in the rest of clause 6 (as amended by Amendment 157).

Amendment 28, in clause 6, page 5, line 39, leave out “But”.

This amendment is consequential on Amendment 26.

Amendment 156, in clause 6, page 5, line 40, leave out “an intelligence service” and insert

“a relevant public authority (other than the head of that authority when discharging obligations on behalf of it)”.

This amendment clarifies that the obligation under clause 2(3) to give a notification applies to the head of a relevant public authority when acting on its behalf.

Amendment 157, in clause 6, page 6, line 1, leave out paragraph (b) and insert—

“(b) to any other public official, or to a public authority other than a relevant public authority, where compliance with the obligation would result in the provision of protected information.

(2A) Subsection (2B) applies where—

(a) a public authority (‘the recipient authority’) is in possession of protected information provided by a relevant public authority, and

(b) the recipient authority would, but for the application of subsection (2)(b), be required to give a notification under section 2(3) that would result in the provision of that information.

(2B) The recipient authority must inform the relevant public authority that it has relied on the exemption in subsection (2)(b) in relation to the information (and the relevant public authority must act in accordance with section 2(3)).

(2C) Where, in compliance with the obligation under section 2(4), a person who works for a relevant public authority (other than the head of that authority) would be required to provide protected information to an inquiry or investigation, the person complies with that obligation by providing the information to the head of the authority.

(2D) Where the head of a relevant public authority receives information by virtue of subsection (2C), they must (subject to subsection (2E)) provide that information to the inquiry or investigation—

(a) by such time as the person leading the inquiry or investigation may require by virtue of section 3(5)(a), or

(b) where no such requirement is imposed, as soon as reasonably practicable.

(2E) The duty imposed by subsection (2D) on the head of a relevant public authority to provide information does not apply if, or to the extent that, either of the following conditions is met before the head would otherwise be required to provide the information to the inquiry or investigation.

(2F) The first condition is that an application is made, by virtue of any enactment or rule of law, for the information to be subject to restrictions on disclosure in accordance with that enactment or rule of law.

(2G) The second condition is that representations are made to a Minister for the inquiry or investigation to become an inquiry established under the Inquiries Act 2005 (in cases where it is not being held under that Act).

(2H) Where an application is made in accordance with an enactment or rule of law as mentioned in subsection (2F), information must be provided to the inquiry or investigation if, and to the extent that, the enactment or rule of law so requires for the purposes of the application being determined.

(2I) A person leading an inquiry or investigation must suspend it if—

(a) representations are made to a Minister as mentioned in subsection (2G) in relation to the inquiry or investigation, and

(b) the Minister requests the person to do so on the ground that the matters to which the inquiry or investigation relates are likely to be adequately investigated by an inquiry under the Inquiries Act 2005 that is being or is to be held.

(2J) Subsection (2I) does not apply in relation to an investigation under Part 1 of the Coroners and Justice Act 2009 (see instead paragraph 3 of Schedule 1 to that Act).”—(Catherine Atkinson.)

This amendment provides for limited circumstances in which the duty to give a notification under clause 2(3) to the person leading an investigation or inquiry does not apply and provides for certain safeguards in relation to the provision of protected information under clause 2(4). The terms “protected information” and “relevant public authority” are defined in clause 8 as amended by Amendments 167 and 168.

Amendment proposed: 199, in clause 6, page 6, line 3, at end insert—

“(2A) Where, in compliance with the obligation under section 2(4), a person who works for an intelligence service, a military intelligence service, the National Crime Agency, Counter Terrorism Command, or one of the armed forces, would be required to provide security or intelligence information, the obligation applies in respect of that information only if the head of the service or agency consents to it being provided.

(2B) The head of an intelligence service, the head of military intelligence service, the head of the National Crime Agency, the head of Counter Terrorism Policing UK, or the head of one of the armed forces may withhold consent under subsection (2A) only if it appears to the head that either of the following conditions is met.

(2C) The first condition is that it is necessary for consent to be withheld in the interests of national security or otherwise for the purposes of the proper exercise of the functions of the service.

(2D) The second condition is that the information would not be of assistance to the inquiry or investigation in meeting its objectives.

(2E) Where the head of an intelligence service, the head of military intelligence service, the head of the National Crime Agency, the head of Counter Terrorism Policing UK, or the head of one of the armed forces withholds consent under subsection (2A), the head must notify the person leading the inquiry or investigation of that fact.”—(Nick Timothy.)

This amendment ensures that the duty of candour and assistance may require a person who works for an intelligence service, military intelligence, the NCA, Counter Terrorism Command or the armed forces to provide security or intelligence information with the consent of the head of their service.

Question put, That the amendment be made.

17:41

Division 57

Question accordingly negatived.

Ayes: 102

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Conservative: 90
Reform UK: 5
Democratic Unionist Party: 4
Independent: 2
Restore Britain: 1

Noes: 409

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Labour: 329
Liberal Democrat: 52
Scottish National Party: 7
Independent: 5
Green Party: 5
Plaid Cymru: 4
Social Democratic & Labour Party: 1
Your Party: 1
Ulster Unionist Party: 1

Clause 6

Security and Intelligence Information

Amendments made: 32, page 6, line 4, at beginning insert—

“For the purpose of securing compliance with the obligation under section 2(3),”.

This amendment clarifies that the arrangements referred to in clause 6(3) are for the purposes of ensuring that the obligation to notify an inquiry or investigation under clause 2(3) is complied with by intelligence services or those that work for them.

Amendment 158, page 6, line 4, leave out “intelligence service” and insert “relevant public authority”.

This amendment is consequential on Amendment 157.

Amendment 159, page 6, line 4, leave out second “service” and insert “authority”.

This amendment is consequential on Amendment 157.

Amendment 160, page 6, line 5, leave out “service” and insert “authority”.

This amendment is consequential on Amendment 157.

Amendment 161, page 6, line 6, leave out “service’s” and insert “authority’s”.

This amendment is consequential on Amendment 157.

Amendment 162, page 6, line 7, leave out paragraph (a).

This amendment removes a previous obligation on the part of intelligence services in relation to records of information that is considered unnecessary as a result of other amendments being made.

Amendment 163, page 6, line 10, leave out “service” and insert “authority”.

This amendment is consequential on Amendment 157.

Amendment 164, page 6, line 11, leave out “service” and insert “authority”.

This amendment is consequential on Amendment 157.

Amendment 165, page 6, line 12, at end insert—

“(3A) For the purposes of this section—

(a) references to a person who works for a relevant public authority include a person who used to work for such an authority;

(b) “Minister” has the same meaning as in the Inquiries Act 2005 (see section 1(2) of that Act) but, in relation to an investigation under Part 1 of the Coroners and Justice Act 2009, also includes the Lord Chancellor”.

This amendment is consequential on Amendment 157.

Amendment 33, page 6, line 13, leave out subsection (4).—(Catherine Atkinson).

This amendment is consequential on Amendment 166.

Clause 8

Interpretation of this Chapter

Amendments made: 166, page 6, line 28, at end insert—

““head” , in relation to a relevant public authority, means—

(a) in relation to the Security Service, the Director General of the Security Service;

(b) in relation to the Secret Intelligence Service, the Chief of the Secret Intelligence Service;

(c) in relation to the Government Communications Headquarters, the Director of the Government Communications Headquarters;

(d) in relation to Defence Intelligence, the Chief of Defence Intelligence;

(e) in relation to the National Crime Agency, the Director General of the National Crime Agency;

(f) in relation to a police force (other than the National Crime Agency), the relevant senior officer of the metropolitan police force;”

This amendment defines the meaning of “head” for the purposes of the amendment made to clause 6 by Amendment 157.

Amendment 167, page 7, line 7, at end insert—

““protected information” means information that—

(a) relates to security or intelligence, within the meaning given by section 1(9) of the Official Secrets Act 1989;

(b) is information relating to defence produced or held by Defence Intelligence, the disclosure of which would be damaging (and “defence” and “damaging” have the meanings given by section 2 of the Official Secrets Act 1989);

(c) relates to the exercise by the National Crime Agency of its criminal intelligence function, within the meaning given by section 1(5) of the Crime and Courts Act 2013;

(d) relates to the exercise by a police force (other than the National Crime Agency) of its counter-terrorism and other national security functions;”.

This amendment defines the term “protected information” for the purposes of the amendment made to clause 6 by Amendment 157.

Amendment 168, page 7, line 9, at end insert—

““relevant public authority” means any of—

(a) an intelligence service;

(b) Defence Intelligence;

(c) the National Crime Agency;

(d) a police force (other than the National Crime Agency), in the exercise of its counter-terrorism and other national security functions.

(1A) For the purposes of subsection (1)—

(a) references (in the definitions of “protected information” and “relevant public authority”) to the “counter-terrorism and other national security functions” of a police force are to any functions carried out under a collaboration agreement made under section 22A of the Police Act 1996 for the purpose of addressing, on a collaborative basis with other police forces, threats posed to national security;

(b) the reference (in the definition of “head”) to the relevant senior officer of the metropolitan police force is to the officer of that force, of the rank of a Commander or above, with overall responsibility for the conduct of the arrangements made under that collaboration agreement.

(1B) In the application of subsection (1A)(a) to the Police Service of Scotland, the Police Service of Northern Ireland or the Police Service of Northern Ireland Reserve, the reference to a collaboration agreement made under section 22A of the Police Act 1996 is to be read as a reference to any memorandum of understanding or other agreement made for the purpose mentioned in subsection (1A)(a).”—(Catherine Atkinson.)

This amendment defines the term “relevant public authority” for the purposes of the amendment made to clause 6 by Amendment 157.

Clause 9

Expected standards of ethical conduct

Amendments made: 37, page 8, line 7, leave out “code” and insert

“standards of conduct expected of them”.

This amendment is to include cases where some or all of the standards of conduct expected of a person who works for a public authority are contained in legislation or otherwise than in the authority’s code of ethical conduct.

Amendment 38, page 9, line 5, at end insert—

“(11A) For the purposes of this Chapter—

(a) a person who works at a school maintained by a local authority in England or Wales is to be treated as working for the proprietor of that school rather than for the authority;

(b) a person who works at a designated institution in England or Wales is to be treated as working for the governing body of the institution rather than for any other body;

(c) a person who works at a grant-aided school in Northern Ireland is to be treated as working for the Board of Governors of the school rather than for any other body.

(11B) In subsection (11A)—

“designated institution” means an institution that is a designated institution for the purposes of Part 1 of the Further and Higher Education Act 1992;

“grant-aided school” has the meaning given by Article 2(2) of the Education and Libraries (Northern Ireland) Order 1986 (S.I. 1986/594 (N.I. 3));

“proprietor” has the meaning given by section 579(1) of the Education Act 1996;

“school maintained by a local authority” has the same meaning as in the School Standards and Framework Act 1998 (see section 142(1) of that Act).”

This amendment ensures that the duties under clause 9 to adopt codes of ethical conduct that fall upon governing bodies of schools, and on the governing bodies of designated institutions in the further education sector, will be adopted for people who work at the school or institution but are employed by a body other than the governing body.

Amendment 39, page 9, line 7, at end insert—

“(b) references to a person who ‘works for’ a public authority are to be read in accordance with subsection (3) of section 23 as if paragraph (h) of that subsection were omitted.”—(Catherine Atkinson.)

This amendment ensures that public authority codes of conduct are primarily required to cover those with employment or contractual relationship with the authority, excluding from scope individuals who exercise functions on behalf of the authority but may not be directly accountable to it.

Clause 11

Offence of misleading the public

Amendments made: 40, page 10, line 2, leave out paragraph (a).

This amendment, together with Amendment 70, provides for clause 11 to extend and apply fully to all parts of the United Kingdom.

Amendment 41, page 10, line 10, after “conviction” insert “in England and Wales”.

This amendment is consequential on amendments 40 and 70.

Amendment 42, page 10, line 11, at end insert—

“(aa) on summary conviction in Scotland, to imprisonment for a term not exceeding 12 months or a fine not exceeding the statutory maximum (or both);

(ab) on summary conviction in Northern Ireland, to imprisonment for a term not exceeding six months or a fine not exceeding the statutory maximum (or both);”—(Catherine Atkinson.)

This amendment provides for penalties for offences under clause 11 committed in Scotland or Northern Ireland, in consequence of amendments 40 and 70.

Amendment proposed: 19, page 10, line 23, at end insert—

“(7A) A prosecution for an offence under this section shall not be instituted except by or with the consent of the Attorney General.”—(Dr Mullan.)

This amendment requires the Attorney General to consent to the prosecution of anyone for the offence of misleading the public.

Question put, That the amendment be made.

17:57

Division 58

Question accordingly negatived.

Ayes: 104

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Conservative: 92
Reform UK: 5
Democratic Unionist Party: 4
Independent: 2
Restore Britain: 1

Noes: 412

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Labour: 331
Liberal Democrat: 52
Scottish National Party: 7
Independent: 5
Green Party: 5
Plaid Cymru: 4
Your Party: 2
Social Democratic & Labour Party: 2
Ulster Unionist Party: 1

18:35

Proceedings interrupted (Programme Order, 3 November 2025).

The Deputy Speaker put forthwith the Questions necessary for the disposal of the business to be concluded at that time (Standing Order No. 83E).

Clause 12

Seriously improper acts

Amendments made: 43, page 11, line 22, after “must” insert “be directed to”.

This amendments clarifies that a jury must be directed to have regard to certain matters when considering whether an act is seriously improper for the purposes of the offence under clause 12.

Amendment 44, page 12, line 4, after “section” insert

“—

(a) in England and Wales,”

This amendment is consequential on the extension of Part 3 of the Bill (misconduct in public office) to Northern Ireland.

Amendment 45, page 12, line 5, at end insert—

“(b) in Northern Ireland, may be brought only by or with the consent of the Director of Public Prosecutions for Northern Ireland.”—(Catherine Atkinson.)

This amendment is consequential on the extension of Part 3 of the Bill (misconduct in public office) to Northern Ireland.

Clause 13

Breach of duty to prevent death or serious injury

Amendments made: 46, page 12, line 24, after “section” insert

“—

(a) in England and Wales,”.

This amendment is consequential on the extension of Part 3 of the Bill (misconduct in public office) to Northern Ireland.

Amendment 47, page 12, line 25, at end insert—

“(b) in Northern Ireland, may be brought only by or with the consent of the Director of Public Prosecutions for Northern Ireland.”

This amendment is consequential on the extension of Part 3 of the Bill (misconduct in public office) to Northern Ireland.

Amendment 48, page 12, line 28, leave out subsection (7) and insert—

“(7) In this section—

“critical harm” means death or serious injury;

“serious injury” means—

(a) in England and Wales and Northern Ireland, grievous bodily harm within the meaning of the Offences against the Person Act 1861;

(b) in Scotland, severe injury (including psychological injury).”—(Catherine Atkinson.)

This amendment is consequential on the extension of Part 3 of the Bill (misconduct in public office) to Scotland and Northern Ireland.

Clause 14

Territorial application of sections 12 and 13

Amendments made: 49, page 12, line 33, leave out subsection (1).

This amendment is consequential on the extension of Part 3 of the Bill (misconduct in public office) to Scotland and Northern Ireland.

Amendment 50, page 13, line 2, leave out “England and Wales” and insert “the United Kingdom”.

This amendment is consequential on the extension of Part 3 of the Bill (misconduct in public office) to Scotland and Northern Ireland.

Amendment 51, page 13, line 2, at end insert—

“(3) Where an offence under section 12 or 13 is committed outside the United Kingdom—

(a) proceedings for the offence may be taken at any place in the United Kingdom, and

(b) the offence may for all incidental purposes be treated as committed at any such place.

(4) In the application of subsection (3) to Scotland, any such proceedings against the person may be taken—

(a) in any sheriff court district in which the person is apprehended or is in custody, or

(b) in such sheriff court district as the Lord Advocate may determine.

(5) In subsection (4) “sheriff court district” is to be read in accordance with the Criminal Procedure (Scotland) Act 1995 (see section 307(1) of that Act).”—(Catherine Atkinson.)

This amendment is consequential on the extension of Part 3 of the Bill (misconduct in public office) to Scotland and Northern Ireland.

Clause 15

Holders of public office

Amendments made: 52, page 13, line 8, leave out “Secretary of State” and insert “appropriate national authority”.

This amendment is consequential on the extension of Part 3 of the Bill (misconduct in public office) to Scotland and Northern Ireland.

Amendment 53, page 13, line 11, leave out from beginning to end of line 20.

This amendment is consequential on the extension of Part 3 of the Bill (misconduct in public office) to Scotland and Northern Ireland.

Amendment 54, page 13, line 21, leave out “or (4)”.—(Catherine Atkinson.)

This amendment is consequential on the extension of Part 3 of the Bill (misconduct in public office) to Scotland and Northern Ireland.

Clause 16

Abolition of common law offence of misconduct in public office

Amendments made: 55, page 13, line 23, leave out

“common law offence of misconduct in public office”

and insert

“offence of misconduct in public office under the common law of England and Wales”.

This amendment is consequential on NC9.

Amendment 56, page 13, line 30, leave out “common law”.

This amendment is consequential on NC9.

Amendment 57, page 13, line 31, after “office” insert

“under the common law of England and Wales”.—(Catherine Atkinson.)

This amendment is consequential on NC9.

Clause 18

Parity etc at inquiries and investigations

Amendments made: 58, page 14, line 35, leave out from “members” to end of line 36 and insert

“where a public authority is, or is represented by, an interested person at an inquest or a participant in a Scottish inquiry.”

This amendment is consequential on Amendment 142.

Amendment 59, page 14, leave out lines 38 and 39 and insert—

““inquest” means an inquest held under Part 1 of the Coroners and Justice Act 2009 (and the reference to an “interested person” at such an inquest has the same meaning as in that Part of that Act);”.

This amendment is consequential on Amendment 142.

Amendment 60, page 14, line 43, at end insert—

““Scottish inquiry” means an inquiry held under the Inquiries into Fatal Accidents and Sudden Deaths etc. (Scotland) Act 2016 (asp 2) (and the reference to a participant at such an inquiry is to be read in accordance with section 11(2)(b) of that Act);”.—(Catherine Atkinson.)

This amendment is consequential on Amendment 142.

Clause 22

Regulations

Amendments made: 61, page 16, line 32, leave out paragraph (b).

This amendment, together with amendments 62, 63, 64, 93 and 94, make technical changes in relation to Welsh statutory instruments that are consequential on the commencement of section 1 of the Legislation (Procedure, Publication and Repeals) (Wales) Act 2025.

Amendment 62, page 16, line 33, at end insert—

“(4A) Regulations under this Act made by the Welsh Ministers are to be made by Welsh statutory instrument.”

See the explanatory statement for Amendment 61.

Amendment 63, page 17, line 9, leave out from “procedure,” to end of line 11 and insert

“they are subject to the Senedd annulment procedure (see section 37E of the Legislation (Wales) Act 2019 (anaw 4));”.

See the explanatory statement for Amendment 61.

Amendment 64, page 17, line 12, leave out from “procedure,” to end of line 14 and insert

“they are subject to the Senedd approval procedure (see section 37C of that Act).”—(Catherine Atkinson.)

See the explanatory statement for Amendment 61.

Clause 23

General interpretation

Amendments made: 65, page 18, line 16, at end insert

“, and

(b) a children’s hearing within the meaning of the Children’s Hearings (Scotland) Act 2011 (asp 1) arranged by virtue of, or for the purposes of, that Act or any other enactment;”.

This amendment provides that the definition of “court” includes a children’s hearing within the meaning of the Children’s Hearings (Scotland) Act 2011, in addition to any tribunal or body exercising the judicial power of the State.

Amendment 66, page 19, line 31, at end insert

“, or

(iv) Healthcare Improvement Scotland established under section 10A of that Act;”.

This amendment provides that Healthcare Improvement Scotland will come within the definition of an “NHS body”.

Amendment 67, page 20, line 28, leave out “maintained school” and insert

“school maintained by a local authority”.

This amendment ensures that the definition of “school” includes maintained nursery schools and pupil referral units.

Amendment 68, page 20, line 29, leave out “20(7)” and insert “142(1)”.

This amendment is consequential on Amendment 67.

Amendment 69, page 20, line 31, leave out from “Academy” to end of line 32 and insert

“school or an alternative provision Academy”.—(Catherine Atkinson.)

This amendment provides that alternative provision Academies are included within the definition of a “school” in relation to England.

Clause 24

Extent

Amendments made: 70, page 22, line 23, leave out

“Part 1, Chapters 1 and 2 of Part 2”

and insert “Parts 1 to 3”.

This amendment provides for clause 11 (offence of misleading the public) and Part 3 (misconduct in public office) to apply and extend to all parts of the United Kingdom.

Amendment 71, page 22, line 25, leave out paragraph (b) and insert—

“(b) Part 4 extends to England and Wales and Scotland only.”—(Catherine Atkinson.)

This amendment is consequential on Amendment 70 and also on the provision made by Amendment 142 about legal aid for bereaved family members in Scotland where a public authority is a participant in an inquiry into a death.

Clause 25

Commencement

Amendment made: 72, page 23, line 5, after “Schedule 1” insert

“or Part 5 of Schedule 6”.—(Catherine Atkinson.)

This amendment is consequential on Amendment 142.

Schedule 1

Application of duty of candour and assistance

Amendments made: 169, page 24, line 15, leave out from “that” to end of line 17 and insert

“the following condition is met.”

This amendment is consequential on Amendment 170.

Amendment 170, page 24, line 17, at end insert—

“(1A) The condition is that—

(a) the person’s acts are relevant to the inquiry or the person otherwise has information that is relevant, and

(b) where the person is an individual, compliance with their obligations imposed by virtue of the direction would assist the inquiry to meet its objectives.”

This amendment (together with Amendment 169) clarifies that the duty to give a compliance direction to an individual applies only if the chair of the inquiry considers that compliance with the direction will help the inquiry to meet its objectives.

Amendment 171, page 24, leave out lines 34 to 37 and insert—

“(c) must include a description of the matters or issues to be covered in complying with the direction and may specify further requirements to be complied with (and may specify the form and manner in which, and the period within which, obligations imposed by virtue of the direction are to be complied with);”.

This amendment requires a compliance direction to include a description of matters or issues to be covered when complying with the direction.

Amendment 172, page 25, leave out lines 23 to 29 and insert—

“(10) A compliance direction that would require the provision of protected information from an individual—

(a) in a case where the information concerned relates to security or intelligence (within the meaning given by section 1(9) of the Official Secrets Act 1989), may be given only to a public official who works (or used to work) for an intelligence service;

(b) in any other case, may be given only to a public official who works (or used to work) for a relevant public authority,

and an individual is not required to provide any protected information in response to a direction given in contravention of this subsection.

(10A) Before the chair of an inquiry gives a compliance direction to an individual who works (or used to work) for a public authority (and so far as the direction relates to the individual’s work for the authority), the chair must consult the authority for the purpose of ensuring that compliance with the obligations imposed by virtue of the direction will assist the inquiry to meet its objectives.”

This amendment, together with Amendment 157, enables a compliance direction to be given requiring the provision of protected information (subject to certain safeguards) to a public official who works for a relevant public authority in place of the previous prohibition on the giving of such directions. The terms “protected information” and “relevant public authority” are defined in clause 8 (as amended by Amendments 167 and 168).

Amendment 173, page 25, line 37, at end insert—

““protected information” ;”.

This amendment is consequential on Amendment 172.

Amendment 174, page 25, line 39, at end insert—

““relevant public authority” ;”.

This amendment is consequential on Amendment 172.

Amendment 175, page 26, line 36, leave out from “that” to end of line 37 and insert

“the following condition is met”.

This amendment is consequential on Amendment 176.

Amendment 176, page 26, line 37, at end insert—

“(2A) The condition is that—

(a) the person’s acts are relevant to the inquiry or the person otherwise has information that is relevant, and

(b) where the person is an individual, compliance with their obligations imposed by virtue of the direction would assist the inquiry to meet its objectives.”

This amendment (together with Amendment 175) clarifies that the duty to give a compliance direction to an individual applies only if the chair of the inquiry considers that compliance with the direction will help the inquiry to meet its objectives.

Amendment 177, page 27, line 12, leave out paragraph (c) and insert—

“(c) must include a description of the matters or issues to be covered in complying with the direction and may specify further requirements to be complied with (and may specify the form and manner in which, and the period within which, obligations imposed by virtue of the direction are to be complied with);”.

See the explanatory statement to Amendment 171.

Amendment 76, page 27, line 32, leave out “(1) and (2)”.

This amendment applies section 17(3) of the Inquiries Act 2005 (duty on chair to act with fairness and avoid unnecessary cost) to non-statutory inquiries to which the duty of candour and assistance applies.

Amendment 178, page 28, line 38, leave out sub-paragraph (11) and insert—

“(11) A compliance direction requiring the provision of protected information from an individual—

(a) in a case where the information concerned relates to security or intelligence (within the meaning given by section 1(9) of the Official Secrets Act 1989), may be given only to a public official who works (or used to work) for an intelligence service;

(b) in any other case, may be given only to a public official who works (or used to work) for a relevant public authority,

and an individual is not required to provide any protected information in response to a direction given in contravention of this sub-paragraph.

(11A) Before the chair of an inquiry gives a compliance direction to an individual who works (or used to work) for a public authority (and so far as the direction relates to their work for the authority), the chair must consult the authority for the purpose of ensuring that compliance with the obligations imposed by virtue of the direction will assist the inquiry to meet its objectives.”

See the explanatory statement to Amendment 172.

Amendment 179, page 30, line 38, at end insert—

“(2A) The duty to comply with the obligation under section 2(3) in relation to the inquiry does not apply to—

(a) a Minister of the Crown, a government department, the Scottish Ministers, the Welsh Ministers or a Northern Ireland devolved authority, or

(b) an individual who is a public official by virtue of working for, or otherwise holding office under, a public authority within paragraph (a).”

This amendment removes the requirement for Ministers and officials in Government and the devolved administrations to notify local authority inquiries of the matters in clause 2(3) of the Bill. The Bill already provides that such inquiries may not demand materials produced or provided by or on behalf of the Government or a devolved administration.

Amendment 78, page 30, line 40, leave out “sub-paragraph (11)” and insert “sub-paragraphs (11) and (11A)”.

This amendment is consequential on Amendment 183.

Amendment 180, page 31, line 3, leave out from “that” to end of line 4 and insert

“the following condition is met”.

This amendment is consequential on Amendment 181.

Amendment 181, page 31, line 4, at end insert—

“(3A) The condition is that—

(a) the person’s acts are relevant to the inquiry or the person otherwise has information that is relevant, and

(b) where the person is an individual, compliance with their obligations imposed by virtue of the direction would assist the inquiry to meet its objectives.”

This amendment (together with Amendment 180) clarifies that the duty to give a compliance direction to an individual applies only if the chair of the inquiry considers that compliance with the direction will help the inquiry to meet its objectives.

Amendment 182, page 31, line 18, leave out paragraph (c) and insert—

“(c) must include a description of the matters or issues to be covered in complying with the direction and may specify further requirements to be complied with (and may specify the form and manner in which, and the period within which, obligations imposed by virtue of the direction are to be complied with);”.

See the explanatory statement to Amendment 171.

Amendment 79, page 31, line 38, leave out “(1) and (2)”.

This amendment applies section 17(3) of the Inquiries Act 2005 (duty on chair to act with fairness and avoid unnecessary cost) to local authority inquiries to which the duty of candour and assistance applies.

Amendment 80, page 32, line 33, leave out paragraph (c).

This amendment is consequential on Amendment 183.

Amendment 183, page 32, line 39, at end insert—

“(11A) A compliance direction requiring the provision of protected information from an individual—

(a) in a case where the information concerned relates to security or intelligence (within the meaning given by section 1(9) of the Official Secrets Act 1989), may be given only to a public official who works (or used to work) for an intelligence service;

(b) in any other case, may be given only to a public official who works (or used to work) for a relevant public authority,

and an individual is not required to provide any protected information in response to a direction given in contravention of this sub-paragraph.

(11B) Before the chair of an inquiry gives a compliance direction to an individual who works (or used to work) for a public authority (and so far as the direction relates to their work for the authority), the chair must consult the authority for the purpose of ensuring that compliance with the obligations imposed by virtue of the direction will assist the inquiry to meet its objectives.”

See the explanatory statement to Amendment 172.

Amendment 184, page 34, leave out lines 21 to 24 and insert—

“(c) must include a description of the matters or issues to be covered in complying with the direction and may specify further requirements to be complied with (and may specify the form and manner in which, and the period within which, obligations imposed by virtue of the direction are to be complied with);”.

See the explanatory statement to Amendment 171.

Amendment 185, page 34, line 43, leave out from beginning to end of line 6 on page 35 and insert—

“(9) A compliance direction requiring the provision of protected information from an individual—

(a) in a case where the information concerned relates to security or intelligence (within the meaning given by section 1(9) of the Official Secrets Act 1989), may be given only to a public official who works (or used to work) for an intelligence service;

(b) in any other case, may be given only to a public official who works (or used to work) for a relevant public authority,

and an individual is not required to provide any protected information in response to a direction given in contravention of this subsection.

(9A) Before a senior coroner conducting an investigation gives a compliance direction to an individual who works (or used to work) for a relevant public authority (and so far as the direction relates to their work for the authority), the senior coroner must consult the authority for the purpose of ensuring that compliance with the obligations imposed by virtue of the direction will assist the investigation to meet its objectives.”

See the explanatory statement to Amendment 172.

Amendment 186, page 35, line 15, at end insert—

““protected information” ;”.

This amendment is consequential on Amendment 185.

Amendment 187, page 35, line 17, at end insert—

““relevant public authority” ;”.

This amendment is consequential on Amendment 185.

Amendment 188, page 36, line 4, at end insert

“and, where the person is an individual, of the matter in subsection (3A)”.

This amendment is consequential on Amendment 189.

Amendment 189, page 36, line 9, at end insert—

“(3A) The matter is that compliance with the person’s obligations imposed by virtue of the direction would assist the inquiry to which the investigation relates to meet its objectives.”

This amendment (together with Amendment 188) clarifies that the duty to give a compliance direction to an individual applies only if the procurator fiscal considers that compliance with the direction will help the inquiry to meet its objectives.

Amendment 190, page 36, leave out lines 28 to 31 and insert—

“(c) must include a description of the matters or issues to be covered in complying with the direction and may specify further requirements to be complied with (and may specify the form and manner in which, and the period within which, obligations imposed by virtue of the direction are to be complied with);”.

See the explanatory statement to Amendment 171.

Amendment 191, page 37, leave out lines 25 to 31 and insert—

“(13) A compliance direction requiring the provision of protected information from an individual—

(a) in a case where the information concerned relates to security or intelligence (within the meaning given by section 1(9) of the Official Secrets Act 1989), may be given only to a public official who works (or used to work) for an intelligence service;

(b) in any other case, may be given only to a public official who works (or used to work) for a relevant public authority,

and an individual is not required to provide any protected information in response to a direction given in contravention of this subsection.

(13A) Before the procurator fiscal gives a compliance direction to an individual who works (or used to work) for a relevant public authority (and so far as the direction relates to their work for the authority), the procurator fiscal must consult the authority for the purpose of ensuring that compliance with the obligations imposed by virtue of the direction will assist the inquiry to which the investigation relates to meet its objectives.”

See the explanatory statement to Amendment 172.

Amendment 192, page 37, line 39, at end insert ““protected information” ;”.

This amendment is consequential on Amendment 191.

Amendment 193, page 37, line 41, at end insert ““relevant public authority” ;”.

This amendment is consequential on Amendment 191.

Amendment 194, page 39, leave out lines 21 to 24 and insert—

“(c) must include a description of the matters or issues to be covered in complying with the direction and may specify further requirements to be complied with (and may specify the form and manner in which, and the period within which, obligations imposed by virtue of the direction are to be complied with);”.

See the explanatory statement to Amendment 171.

Amendment 195, page 40, leave out lines 1 to 7 and insert—

“(9) A compliance direction requiring the provision of protected information from an individual—

(a) in a case where the information concerned relates to security or intelligence (within the meaning given by section 1(9) of the Official Secrets Act 1989), may be given only to a public official who works (or used to work) for an intelligence service;

(b) in any other case, may be given only to a public official who works (or used to work) for a relevant public authority,

and an individual is not required to provide any protected information in response to a direction given in contravention of this subsection.

(9A) Before the coroner gives a compliance direction to an individual who works (or used to work) for a relevant public authority (and so far as the direction relates to their work for the authority), the coroner must consult the authority for the purpose of ensuring that compliance with the obligations imposed by virtue of the direction will assist the inquest to meet its objectives.”

See the explanatory statement to Amendment 172.

Amendment 196, page 40, line 16, at end insert ““protected information” ;”.

This amendment is consequential on Amendment 195.

Amendment 197, page 40, line 18, at end insert ““relevant public authority” ;”.

This amendment is consequential on Amendment 195.

Amendment 91, page 41, line 24, leave out paragraph (c).

This amendment is consequential on Amendment 198.

Amendment 198, page 41, line 38, at end insert—

“(5A) Subsection (10) of section 23A of the Inquiries Act 2005 (which provides for safeguards in the case of compliance directions requiring protected information from public officials) (as inserted by Part 1 of this Schedule) applies to a compliance direction given by virtue of regulations under this paragraph as it applies to a compliance direction given under that section.”

See the explanatory statement to Amendment 172.

Amendment 93, page 42, line 42, leave out paragraphs (a) and (b) and insert—

“(a) they are subject to the Senedd confirmation procedure (see section 37D of the Legislation (Wales) Act 2019 (anaw 4)), and

(b) they cease to have effect at the end of the period of 40 days beginning with the day on which the Welsh statutory instrument containing them is made unless, during that period, they are confirmed by a resolution of Senedd Cymru.”

See the explanatory statement for Amendment 61.

Amendment 94, page 43, line 31, leave out “this paragraph” and insert

“sub-paragraph (2)(b), (3)(c) or (5)(b)”.—(Catherine Atkinson.)

See the explanatory statement for Amendment 61.

Schedule 2

Meaning of “public authority” and “public official” etc

Amendments made: 95, page 46, line 8, leave out “or (11)” and insert “, (11) or (11A)”.

This amendment is consequential on Amendment 97.

Amendment 96, page 46, line 8, at end insert—

“(ca) being appointed as a member of the Children’s Panel in accordance with section 4 of the Children’s Hearings (Scotland) Act 2011 (asp 1);”.

This amendment provides for an exclusion from the definition of “public official” for those appointed as members of the Children’s Panel in Scotland.

Amendment 97, page 46, line 32, at end insert—

“(11A) This sub-paragraph applies if the local authority is a local authority in Scotland and the individual is, in relation to the authority—

(a) a convener elected in accordance with section 4(1) of the Local Government etc. (Scotland) Act 1994,

(b) a depute convener elected in accordance with section 4(2) of that Act, or

(c) a councillor designated by the authority for purposes relating to the payment of remuneration, in accordance with regulations made under section 11 of the Local Governance (Scotland) Act 2004 (asp 9), as—

(i) the Leader of the Council,

(ii) the Civic Head, or

(iii) a senior councillor.”—(Catherine Atkinson.)

This amendment provides that certain elected officials of local authorities in Scotland will fall within the definition of a “public official” and therefore be subject to the duty of candour and assistance.

Schedule 3

Offences under Part 2: related provision

Amendments made: 98, page 47, line 38, leave out from “Kingdom” to “unless” in line 2 of page 48.

This amendment is consequential on Amendments 40.

Amendment 99, page 48, line 7, after “5” insert “or 11”.

This amendment is consequential on Amendments 40 and 70.

Amendment 100, page 48, line 21, after “5” insert “or 11”.

This amendment is consequential on Amendments 40 and 70.

Amendment 101, page 48, line 26, leave out sub-paragraph (2).—(Catherine Atkinson.)

This amendment is consequential on Amendments 40 and 70.

Schedule 4

Holders of public office

Amendments made: 102, page 49, line 35, at end insert—

“1A A member of the Scottish government (see section 44 of the Scotland Act 1998) or a junior Scottish Minister (see section 49 of that Act).

1B A member of the Welsh Government (see section 45 of the Government of Wales Act 2006).

1C A Minister or junior Minister within the meaning of the Northern Ireland Act 1998 (see sections 7(3) and 19 of that Act).”

This amendment is consequential on the extension of Part 3 of the Bill (misconduct in public office) to Scotland and Northern Ireland.

Amendment 103, page 49, line 36, leave out paragraph 2.

This amendment is consequential on the extension of Part 3 of the Bill (misconduct in public office) to Scotland and Northern Ireland.

Amendment 104, page 50, line 4, leave out from “State” to end of line 10.

This amendment is consequential on the extension of Part 3 of the Bill (misconduct in public office) to Scotland and Northern Ireland.

Amendment 105, page 50, line 11, leave out “The condition is that” and insert

“A person does not fall within sub-paragraph (1) if”.

This amendment is consequential on the extension of Part 3 of the Bill (misconduct in public office) to Scotland and Northern Ireland.

Amendment 106, page 50, line 16, at end insert “(aa) the Scottish Ministers,”.

This amendment is consequential on the extension of Part 3 of the Bill (misconduct in public office) to Scotland.

Amendment 107, page 50, line 17, at end insert—

“(c) a Northern Ireland devolved authority.”

This amendment is consequential on the extension of Part 3 of the Bill (misconduct in public office) to Northern Ireland.

Amendment 108, page 50, line 23, at end insert—

“4A (1) A member of the Scottish Parliament.

(2) A member of the staff of the Scottish Parliament within the meaning of the Scotland Act 1998 (see paragraph 3(2) of Schedule 2 to that Act).”

This amendment is consequential on the extension of Part 3 of the Bill (misconduct in public office) to Scotland and Northern Ireland.

Amendment 109, page 50, line 26, at end insert—

“5A (1) A member of the Northern Ireland Assembly.

(2) A member of the staff of the Northern Ireland Assembly within the meaning of the Northern Ireland Act 1998 (see paragraph 2(2) of Schedule 5 to that Act).”

This amendment is consequential on the extension of Part 3 of the Bill (misconduct in public office) to Scotland and Northern Ireland.

Amendment 110, page 50, line 33, after “body” insert

“, within the meaning given by section 101 of the Police Act 1996”.

This amendment is consequential on the extension of Part 3 of the Bill (misconduct in public office) to Scotland and Northern Ireland.

Amendment 111, page 50, line 34, at end insert—

“7A (1) A constable of the Police Service of Scotland, within the meaning of the Police and Fire Reform (Scotland) Act 2012.

(2) A member of the police staff within the meaning of that Act.

7B (1) A police officer, within the meaning of the Police (Northern Ireland) Act 2000 (see section 77(1) of that Act).

(2) A person who is a member of the police support staff, within the meaning given by section 4(6) of that Act.

7C A person who is a member of or works for the Northern Ireland Policing Board.”

This amendment is consequential on the extension of Part 3 of the Bill (misconduct in public office) to Scotland and Northern Ireland.

Amendment 112, page 51, line 28, at end insert—

“(3) A person appointed under section 79 of the Harbours, Docks and Piers Clauses Act 1847.

(4) A person appointed to be a constable under Article 19 of the Airports (Northern Ireland) Order 1994 (S.I. 1994/426 (N.I. 1)).”

This amendment is consequential on the extension of Part 3 of the Bill (misconduct in public office) to Scotland and Northern Ireland.

Amendment 113, page 51, line 33, at end insert—

“(1A) A member of the Scottish Fire and Rescue Service.

(1B) A member of the Northern Ireland Fire and Rescue Service Board.”

This amendment is consequential on the extension of Part 3 of the Bill (misconduct in public office) to Scotland and Northern Ireland.

Amendment 114, page 51, line 34, leave out “fire and rescue authority” and insert

“body mentioned in any of sub-paragraphs (1) to (1B)”.

This amendment is consequential on the extension of Part 3 of the Bill (misconduct in public office) to Scotland and Northern Ireland.

Amendment 115, page 51, line 37, after “exercises” insert “core”.

This amendment, together with Amendment 117, clarifies that, in respect of persons exercising functions at places of state detention, only persons who exercise custodial or escort functions, or functions involving the provision of healthcare or education, are subject to the provisions of Part 3 of the Bill (misconduct in public office).

Amendment 116, page 51, line 37, leave out from “detention,” to end of line 39.

This amendment is consequential on the extension of Part 3 of the Bill (misconduct in public office) to Scotland and Northern Ireland.

Amendment 117, page 51, line 39, at end insert—

“(2) In sub-paragraph (1), “core functions” means—

(a) custodial or escort functions, or

(b) functions involving the provision of healthcare or education, so far as carried out at a place of state detention.

(3) Subject to sub-paragraph (4), a person is in state detention if the person is compulsorily detained by a public authority within the meaning of section 6 of the Human Rights Act 1998.

(4) A person is not in state detention at any time when they are detained in circumstances amounting to a deprivation of liberty by virtue of any of the following—

(a) sections 4A(3) or (5) or 4B of the Mental Capacity Act 2005;

(b) the Adults with Incapacity (Scotland) Act 2000 (asp 4);

(c) Part 2 of the Mental Capacity Act (Northern Ireland) 2016 (c. 18 (N.I.)).”

This amendment is consequential on Amendment 115 and on the extension of Part 3 of the Bill (misconduct in public office) to Scotland and Northern Ireland.

Amendment 118, page 52, line 2, at end insert—

“(2) A member of the Parole Board for Scotland.

(3) A Parole Commissioner for Northern Ireland.”

This amendment is consequential on the extension of Part 3 of the Bill (misconduct in public office) to Scotland and Northern Ireland.

Amendment 119, page 52, line 3, leave out paragraph 16 and insert—

“16 (1) A member of an independent monitoring board, appointed under section 6 of the Prison Act 1952 or section 10 of the Prison Act (Northern Ireland) 1953 (c. 18 (N.I.)).

(2) A member of a Visiting Committee, appointed under section 152 of the Immigration and Asylum Act 1999.

(3) A prison monitoring co-ordinator appointed under section 7A of the Prisons (Scotland) Act 1989 or prison monitor appointed under section 7C of that Act.

(4) A person approved under Rule 14 of the Juvenile Justice Centre Rules (Northern Ireland) 2008 (S.R. (N.I.) 2008 No. 427).”

This amendment is consequential on the extension of Part 3 of the Bill (misconduct in public office) to Scotland and Northern Ireland.

Amendment 120, page 52, line 10, leave out sub-paragraph (1).

This amendment is consequential on Amendment 121.

Amendment 121, page 52, line 11, leave out from “person” to “is” in line 12 and insert “who”.

This amendment is consequential on Amendment 123.

Amendment 122, page 52, line 13, at end insert—

“(aa) the Lord Chief Justice of England and Wales;”.

This amendment adds the Lord Chief Justice of England and Wales to the list of holders of public office for the purposes of Part 3 of the Bill.

Amendment 123, page 52, line 17, at end insert—

“(ca) the Lord President or Lord Justice Clerk of the Court of Session;

(cb) a judicial office holder, within the meaning of Part 2 of the Judiciary and Courts (Scotland) Act 2008 (asp 6) (see section 43 of that Act);

(cc) a member of the Scottish Tribunals, within the meaning of the Tribunals (Scotland) Act 2014 (see section 13(3) of that Act);

(cd) a member of the Children’s Panel appointed in accordance with section 4 of the Children’s Hearings (Scotland) Act 2011 (asp 1);

(ce) a member of the Lands Tribunal for Scotland or Scottish Land Court (including the Deputy Chairman of that Court);

(cf) the President of, or a member of, the Mental Health Tribunal for Scotland;

(cg) the Lord Chief Justice of Northern Ireland;

(ch) a Lord Justice of Appeal in Northern Ireland;

(ci) the holder of an office mentioned in Schedule 1 to the Justice (Northern Ireland) Act 2002;

(cj) the Chief Coroner or a Deputy Chief Coroner appointed under Schedule 8 to the Coroners and Justice Act 2009;

(ck) a senior coroner, area coroner or assistant coroner appointed under Schedule 3 to that Act.”

This amendment is consequential on the extension of Part 3 of the Bill (misconduct in public office) to Scotland and Northern Ireland and also makes drafting refinements.

Amendment 124, page 52, line 20, at end insert—

“(f) any other member of a court or tribunal in which legal proceedings may be brought.”

This amendment ensures that persons exercising judicial functions are subject to the misconduct offences in Part 3 of the Bill even if the office they hold is not specifically mentioned.

Amendment 125, page 52, line 20, at end insert—

“(3) Any other person (other than a person employed in the civil service of the State) who—

(a) works for a person within sub-paragraph (2) in relation to the exercise of that person’s judicial functions, or

(b) works for a court or tribunal in which legal proceedings may be brought in relation to the exercise of the judicial functions of that court or tribunal.”

This amendment ensures the persons who work for a judicial office holder or court (other than civil servants, who are caught by paragraph 3 of Schedule 4 to the Bill) are subject to the misconduct offences in Part 3 of the Bill.

Amendment 126, page 52, line 21, leave out paragraph 18.

This amendment is consequential on Amendment 123.

Amendment 127, page 52, line 29, leave out from “authority” to end of line 31.

This amendment is consequential on the extension of Part 3 of the Bill (misconduct in public office) to Scotland and Northern Ireland.

Amendment 128, page 52, line 32, leave out “in England”.

This amendment is consequential on the extension of Part 3 of the Bill (misconduct in public office) to Scotland and Northern Ireland.

Amendment 129, page 52, line 32, at end insert—

“(2A) Sub-paragraph (1) includes—

(a) in relation to a London borough council, a district council or a county council in England, an elected mayor within the meaning of Part 1A of the Local Government Act 2000;

(b) in relation to a county borough council or a county council in Wales, an elected mayor within the meaning of Part 2 of the Local Government Act 2000.”

This amendment is consequential on the extension of Part 3 of the Bill (misconduct in public office) to Scotland and Northern Ireland.

Amendment 130, page 52, line 34, leave out from “school” to end of line 3 on page 53.

This amendment is consequential on the extension of Part 3 of the Bill (misconduct in public office) to Scotland and Northern Ireland.

Amendment 131, page 52, line 35, at end insert—

“(4) The reference in sub-paragraph (3) to a person who works for a school includes a person who works—

(a) at a place mentioned in any of paragraphs (a) to (c) of the definition of “school” in section 23(1), or

(b) at a public school in Scotland within the meaning of the Education (Scotland) Act 1980 (see section 135(1) of that Act).”

This amendment is consequential on the extension of Part 3 of the Bill (misconduct in public office) to Scotland and Northern Ireland.

Amendment 132, page 53, line 18, leave out “or” and insert “, the Scottish Ministers,”.

This amendment is consequential on the extension of Part 3 of the Bill (misconduct in public office) to Scotland.

Amendment 133, page 53, line 18, at end insert

“or a Northern Ireland devolved authority”.

This amendment is consequential on the extension of Part 3 of the Bill (misconduct in public office) to Northern Ireland.—(Catherine Atkinson.)

Schedule 5

Part 3: consequential amendments

Amendments made: 134, page 54, line 18, leave out

“in subsection (11), omit “England and Wales or””

and insert “omit subsection (11)”.

This amendment is consequential on NC9.

Amendment 135, page 54, line 19, at end insert—

“Investigatory Powers Act 2016

4 In section 1 (overview of Act), omit subsection (5)(b)(v).”—(Catherine Atkinson.)

This amendment is consequential on NC9.

Schedule 6

Conduct of public authorities at inquiries and inquests

Amendments made: 136, page 60, line 38, after “authority” insert

“or any of the following persons”.

This amendment and Amendment 137 provide for Part 4 of the Bill to apply in relation to inquests where a public authority is represented by its head or another person, if the authority is not itself an “interested person” at the inquest.

Amendment 137, page 60, line 39, at end insert—

“(a) a chief constable;

(b) a Provost Marshal of a service police force or the tri-service serious crime unit;

(c) the Director General of the Independent Office for Police Conduct;

(d) a person who is an interested person by virtue of section 47(2)(l) of the Coroners and Justice Act 2009 Act (persons appointed by a Government department).”

See the explanatory statement for Amendment 136.

Amendment 138, page 61, line 20, at end insert—

““chief constable” means—

(a) a chief officer of police, within the meaning given by section 101(1) of the Police Act 1996;

(b) the chief constable of the Police Service of Scotland;

(c) the Chief Constable of the Police Service of Northern Ireland;

(d) the Chief Constable of the Ministry of Defence Police;

(e) the Chief Constable of the Civil Nuclear Constabulary;

(f) the Chief Constable of the British Transport Police;”.

This amendment is consequential on Amendments 136 and 137.

Amendment 139, page 62, line 4, leave out

“who has made an application”

and insert

“to whom the legal help may be provided”.

This amendment is to clarify the meaning of this amendment of legal aid regulations.

Amendment 140, page 62, line 10, leave out

“omit the words after paragraph (c)”

and insert

“for the words from “any” to the end of the regulation substitute “civil legal services other than—

(a) acting as a mediator or arbitrator, or

(b) issuing or conducting court proceedings.”

This amendment enables the additional legal services being made available to bereaved family members at inquests to be dealt with together for the purposes of administration of legal aid.

Amendment 141, page 62, line 21, at end insert—

“Exercise of other powers in relation to legal aid

7 Nothing in this Part of this Schedule affects—

(a) the powers conferred on the Lord Chancellor by section 9(2) of the Legal Aid, Sentencing and Punishment of Offenders Act 2012 in relation to Schedule 1 to that Act, or

(b) any other power of the Lord Chancellor to make orders or regulations under Part 1 of that Act.”

This amendment makes clear that nothing in Part 4 of Schedule 6 to the Bill affects the exercise of the Lord Chancellor’s powers to make orders and regulations about legal aid.

Amendment 142, page 62, line 21, at end insert—

“Part 5

Legal aid at inquiries in Scotland into fatal accidents and sudden deaths

Amendment of the Legal Aid (Scotland) Act 1986

7 (1) The Legal Aid (Scotland) Act 1986 is amended as follows.

(2) In section 36 (regulations), in subsection (3), after paragraph (bb) insert—

“(bc) is participating, or seeking to participate, in inquiry proceedings within the meaning of the Inquiries into Fatal Accidents and Sudden Deaths etc. (Scotland) Act 2016 (see section 11(2)(a) of that Act);””.—(Catherine Atkinson.)

This amendment enables regulations to be made to extend legal aid to bereaved family members where a public authority is a participant in an inquiry in Scotland into a fatal accident or sudden death.

Third Reading

King’s consent signified.

18:10

[The Prime Minister (Keir Starmer)]

I usually have to ask the King for consent, Madam Deputy Speaker.

I beg to move, That the Bill be now read the Third time.

I still remember the first time I met the Hillsborough families with Bishop James Jones. That was nearly 15 years ago, as the Director of Public Prosecutions. It was a humbling experience, and I was taken aback by their courage. To be able to campaign after such unimaginable loss—it floored me. As a father of teenagers who come to watch football with me, I do not think I could do that myself. To then keep going and going, as the state deployed all its power to obstruct justice and truth—that is a stain on our history. Yet keep going they did, and we are here today because of them. Some of them are with us in the Gallery today, and they were with me in No. 10 just this afternoon.

Indeed, that has always been the motivation for this Bill. The Hillsborough families fought so that no family like them should ever have to endure and suffer what they went through. What they have done will protect individuals and families whom they will never know and will never meet, but who will never have to go through what they went through. In my view, that is incredibly inspiring and humbling. This is not just a Bill for the 97, although it is that. It is a Bill for every single working person in this country, because let us face it: there is a class element to this. Time and again the cry for justice has been ignored by the British state because of who the victims are—because they are working class, because they are black, because they are women and girls.

I come here today not to take credit for this Government or this House, but as Prime Minister, to put on our national record exactly where the credit belongs. It belongs to the families and to the campaigners, and I pay tribute to every one of them: the Hillsborough families, Hillsborough Law Now, Inquest, Grenfell United, the Manchester Arena families—some of whom were with me again this afternoon and are here today—victims of the grooming gangs, the Horizon scandal, the infected blood campaigners, the Truth About Zane campaign and all the families who engaged with us to share their deeply personal and painful experiences. I thank them all for their time and, most of all, for their courage. While these are different tragedies, they represent the same demand repeated across decades: for truth, justice and accountability to belong equally to every single person in this country.

I am grateful to every Member of this House and in the other place from across the political divide who worked constructively with us to get us to this point and turn this long-denied cry for justice into the law of this land. It is long, long overdue. I pay credit to everybody who has fought so hard for this every single step of the way and thank them for what they have done.

This Bill has been too long coming, but now, as we reach Third Reading, we stand on the precipice of change. This is a moment of real significance for our country. We arrive here with a Bill that is stronger and, above all, worthy of those who fought for it. It is a law that will always carry their name: the Hillsborough law. I commend this Bill to the House.

18:16

[Dr Kieran Mullan (Bexhill and Battle) (Con)]

Let me begin, as I have throughout the passage of this Bill, by placing at the forefront my admiration for the campaigners—the families and friends of the 97 who lost their lives in the Hillsborough tragedy. On 15 April 1989 their lives were changed forever. Nothing could be done to bring back their loved ones after they were gone. Anyone who has lost someone close to them suddenly like that knows the experience of their world changing in an instant, when at one point the person they care deeply about is there, and suddenly, in the next moment, they are not. Afterwards, everything—everything else—is different.

While those deaths could not be undone, what could have changed and what could have been different was the truth about what happened to their loved ones being told to them, and it was not—not just as an act of omission, but as part of a deliberate cover-up by the police and others to protect themselves from the consequences of their failings. What might have been solely a tragic experience of grief that would of course never leave them, with a gap in their lives where their loved ones were supposed to be, was in addition turned into decades of torment as they fought so hard for that truth that was kept from them.

The Bill is born of that fight and of that torment, and it is a tribute to their determination. That is why, when I faced the Prime Minister across the Dispatch Box eight months ago, I made clear the good-faith desire of the Opposition to engage constructively with the Government on this Bill. I have sought to live up to that throughout its passage, not just for the Hillsborough families, but for the many others let down by the state and its institutions—the postmasters, the infected blood scandal victims, and those lost in the Grenfell Tower fire and other tragedies and scandals, as Members across the House have highlighted throughout the passage of this Bill.

I feel still the keen interest of the families as we reach Third Reading, but it is our job—mine, the Opposition’s and all MPs’—to both hold in one hand, sincerely and clearly, the experiences of all those people who have suffered so greatly and, on the other, our duty and responsibility to legislate carefully and in a considered way. I am deeply disappointed that this Prime Minister and this Government have made that task much, much more difficult than it needed to be. [Interruption.] I would challenge any MP—[Interruption.] Any MP, no matter—[Interruption.] I would challenge—

[The Prime Minister]

Will the shadow Minister give way?

[Dr Mullan]

No. I would challenge any MP— [Interruption.] Not yet, not yet. No matter how supportive of this legislation, with far-reaching—[Hon. Members: “Give way!”] No, I will finish this moment. With far-reaching consequences—[Interruption.]

[Madam Deputy Speaker (Caroline Nokes)]

Order. The shadow Minister must be heard.

[Dr Mullan]

I would challenge any MP, no matter how supportive of this legislation—which has such far-reaching consequences for the operation of the Government—to say that its progress, particularly over the last 24 hours, is anything like careful and considered.

[The Prime Minister]

I just want to record that these families, and families across the country affected by the Bill, have waited years and years too long. I made a promise to these families. I looked them in the eye and said that I would bring this forward as soon as I could. I have kept that promise, and I am proud that this Labour Government are bringing this Bill in.

[Dr Mullan]

If the Prime Minister wanted to truly live up to that promise, he would not have introduced legislation with less than 24 hours’ notice on an issue of national security. As the House has alluded to, I would have wanted the opportunity to make this moment a purely positive one, but I am afraid that the Prime Minister has made it impossible for me to fulfil my duties to the House. To give less than 24 hours’ notice for consideration of a Bill before its Third Reading is simply unacceptable. The House, those families, this Bill deserve greater respect than that. There is simply no excuse for the series of mistakes made by the Prime Minister’s Government that have led us here—led us to a place where those of us who engaged in good faith, as I did, cannot possibly be expected to have any trust left on a Bill that has trust at its heart.

The Prime Minister announced this Bill at his party conference in 2024. The media were briefed and told that the Bill and how it would operate had the full support of campaigning families and their legal advisers. They were so supportive, in fact, that they had released statements to that effect—and we now know that that was not true: they had already explained their misgivings. Then, after the introduction of the Bill, a Minister told me directly that the families were entirely happy with how the Bill was being legislated. And that also was not true.

[Maria Eagle]

The Conservatives were in power for 14 years and could have introduced the Bill. Why did they not do so?

[Dr Mullan]

I thank the right hon. Lady for raising that point. It was on that basis that I sought sincerely to engage properly with the Bill, and the Ministers and officials who met me repeatedly would be able to attest to that. That cannot be sustained when a Government bring forward legislation with 24 hours’ notice of important matters of national security.

The Government say that they have now resolved the central tension that led to the Bill being pulled. After months of negotiations, the central claim made by their Ministers that it needed particular safeguards for the agencies working in national security has now disappeared—apparently no longer needed. A Government who have wilfully misled us repeatedly on this Bill now want us to set aside—[Interruption.]

[Madam Deputy Speaker]

Order. I think that the shadow Minister needs to be very careful in his use of language.

[Dr Mullan]

A Government who have, inadvertently, repeatedly misled us on this Bill now want us to take them on trust. I heard personally and directly from Ministers and officials repeatedly that independent safeguards were needed, and now, apparently, they are not. Supposedly, over the weekend, those concerns have evaporated, and that is totally unacceptable. We are suddenly setting aside in a matter of days what the security services have told us for 18 months, in consistent, sober, professional warnings, which coincides perfectly with the Prime Minister coming here to give his final speech on this matter. Are we really going to suggest that that genuine professional opinion has changed overnight? I do not think that it has.

[Daisy Cooper (St Albans) (LD)]

As an Opposition MP myself, I must say that my party and I have been critical of the handover of power that has taken place in the Labour party, but this particular moment, on Third Reading, should belong to the families. [Hon. Members: “Hear, hear!”] We can do our party political point-scoring whenever and wherever we like, but does the hon. Member not agree that this moment should belong to the families?

[Dr Mullan]

If the Government were so concerned about this Bill passing, they should have organised it. We have just listened to a raft of amendments to the Bill being nodded through in this House, with absolutely no scrutiny. [Interruption.]

[Madam Deputy Speaker]

Order. I will hear the shadow Minister. I appreciate that temperatures are running very high, but it is important that voices are heard in this House.

[Dr Mullan]

As I have said, this could have been a Bill that we supported without reservation, but I am afraid that we maintain reservations about it, entirely as a result of its mismanagement by the Prime Minister.

I want to conclude by saying that none of this takes anything at all away from the families. [Interruption.] Labour Members do not want to hear this. It does not take anything away from the Members who have done so much to bring this legislation forward, but what is clear is that the Bill is the legacy of the campaigners and MPs—nobody else is responsible for our being here. I welcome their campaigning over many years and thank them for it.

18:25

[Andy Burnham (Makerfield) (Lab/Co-op)]

I feel tempted to start this speech by saying, “As I was saying 10 years ago in this place,” but it feels fitting to be here tonight, and particularly to be with my right hon. and learned Friend the Prime Minister. I remember very clearly that at the conclusion of the second Hillsborough inquest, he worked with me, as part of the shadow Health team back then, to draft the original Bill that was presented to Parliament. Tonight, it is before this House.

Tonight, it feels like life is coming full circle. In passing this momentous piece of legislation, which will change the way this country thinks about and works towards justice, we are truly rewiring the state and passing power from the authorities to the hands of ordinary people. It is happening because of the Prime Minister’s commitment to a country based on justice and fairness, and we thank him for that. He has honoured his commitment to the Hillsborough families, and what this House will do in passing this Bill tonight is rebalance the scales of justice so that we have justice for ordinary people going forward. That is some legacy indeed.

We have all recognised that we simply would not be here tonight were it not for the dignity and determination of the Hillsborough families, who are with us in this Chamber this evening. They have been supported by the wider group of campaigns as part of Hillsborough Law Now. I want to recognise their lawyers, Pete Weatherby KC and Elkan Abrahamson KC, who are with us this evening; INQUEST’s Deborah Coles, who is with us as well; and all the people who supported the campaign. That is the reason we are here, but we are also here because of the city of Liverpool, which is represented so well by my hon. Friend the Member for Liverpool West Derby (Ian Byrne), who has been the parliamentary lead on this Bill and has been entirely true to the people of his city, as has my friend Steve Rotheram, a former Member of this House and now the Mayor of the Liverpool City Region, who also carried the campaign to this point.

I cannot describe my pride in being in the House tonight to see this Bill plant the values of the city of my birth at the heart of this country. That is something of huge and profound significance that has been brought about by the Hillsborough families. We recognise the significance of that tonight.

As Steve Rotheram has said, the Hillsborough law cannot do any more for the Hillsborough families. It will do much more for those who come after them, but that is what makes their campaign so special. They have done this for others, not for themselves. It is important to remind the House of the other campaigns, which we hope will now be lifted by this legislation as we pass it this evening.

We do think this evening, as the Prime Minister said, of the Grenfell survivors and families—I am sure all London Members will want to echo that—who are still waiting for justice and accountability over nine years after the Grenfell fire. We think tonight of the Primodos families, who have fought so hard for fairness, supported by my hon. Friend the Member for Bolton South East—

[Yasmin Qureshi (Bolton South and Walkden) (Lab)]

Bolton South and Walkden.

[Andy Burnham]

I have been away for a while, but I will get there in the end.

I know that other Members in this House have supported those who have suffered other treatment disasters—sodium valproate, mesh, PIP implants. These are still ongoing campaigns, and we need to recognise these campaigns in the House tonight, as we do that of the Chinook families, who were in court today—only just now, I was speaking about that to the hon. Member for Mid Dorset and North Poole (Vikki Slade) in the Lobby—and we pay tribute to them this evening.

Let us not forget in this list, and I know they have support from across the House, the servicemen who served this country in the post-war period in the south Pacific—our nuclear test veterans. How often in this House do we praise our veterans, and how in this case have we left those veterans without truth and justice about what happened to them all those years ago? I think this House needs to hear their call for a special tribunal, which is entirely consistent with the aims of the Bill we are passing tonight.

This Bill advances all of these just causes, and the campaign for truth and justice does not stop here; indeed, it accelerates from here. I hope it ends the cover-up culture that has failed so many ordinary people in this country. We can never forget that for 20 years an entire English city was crying “Injustice!” correctly, yet this place ignored those people for all that time. We cannot forget that, and we cannot take away the hurt that that caused. We cannot forget that postmasters and mistresses serving communities up and down this country were branded as petty thieves, and carried that stigma with them for years. Likewise, those infected by infected blood were blamed for having brought it on themselves through their lifestyle. We cannot forget that.

Let me finish where I started, with the Liverpool supporters who were blamed for harming their own fellow supporters at a football match. That is what was done, and that was left to stand for all those years. The families here tonight had to live with that for all those years. Imagine what that must have felt like. We have had a situation in this country where people suffered the trauma of the initial bereavement—the incident that took their loved ones away—and then were retraumatised by the behaviour of the state. We cannot take that hurt away tonight, but we can put decency back at the heart of the British state, and that is what this Bill does. I finish by again praising the Prime Minister for making it happen. This truly is his legacy.

18:33

[Ed Davey (Kingston and Surbiton) (LD)]

I begin by echoing the words of the Prime Minister and the right hon. Member for Makerfield (Andy Burnham) in paying tribute to the Hillsborough campaigners. Our whole country owes them a debt, and I want to speak about that, but I want to do so in the spirit of cross-party support and working that this moment demands.

I want to pay tribute personally to the Prime Minister for the work that he has done on this, having to overcome the difficulties, as we know, with the security issues. I also want to pay tribute—I hope this is not the last time—to the right hon. Member for Makerfield, who is welcome back in this House. He has for many years paid a very personal role in this campaign, so it is very fitting that he is in the House tonight to see this law passed. I echo the tributes that he has paid, and that others will no doubt pay, because people have campaigned for many years for this moment. The enormous debt of gratitude we owe them for their courage, tenacity and determination is one that I hope this historic moment gives proper credit to.

But let us remember, as others have said, that it is not just the Hillsborough scandal; it is Grenfell, it is Windrush, it is Horizon, it is Orgreave, it is infected blood, it is covid, it is the nuclear test veterans, and the other scandals that have been mentioned. The right hon. Member for Makerfield was right to add Primodos to the list. I hope, by the way, when he takes the office we expect him to take soon, that he will put right those scandals. We will hold him to that in a cross-party manner.

There are many tragedies and scandals that have been compounded by state cover-up. This is an issue of rights between the state and individuals: victims, survivors and families having to fight for years or even decades just to expose the truth and win the justice they should have had straight away.

All too often, when things have gone wrong, we have seen a tendency to cover up mistakes, to close ranks, to protect institutions and, so often, to lie. Victims and families have spent years campaigning tirelessly against a system and an establishment that have tried to find countless ways of saying no. Thanks to those campaigners, we now take a big step closer to ending that culture of cover up, ensuring that no one has to fight so long and so painfully to get truth, justice and accountability.

There is more to do, and not just on the individual scandals but on the need to protect whistleblowers. That is an issue the Liberal Democrat party has raised and we want to work cross-party with the Government to ensure that we set up an independent office for whistleblowers, so that people come forward to expose scandals and ensure justice happens more quickly.

Many of the people who will benefit from this law will not recognise and will not even know how hard—how painfully hard—the campaigners have had to work over so many years. It is important that we remember that. It is truly remarkable, having suffered so much pain and injustice, that they kept going. What has been achieved in the Bill is something that will change the very nature of power in our country. It will make the lives of so many people better.

I thank the campaigners. I say to them, from the bottom of my heart, thank you.

Question put and agreed to.

Bill accordingly read the Third time and passed.

Public Office (Accountability) Bill (Carry-over extension)

Carry-over motion
Tuesday 14th July 2026 Commons Chamber

Ordered,

That the period on the expiry of which proceedings on the Public Office (Accountability) Bill shall lapse in pursuance of paragraph (13) of Standing Order No. 80A shall be extended by 136 days until 29 January 2027.—(Catherine Atkinson.)

Steel Industry (Nationalisation) Bill (Programme) (No. 2)

Motion made, and Question put forthwith (Standing Order No. 83A(7)),

That the following provisions shall apply to the Steel Industry (Nationalisation) Bill for the purpose of supplementing the Order of 21 May 2026 (Steel Industry (Nationalisation) Bill: Programme):

Consideration of Lords Amendments

(1) Proceedings on consideration of Lords Amendments shall (so far as not previously concluded) be brought to a conclusion one hour after their commencement.

Subsequent stages

(2) Any further Message from the Lords may be considered forthwith without any Question being put.

(3) Proceedings on any further Message from the Lords shall (so far as not previously concluded) be brought to a conclusion one hour after their commencement.—(Claire Hughes.)

Question agreed to.

Steel Industry (Nationalisation) Bill

Consideration of Lords amendments
Tuesday 14th July 2026 Commons Chamber

Consideration of Lords amendments

Clause 3

Sunset for exercise of principal transfer powers

[Madam Deputy Speaker (Caroline Nokes)]

I can inform the House that nothing in the Lords amendments engages Commons financial privilege.

18:35

[The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Business and Trade (Chris McDonald)]

I beg to move, That this House agrees with Lords amendment 1.

[Madam Deputy Speaker]

With this it will be convenient to discuss Lords amendments 2 to 18.

[Chris McDonald]

It is a pleasure to be back in the House today to see through the final stages of this Bill. The Government support all the Lords amendments before us.

I wish to pay tribute to my colleague Minister Leong for so expertly guiding the Bill through its passage in the other place. I also wish to place on the record my thanks for the constructive approach taken by peers to the scrutiny of the Bill during its passage through the upper House, including the constructive and careful consideration from His Majesty’s official Opposition, Liberal Democrat peers and Cross-Bench peers. I thank them for their contribution.

We have a responsibility to act now to secure the future of the UK steel industry. This Bill will assist in that by ensuring that steel production is secured, helping to restore domestic production to sustainable levels and supporting the Government’s economic growth plans where the public interest test is met.

The Lords amendments before us strengthen the Bill in several ways. Amendment 1 ensures that the sunset power in the Bill may be extended only by increments of two years. This means that the Government would have to seek parliamentary approval at regular intervals to keep the principal transfer powers on the statute book.

Lords amendments 2 and 3 place a duty on the Secretary of State to consider the costs that are likely to be associated with the exercise of the principal transfer powers, ensuring that such costs are considered in any decision making over the use of these powers.

Lords amendments 4 and 5 upgrade the parliamentary procedure relating to continuity obligations and enforcement, ensuring that Parliament has increased scrutiny of these matters.

Lords amendments 6 to 18 all relate to the appointment and role of an independent valuer and ensure that key considerations around environmental and health and safety liabilities are taken into account during any valuation exercise.

A final decision on the use of the powers in the Bill has not been taken. Any decision to exercise the powers in the Bill will be subject to satisfaction of the public interest test, based on the relevant facts at the time of the decision.

Steel has shaped our nation’s history, and this Bill is an opportunity to ensure its long-term success. The Bill enables decisive action for a strategically vital industry, defending our national security and supporting our critical national infrastructure, our economy and our national interest. I therefore ask right hon. and hon. Members to support the Lords amendments before us today.

[Madam Deputy Speaker (Caroline Nokes)]

I call the shadow Secretary of State.

[Andrew Griffith (Arundel and South Downs) (Con)]

I am grateful to their lordships for their work on the Bill. We support the amendments before the House.

Let me be plain from the outset: our objection has never been to steelmaking, or to the men and women who make steel; it is to a Government who have crashed around and used blunt instruments without ever having a detailed plan. Hope is not a strategy, and a blank cheque is not a plan. Nationalisation is a bad idea, and nothing that has yet been said at that Dispatch Box has told the House where the spending stops. The Government are taking us down a fast and expensive road with no idea where the exit lies. Even members of the Government concede in private that they rushed into something that they now repent at leisure.

Let us look at what we have learnt over the passage of the Bill. The Government and their Lib Dem little helpers in the Lords voted against a Conservative amendment in the name of the noble Lord Hunt to limit support to £2.5 billion over three years. That is almost £2.3 million every single day. The cap was not plucked from thin air—that £2.5 billion was the Government’s own figure. In their refusal to accept a cap, the Government concede that the figure is likely to be more. That could have been 35,000 new police officers, eight brand-new hospitals or more than double what the Chancellor raised over the course of this Parliament by destroying the livelihoods of British farmers.

18:45

We support Lords amendment 1, which limits by two years the power for Ministers to bring further steel businesses into public ownership without coming back to this House. Powers this sweeping should never have been handed to Ministers without limit. We support Lords amendments 2 and 3, tabled by the Liberal Democrats, which would require the Secretary of State to weigh the likely costs before making share transfer or property transfer regulations. That is a modest ask, and it is hugely damning that it had to be forced on the Government.

We support Lords amendments 4 and 5, which were laid on a cross-party basis. They shift the regulations governing continuity obligations and their enforcement from the negative procedure to the affirmative. If Ministers wish to bind steel undertakings and their suppliers, let them do so in daylight, with the consent of this House—not by regulations that slip through unseen without the scrutiny of Parliament.

We welcome the Government’s Lords amendments 6 to 18, which would require, rather than merely permit, the compensation scheme to provide for an independent valuer and would set out plainly the role that the valuer must perform. When the Government listen and act sensibly, we support them—and we have. It is a pity that the Government did not extend this House the same courtesy on the one amendment that mattered the most: the cap on an otherwise unlimited bill for the taxpayer.

For all the hours we have now spent debating the future of steelmaking in the UK, the Government still refuse to confront the real issue—they know what it is, but they refuse to confront it. It is the Secretary of State for Energy and his addiction to ruinously high energy prices. It is not me who says that but Unite the union’s general secretary, who described this as a “noose around the neck” of job creation.

There is no path to profitable steelmaking of any kind in the UK while energy prices here are four times higher than in many of our competitor nations. There is no tariff damaging enough to manufacturers and steel users to compensate for that, even though the Government’s botched attempts are clearly already causing manufacturing jobs to shift offshore.

The Government will talk about their British industrial competitiveness scheme, which is welcome, but it is just a sticking plaster on a gaping wound—and the Minister knows it. It is nonsense to claim that their strategy is one of security of supply when the same Government refused to open a coking coal mine, meaning that every furnace is reliant on imports, without which they would close in a matter of hours.

Only the Conservatives have a plan to get Britain drilling and reduce energy costs. We will remove legal obstacles blocking new oil and gas projects like Rosebank and Jackdaw and scrap the energy profits levy to make them viable. We will increase private investment in oil and gas extraction, and we will scrap the carbon taxes and industrial levies that expensively subsidise intermittent renewables that do not generate when the wind does not blow or the sun does not shine.

We will not stand in the way of these amendments. Many of them are ours, and the rest improve a flawed Bill, but let no one mistake improvement for endorsement. The amendments warrant our support, but the so-called plan and the botched decisions behind them do not.

[Sarah Olney (Richmond Park) (LD)]

We have a duty to stand by the steel sector, especially as it navigates unprecedented challenges, including President Trump’s unfair steel tariffs, China’s anti-competitive state aid practices, and the transition to environmentally sustainable production methods. If we are going to foster a thriving steel industry, we cannot allow more producers to collapse, more jobs to be lost, or the risk of our last blast furnaces going cold.

That is why the Liberal Democrats broadly welcome this legislation as a temporary emergency and targeted step aimed specifically at turning around British Steel before it can be returned to the private sector. I am particularly glad that the Government have accepted Liberal Democrat amendments that will require the Secretary of State to have regard to the costs of nationalisation before they table regulations to nationalise a company, as well as amendments that would ensure the consideration of environmental liabilities. Those Liberal Democrat amendments will strengthen the legislation, ensuring that these measures—and indeed the Government’s broader steel strategy—move us in the right direction to set the industry on a truly sustainable footing for the long term, while providing taxpayers with real value for money.

Lords amendments 2 and 3 ensure that if the Secretary of State is to exercise the principal transfer power, the Government must consider the expected cost to the taxpayer. That is important not only for business and industry to have certainty over the nationalisation process, but for taxpayers, who need to know that their money is not being wasted or paid to foreign owners who will leave our industries high and dry.

I am glad that the Government have also agreed to Liberal Democrat amendments that will strengthen the treatment of environmental liabilities in relation to the steel undertaking and ensure that they are explicitly identified and accounted for before compensation payments are made. On top of those legislative concessions, we are glad that the Government accepted other Liberal Democrat calls, including holding a debate in each House within 12 months of Royal Assent and requiring any future chair of a nationalised company to appear before the Business and Trade Committee. Those significant improvements to the legislation promote parliamentary scrutiny and accountability.

We also welcome the Government’s having listened to Liberal Democrat peers and introduction of written ministerial statements on the day of acquisition, which will be repeated every three months until we reach a year from nationalisation. Again, that change boosts transparency, enabling Parliament to scrutinise the measures’ impact on local communities and jobs. Lastly, we are glad that the Government adopted Liberal Democrat proposals to strengthen the UK Steel Council and its role in facilitating nationalisation within the context of the steel strategy.

Steel is a vital sector, bringing far-reaching benefits across the UK. It provides key materials for our national infrastructure from defence to renewable energy, and creates thousands of good jobs across the UK. The Liberal Democrats welcome the action that the Government are taking to protect British steel, backing a key plank of our critical national infrastructure. I am glad that the Government have worked constructively with the Liberal Democrats and that Ministers have adopted many of our proposals to improve transparency and accountability around the financial and environmental costs of any forthcoming measures. We will continue to constructively scrutinise the Government as they put these new measures in force to ensure that steel producers, local jobs and British taxpayers are properly supported and treated fairly.

[Martin Vickers (Brigg and Immingham) (Con)]

I welcome the Government’s acceptance of the Lords amendments. As hon. Members will know, part of my constituency takes in the Scunthorpe steelworks, and hundreds of my constituents work there. My aim throughout the rather tortuous and long saga about the future of the steelworks has been to ensure that their jobs are retained.

As the shadow Secretary of State outlined, the Bill could have been further improved, but I am delighted that we have at least reached a conclusion. There will be a sigh of relief among my many constituents who rely on the steelworks for their employment.

I look forward to engaging with the Minister as we move forward on the future of the steelworks—because, as I think he is well aware, if energy costs in particular stay as they are, there are future disasters ahead. We must do something on energy costs if we are to maintain any sort of a steel industry and heavy industry in the UK.

I thank the Minister for getting us to this point and look forward to working with him in the future.

[Chris McDonald]

I have listened carefully to the shadow Secretary of State’s remarks and those from the shadow Minister, and I will address them in a moment. I am grateful for the support of the Vice-Chamberlain of His Majesty’s Household, my hon. Friend the Member for Scunthorpe (Sir Nicholas Dakin), and of the Minister without Portfolio, my right hon. Friend the Member for Redcar (Anna Turley), both of whom are unable to speak in the debate as a result of their positions elsewhere in the House.

I opened by remarking on the constructive and careful consideration that the Bill has had in the other place; it is disappointing to see that the shadow Secretary of State is not taking the same approach. I will pick up a couple of the issues he raised. I am acutely aware of the position in which the previous Government left us, with uncompetitive energy prices for industry. If he had been attentive in some of the debates we have been involved in, he would be aware of some of the measures that I have taken to address that. Those include our energy-intensive scheme, increased relief on our supercharger scheme and our British industrial competitiveness scheme. I am determined to do more.

On tariffs, I am not saying that making the decision on tariffs was easy, but the shadow Secretary of State would clearly throw British industry to the mercy of dumped steel on the global market. We will not make that decision. He mentions coal for coking ovens. He may be unaware that there are no coking ovens in Scunthorpe. They were closed on his watch.

This Government are acting decisively and with purpose in the national interest, but the shadow Secretary of State is blinded by his ideological position on nationalisation. We believe that a steel industry, where necessary run by the Government and owned by the people, at least gives the opportunity to attract private sector investment. If the public interest test is met, that is the right thing to do. But if that does not convince the shadow Secretary of State, perhaps I can appeal to his sense of patriotism. I said on Second Reading that the England men’s football team had only ever won the world cup in a year when we had nationalised the steel industry. If he has any sense of duty towards our team and wishes them well, he should support nationalisation this time as well.

Lords amendment 1 agreed to.

Lords amendments 2 to 18 agreed to.

Petitions

Tuesday 14th July 2026 Commons Chamber

18:56

[James Naish (Rushcliffe) (Lab)]

I wish to present a petition on behalf of residents of West Bridgford in my constituency, calling for the creation of a new town council. West Bridgford is home to around 40,000 people, making it by far the largest settlement in Rushcliffe, yet unlike almost every other part of the borough it has no town or parish council to represent its local interests. As local government reorganisation concludes this week, many residents are concerned that decisions affecting their community will be taken solely by a large unitary authority, leaving local voices further removed or altogether absent from decision making.

For almost 80 years, West Bridgford had its own urban district council, and there is a strong feeling among residents that a new town council would be beneficial. Indeed, an independent survey carried out earlier this year found exceptionally high engagement. The petition I present today therefore reflects that local desire for greater democratic representation and asks the Government to work with Rushcliffe borough council as the process moves forward.

I am pleased to present the petition, which states:

The petition of residents of West Bridgford in the constituency of Rushcliffe,

Declares that there is a need for a new town council for West Bridgford; further declares that a new town council would have a positive impact on community cohesion throughout the area, which would enhance a sense of place, and support the local environment, its communities, and local distinctiveness.

The petitioners therefore request that the House of Commons urge the Government to work with Rushcliffe Borough Council to create a new West Bridgford town council to support local residents.

And the petitioners remain, etc.

[P003223]

[Chris Hinchliff (North East Hertfordshire) (Lab)]

I rise to present a petition alongside a corresponding online petition signed by hundreds of my constituents in North East Hertfordshire calling to ban housing developers from donating to political parties. Developers are some of the largest donors in politics, pouring in massive sums to tilt the planning system ever further in their favour. Cash for access leaves the impression that the same developers are wrecking nature and failing to deliver affordable homes. Those profiting from low-quality, overpriced housing are also writing the rules. This cements inequality at the heart of democracy because the people living with the consequences of a profit-driven housing crisis never get a seat at the table.

The petition states:

The petition of residents of the United Kingdom,

Declares that housing developers are among the largest donors to political parties and donate massive sums of money in an attempt to tilt the planning system further in their favour; further declares that cash-for-access leaves the impression that the same developers profiting from low-quality, overpriced housing are also helping to write the rules; and further declares that the corrupting influence of big money should be removed from the planning system and politics should be refocused on genuine solutions to the housing crisis that bring down housing costs for ordinary people and give local communities more of a say over their future.

The petitioners therefore request that the House of Commons urges the Government to ban housing developers from donating to political parties.

And the petitioners remain, etc.

[P003225]

[Neil Duncan-Jordan (Poole) (Lab)]

I rise to present a petition, alongside a corresponding online petition, which has been signed by more than 4,000 UK residents, calling for a ban on political donors getting contracts from Governments they helped to fund. Big money donors do not give out of kindness; they pay for access and influence. The evidence shows that it is a smart investment, because the firms have landed billions in Government contracts. If we want to build a better country, we need a better kind of politics, and tackling the corrosive influence of big money is the first step to rebuilding public trust. The petitioners

“therefore request that the House of Commons urges the Government to ban political donors from receiving public contracts with Governments of political parties”

to which they have donated,

“And the petitioners remain, etc.”

Following is the full text of the petition:

[The petition of residents of the United Kingdom,

Declares that companies which donate to political parties have gone on to receive billions of pounds in public contracts; and further declares that this creates a perception that political decisions are shaped by cosy relationships with super-rich donors, instead of a sole focus on delivering better living standards and services for millions of people.

The petitioners therefore request that the House of Commons urges the Government to ban political donors from receiving public contracts with Governments of political parties they have donated to.

And the petitioners remain, etc.]

[P003226]

[Liam Conlon (Beckenham and Penge) (Lab)]

With 28 world records, the Crystal Palace national sports centre is the spiritual home of UK athletics. It is also an incredible community asset. Residents across Beckenham and Penge speak fondly about using its facilities growing up, or remember their children and grandchildren learning to swim in the Olympic-sized pool. However, in recent years, the centre has become a boarded-up relic of the past—in 2014, the then Mayor of London, Boris Johnson, even tried to demolish the athletic stadium and turn it into an unwanted free school—but thanks to the work of Fran Bernstein, Ben Woods, the Crystal Palace Sports Partnership and many others, the centre now has a lifeline. The £130 million transformation of the centre, backed by funding from our Mayor of London, Sir Sadiq Khan, will see the reopening of the Olympic-sized pool and diving boards, a revamped athletics stadium, and new facilities for other sports, too. I will be campaigning to bring world-class athletics back to Crystal Palace park once again. The petitioners

“therefore request that the House of Commons urges the Government to work with the Mayor of London and other relevant partners to support the delivery of the transformation of the Crystal Palace National Sports Centre.”

Following is the full text of the petition:

[The petition of residents of the constituency of Beckenham and Penge,

Declares that the Crystal Palace National Sports Centre is a nationally significant sporting and community facility; further declares that plans have been submitted to transform the site, including refurbishment of the Grade II listed building, a revamped Olympic-sized pool and athletics stadium and new multi-sport and parasport facilities; and further declares that this transformation would benefit residents of Beckenham and Penge for generations to come.

The petitioners therefore request that the House of Commons urges the Government to work with the Mayor of London and other relevant partners to support the delivery of the transformation of the Crystal Palace National Sports Centre.

And the petitioners remain, etc.]

[P003227]

Future of Thames Water

Tuesday 14th July 2026 Commons Chamber

Motion made, and Question proposed, That this House do now adjourn.—(Claire Hughes.)

19:01

[Charlie Maynard (Witney) (LD)]

I will discuss the future of Thames Water, starting with Thames Water’s record of pollution and environmental failure, and how it impacts everyone in my Witney constituency. Thames Water serves the constituency and embodies the systemic failure of the national water sector. Last year, Thames Water pumped sewage into rivers and lakes for 107,822 hours.

West Oxfordshire is very much ground zero for sewage. We have the Thames, the Evenlode, the Windrush, Shill brook and the Cole. We also have WASP, or Windrush Against Sewage Pollution, which has been so active in going after Thames Water’s bad behaviour. It has mapped the illegal sewage spills at Thames Water sewage treatment works and found that, between 2021 and 2025, there were 1,231 illegal spills just in the Witney constituency, and 271 illegal spills in just one sewage treatment works, Faringdon.

West Oxfordshire district council has done great work in trying to hold Thames Water to account, as has WASP, which inspired the Channel 4 programme “Dirty Business”, which many hon. Members will have seen, so well done to Peter, Ash, Geoff and Vaughan. Despite Thames Water’s appalling record, residents have seen their bills skyrocket. I have constituents whose bills have gone up by 50% and 70%; I even have one whose bill has gone up by 93%. That is outrageous, but those bill hikes are not making the situation any better. That is because Thames Water’s financial situation is disastrous. Thames has nearly £20 billion of debt.

[Chris Vince (Harlow) (Lab/Co-op)]

I thank the hon. Gentleman for making his speech, because this is hugely important. Residents in Harlow are also fed up with their bills going up because of what appears to be Thames Water’s incompetence. Does he agree that that should not be the case, and that if Thames Water is so incompetent that it cannot sort out this problem, the Government need to step in and do something about it?

[Charlie Maynard]

I completely agree, and Thames Water’s full-year accounts are out at 7 am tomorrow morning. We will see just what they tell us. It is going to be ugly, not least because the company’s equity is worthless. The largest equity shareholders wrote down their shareholding to zero value and withdrew their board members more than two years ago. When Thames Water’s creditors sought to take on another £3 billion of debt last year, I was given permission to intervene in the High Court and speak for the interests of Thames Water’s 16 million customers, who are paying all these outrageous costs and interest expenses, but would otherwise have had no voice in court.

This Labour Government have slow-peddled for the last two years, and have refused to draw a line under decades of Tory bad behaviour by putting Thames Water into special administration. This approach is costing customers an absolute fortune. Thames Water paid £338 million just in interest expenses in the six months to September 2025. That is £133 million more, just in interest expenses, than it paid in the same period the previous year.

Labour is taking this hands-off approach despite the company’s multiple breaches of its operating licence. Let me illustrate some of those breaches. As I have stated, the company has carried out more than 1,000 illegal spills over four years. It must hold two investment-grade credit ratings as a condition of its operating licence, but it last held any investment-grade credit rating two years ago, in July 2024, and it has undergone a change of ultimate controller; yet the Minister, the Secretary of State and Ofwat have repeatedly refused to answer on that point.

[Mike Martin (Tunbridge Wells) (LD)]

We have a similar problem with South East Water, which is probably the second-worst water company in the United Kingdom after Thames Water. With South East Water, too, this Labour Government have been too timid. Does my hon. Friend agree that the Government, by acting, or not acting, in the way that they are, they are privileging shareholders over consumers?

[Charlie Maynard]

Absolutely. The consumers are getting the raw deal, and there is no end in sight.

To qualify as an ultimate controller—it is a defined term—a party need only have material influence over Thames Water. The creditor consortium right now is negotiating bilaterally with the company, and has put in £3 billion, but somehow that does not make it meet the criterion. It is ridiculous, and frankly, seeing this failure play out was probably the single moment when I most despaired of government and the rule of law. I repeatedly ask the same question, and repeatedly do not get an answer. I find it really, really bad.

[Clive Jones (Wokingham) (LD)]

Residents in Wokingham are absolutely sick of the failures of Thames Water’s management. In 2025 alone, Thames Water committed 74 sewage spills, for a duration of 684 hours. That means that Thames Water dumped sewage for the equivalent of 456 football matches, and there were certainly no clean sheets. No waterway in Wokingham is safe—

[Madam Deputy Speaker (Caroline Nokes)]

Order. The hon. Gentleman should be aware that interventions should be short, spontaneous and perhaps not pre-typed and three pages long.

[Charlie Maynard]

I thank my hon. Friend.

Rather than having customers pay hundreds of millions of pounds of debt at ludicrous interest rates of nearly 10%, Thames Water should be taken into a special administration regime, which is commonly known as bankruptcy on insolvency grounds. I urge the Government to pursue a SAR on the basis of insolvency, as this is a more straightforward way to secure special administration than on a performance basis, and it will give the special administrator additional powers and a stronger position in relation to the creditors.

The Water Industry Act 1991 sets out triggers linked to financial insolvency. Among them is the company being unable, or likely to be unable, to pay its debts. The Secretary of State and Ofwat both have discretion to apply to the High Court for a special administration order if that condition is triggered. I understand that the Government currently do not have, and have refused to publish, a SAR assessment policy. That is despite the Cunliffe review concluding that there is a need for

“broad, judgement-based tests within a clear policy, that has been set out in advance, of how the regulator will assess failing companies against these tests, the factors it will take into account and the indicators it will consider.”

That is from paragraph 793, recommendation 59, of the final report. Clarity around those tests and when a SAR will be used would benefit the water sector and its investors. Importantly, it also increases the Government’s negotiating leverage with the class A creditor consortium by further increasing the credibility of the threat of a SAR. I am interested to hear from the Minister why the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs is so reluctant to publish those tests.

A SAR process would allow Thames Water’s debt to be written down substantially, very likely into single-digit billions. This write-down is crucial, and it is not punitive. The write-down should be sufficient for the company to leave the SAR with a balance sheet that is strong enough to manage the huge spend that will be required over the next decade or so on treatment works and pipe networks.

[Mr Will Forster (Woking) (LD)]

Does my hon. Friend agree that we need Thames Water to go into special measures, so that it can invest in infrastructure? In my constituency, Thames Water has closed a road for three weeks in Horsell because it has not invested, and it dumped over 1,115 hours-worth of sewage last year into our River Wey. That lack of investment is why we need what he is calling for today.

[Charlie Maynard]

I completely agree with my hon. Friend. That is what is going on up and down the catchment writ small, with treatment works deferred despite being crucially needed. In Aston, we have sewage running down the street year after year, and it is the same in Standlake. It is just disgusting, and there is no end in sight.

A SAR process would allow the Government to use the period while Thames Water is in a SAR to put much of the good work from the Cunliffe review into new legislation, and to do the legwork to enable the company to exit as a mutual. Crucially, a SAR would not ultimately cost the Government anything—this really matters—because they will recoup all the funding spent on a SAR, as this new funding injected by the Government would be super senior to all other funding. I am very grateful to the former DEFRA Secretary, Steve Reed, for setting out in a letter to the—

[Madam Deputy Speaker (Caroline Nokes)]

Order. The hon. Gentleman means to say, “the former Secretary of State for DEFRA, the right hon. Member for Streatham and Croydon North (Steve Reed).”

[Charlie Maynard]

My apologies, Madam Deputy Speaker.

I am grateful to the former Secretary of State for setting out in a letter to the Environment, Food and Rural Affairs Committee in June last year that

“we expect that any Government funding required during a SAR would be recouped after the conclusion of the administration”.

The current Secretary of State set out the same point in a parliamentary debate on 16 June. It is also worth noting that the Tories—there are not any in the Chamber—continue to refuse to acknowledge this, and that Teneo, Thames Water’s own expert adviser, stated the same in its report to the High Court in December 2024.

[Calum Miller (Bicester and Woodstock) (LD)]

My hon. Friend is making a powerful argument. Does he agree that the Government’s reluctance to take a company that is clearly now technically insolvent into a SAR is loading costs on to consumers who use other water companies, by creating a moral hazard that means that companies are incentivised to take on ever more debt, with the debt providers being protected by the Government? Instead, the Government should allow companies to fail, if they are going to fail, and to be taken into a SAR, so that there can be investment in the infrastructure that my hon. Friends referred to.

[Charlie Maynard]

I agree 100%, and that is what is so depressing; by continuing to demonstrate that the regulators have no teeth, we create a bigger and bigger problem for ourselves.

The alternative to a SAR—a deal with the creditors, which, extraordinarily, seems to be the Government’s preferred option at this point—should not be countenanced. Giving these businesses, now operating as London & Valley Water consortium, yet more control of the company at ludicrously high interest rates would allow this downward spiral to continue. The Government must and can change course by using their power to ask for a SAR under existing legislation.

There is now the opportunity for Thames Water to exit special administration as a mutual, owned and run in the interests of its customers, and to break the cycle of financial mismanagement and egregious environmental failings once and for all. Legislation sets out that a water company insolvency SAR can conclude in two ways: rescue, whereby the company is restructured, debts are written down or converted, and the existing legal entity continues in a modified form; or transfer, whereby the regulated undertaking is sold or transferred to a new owner. That does not require a competitive auction, as the legislation provides for a transfer approved by the Secretary of State and Ofwat.Nothing in the legislation states that either route requires a competitive sale, as the overriding objective in a SAR is continuity of public service, not maximising creditor returns.

The Government could therefore set out at the point of SAR entry, or shortly after, that a mutual is the preferred exit route for Thames, and make that clear in the special administrator’s mandate. Work would need to be done in parallel with the SAR process to incorporate and put in place the governance framework for a new mutual, as well as more broadly updating water regulations to take into account the Cunliffe report’s recommendations. Ofwat could then work towards a licence transfer to the mutual, rather than running a market sale.

In conclusion, I have some questions for the Minister. If she is unable to answer them now, I would appreciate an answer in writing if possible. Have the Government sought legal advice on the SAR process from a specialist law firm? I appreciate that FTI Consulting has been instructed for many months, but that is not a substitute for legal advice. A proper, specialist understanding of the SAR as a legal process, and of the litigation risk—perceived or actual—of applying for a SAR, is critical.

Will the Government commit to publishing a SAR assessment policy, and does the Minister agree that the creditors consortium has material influence over Thames Water, and therefore meets the ultimate controller test? Will the Minister act with Ofwat to enforce the appropriate penalties on Thames Water for having undergone that change without having given notice, and will she provide an update on the negotiations between Ofwat and Thames Water? Will the Minister now take the London & Valley Water deal off the table, and work with the Secretary of State to apply to the court for Thames Water to be put into special administration? Finally, in response to a question about whether she would consider the Liberal Democrat call for water companies to be mutually owned public benefit companies, the Minister said:

“I would be happy to see more mutual ownership of water companies, but the question is how we get there.”——[Official Report, 16 June 2026; Vol. 787, c. 728.]

Given that, will she confirm her Department’s position on mutual ownership models for water companies? What are the Department’s plans for exploring how we get there?

19:16

[The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Emma Hardy)]

I thank the hon. Member for Witney (Charlie Maynard) for inviting me to respond to his concerns about the future of Thames Water. I have listened with his interest to his comments, and I hope I will be able to add some facts to the debate. I also accept his sympathy and anger on behalf of his constituents. Indeed, they must feel very angry about the fact that water was left in such a state, and that the Environment Agency’s budget was cut by half by the coalition Government, who also introduced self-monitoring. The Environment Agency was unable to fulfil its duties during the time of the coalition Government, and the regulators did not put forward forceful accountability for the water companies. It was left to this Labour Government to clear up the mess left by the coalition Government and 14 years of the Conservatives. I am sure the hon. Gentleman shares my anger about that—I certainly felt angry about it when I came into government and saw the mess that we had been left to clear up.

Let me remind the hon. Gentleman exactly what we have done. We introduced the Water (Special Measures) Act 2025 within six weeks of entering government, to raise standards, enforce accountability, and make pollution cover-ups a criminal offence. We banned more than £4 million in bonuses, and unlocked money in private investment to rebuild vital infrastructure. Just last week we introduced automatic penalties. There is more I could mention, including 10,000 water inspections, which is many more than happened after the slash and burn of funding for the Environment Agency by the coalition Government. We have restored to the system the accountability that has been missing for so long.

[Fleur Anderson (Putney) (Lab)]

My constituents are cheering on the work that the Government have done by getting a grip of this situation after the Environment Agency was left to mark its own homework, and the self-monitoring and regulation framework failed. Will the Minister say more about the dedicated supervisory teams in the White Paper, which will be working to stop this happening again and ensure that Thames Water changes in future?

[Emma Hardy]

My hon. Friend is quite right to point out how self-monitoring, which was introduced by the coalition Government, was such an utter mistake that has done so much damage to the water industry. It is why we are in the current situation. The purpose of the supervisory regime is to be able to intervene earlier, and it works alongside the performance improvement regime so that we can hold companies to account. That is why we are abolishing Ofwat—

[Charlie Maynard]

On that point, will the Minister give way?

[Emma Hardy]

I have heard quite a lot from the hon. Gentleman, so I would be most grateful if he would not mind giving someone else a chance. We are looking at introducing the performance regime for the same reason, because we want to ensure that we can intervene early to stop the abject failure that we saw under the coalition Government.

[Sean Woodcock (Banbury) (Lab)]

Every week in my surgeries I hear about the consequences of Thames Water’s failures. An elderly widowed constituent was left without running water after it failed and botched the installation of a water meter, and she was forced to shell out hundreds of pounds on an emergency plumber to remedy the situation. Will the Minister confirm that she understands the anger of constituents like mine with regard to Thames Water and its continued failing? Will she confirm that she will keep all measures under review?

[Emma Hardy]

It is true that I feel angry on behalf of all our constituents who have been so badly let down by the system that we inherited, and that is exactly why we have taken the action that we have. There is, of course, lots more to do—nobody is saying there is not—but we have to acknowledge the dire straits and the mess that we inherited. We are going to bring forward a clean water Bill to deliver on our promise to clean up our rivers, lakes and seas, and not just for today but for generations to come. The reforms will create a single powerful water regulator to act, and we will ensure that it has teeth in the way that the current regulator does not.

Turning to some of the issues raised by the hon. Member for Witney about the consortiums proposal, regarding the recapitalisation proposal being negotiated between Thames Water, London & Valley Water Consortium—a group of Thames Water’s creditors—and Ofwat, I reiterate that this Government will always act in the national interest. Before I turn to the proposal itself, it is important to be clear about the respective roles and responsibilities of the parties involved, because there is so much misinformation and misunderstanding out there. I welcome the opportunity to at least introduce a few more facts into the argument about the proposals.

Ofwat, as the independent economic regulator, is responsible for assessing that proposal and deciding whether it meets the relevant regulatory and statutory requirements, including whether it is appropriate to take the proposal forward for consultation. However, section 2 of the Water Industry Act 1991 places a duty on both Ofwat and the Secretary of State to exercise their respective relevant functions in the manner best calculated to further or achieve certain objectives. This includes protecting customers, securing the proper delivery of water and sewerage services, ensuring that companies can finance those services and that statutory obligations are properly carried out.

[Mike Martin]

Does the Minister think that the Secretary of State exercised those duties well when, under the Blair Government, Macquarie was allowed to come into Thames Water and South East Water and asset strip those companies?

[Emma Hardy]

Quite clearly, some of the behaviour that we have seen in the past from water companies shows that the regulatory system did not work, and that is exactly why we are changing it. Of course, between Blair and the current Government there were 14 years of Tory Government and five years of coalition Government during which those Governments could have taken the actions that we are taking today.

On 16 June, the Secretary of State gave her preliminary views on the consortium’s proposal to Ofwat, with reference to section 2 duties of the Water Industry Act 1991. She was clear that she does not believe that the current proposal goes far enough to protect customers and the environment. She cited three particular concerns in line with her duties: unfair costs to customers, delays to infrastructure investment and delays to environmental improvements.

However, the decision on how to assess the proposal and whether to proceed with consultation ultimately rests with Ofwat as the independent regulator. It is therefore important that the Government respect those boundaries. While the Secretary of State may express views in accordance with her statutory duties, it would not be appropriate for the Government to direct Ofwat’s decision making, prejudge the outcome of its assessment or be seen to exert undue influence on an independent regulatory process.

We are working closely with Ofwat, which will engage with the consortium on any revised proposal. It is important to be clear that it is ultimately a matter for Ofwat to decide whether to consult on the consortium’s proposal. However, I reassure the House that while the company is stable, we stand ready for all eventualities and the Secretary of State takes her duties very seriously.

I will also use this debate as an opportunity to address some of the misconceptions that have developed about special administration. Too often, SAR is presented as a simple lever that the Government can pull whenever there are concerns about a water company’s performance, but that is simply not the case. The reality is that there is a high bar for the imposition of a special administration regime. A company can enter into a SAR only if it becomes insolvent, or if there has been such a serious breach of its principal statutory duties or an enforcement order that it is no longer appropriate for the company to retain its licence.

Where performance is concerned, any application for a special administration regime would have to be supported by a robust and compelling body of evidence and would ultimately need to satisfy the courts. Bringing a case forward without sufficient evidence would not only risk the failure of that case, but waste a huge amount of taxpayers’ money. For any case brought forward, the Government and Ofwat would need to be convinced that there was a robust and compelling body of evidence. That is quite different from what is presented out there too often—that this is just a button the Government can press at will.

[Calum Miller]

I am glad the Minister has moved on to the substance of DEFRA’s case. Will she clarify for my residents whether she considers a company that is spending 33% of the income it gets from customers on servicing its debt and paying a 10% premium on that debt is actually viable as a company? Will she set out for the House what she considers to be the measure of insolvency for a privately held monopoly?

[Emma Hardy]

As I have just said, on the issue of performance, cases have to be brought forward to court, and the court must be convinced that the company is not performing—I will move on to insolvency.

This issue is why regulators start by using the full range of supervisory and enforcement powers available to them where appropriate. Companies must be held to account, put forward credible plans to improve and deliver for customers on the environment. Indeed, that is one of the reasons why we are introducing a new performance improvement regime through the clean water Bill.

The performance improvement regime will help to prevent poorly performing companies from falling into a cycle of decline, allowing regulators to step in before a company approaches the point of failure. It will strengthen accountability, support improvements in performance and provide a clearer pathway for intervention long before special administration may be required.

Let me address another misconception about special administration. Some suggest that placing a company into special administration would simply allow the Government to take over and run the company directly. That is not how the regime works. A special administrator is appointed by a court and has specific legal duties and objectives. It must manage the company’s affairs, businesses and property for the statutory purposes set out in the Water Industry Act.

The special administrator’s primary responsibility is to ensure the continued delivery of essential water and waste water services while securing a long-term solution for the business. Depending on the circumstances, that could mean rescuing the company, such as through a restructuring, or transferring it as a going concern to new owners. That is why the special administration regime exists to protect customers and maintain vital public services while providing a framework for recovery or transfer. Customers continue to receive their services throughout the process, and the special administrator operates under the supervision of the court and within a clear legal framework.

I know the hon. Member for Witney is particularly concerned about whether the consortium meets the criteria of acting as the ultimate controller of Thames Water. Let me use this opportunity to address his concerns. The classification of ultimate controller is a matter for Ofwat, as the independent economic regulator, by reference to the terms of the company’s licence. Ofwat has given a detailed explanation of why it does not consider the creditors to be the ultimate controllers of the company in its letter to the Chair of the Business and Trade Committee, my right hon. Friend the Member for Birmingham Hodge Hill and Solihull North (Liam Byrne), dated 8 September 2025.

Ofwat has stated that one of the reasons why it does not believe creditors are in a position to materially influence the company’s policies or affairs is that it does not have the right to appoint directors to the board, and it does not hold any governance or veto rights over the Thames Water business plan or other strategic decisions that the company’s board is making. I am reassured that it has reviewed the matter and that the ultimate controller of the company has not changed—

[Charlie Maynard]

How is that possible?

[Emma Hardy]

This is the thing with the hon. Gentleman: he makes many assertions in this House when he stands up to comment, but then he refuses to allow me to address and answer them. I am still answering his point about the ultimate controller. If he wants to ask me a question, he should have the decency and respect to listen to the answer.

I am also reassured that Ofwat will continue to keep the position of Thames Water’s ultimate controllers under review, and that it has made clear to the company its expectation that the company will continue to monitor whether there is, or may be, a change to the ultimate controller position.

I hope that what I have said has introduced a few facts to what can otherwise be quite an inflamed conversation. This Government are serious about tackling water company failure, acting on behalf of customers and protecting the environment. We have demonstrated this with the action we took on our very first day in office, and the action we have taken every day since. I am always happy to discuss issues related to special administration. I have held a private briefing with the hon. Member for Witney before. I would do so again, but what I do not like is when things are presented to the House in a way that is—I am not allowed to say dishonest, so how can I put this?—incorrect. This Government will always act in the national interest, and while the company is stable, we stand ready for all eventualities, including being ready to apply for a special administration regime if necessary.

Question put and agreed to.

19:30

House adjourned.

Employees Travelling Outside the UK: Expenses Rate

Tuesday 14th July 2026 Westminster Hall

16:00

[Peter Lamb (Crawley) (Lab)]

I beg to move,

That this House has considered expenses rates for employees travelling outside the UK.

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Sir Christopher. I am calling on the Government to ensure that serious consideration is given to reassessing the scale rates for expenses and subsistence paid to employees who by nature of their work are required to travel outside the UK. My constituency of Crawley is home to Gatwick airport and many workers, including pilots and cabin crew, who are required to spend considerable time abroad with the flights they crew. That can last from several hours to several days for those working long-haul flights.

Time spent away from home in foreign cities, without access to kitchens or other domestic utilities, can be overwhelmingly expensive, particularly for junior members of the cabin crew, whose salaries, according to the National Careers Service, begin at around £19,000. It is right, therefore, that employers pay tax-deductible subsistence payments to their employees, to cover the costs associated with travel necessary to do their jobs.

Under the previous Government, to save companies having to check every single receipt that an employee accrues while abroad, His Majesty’s Revenue and Customs introduced a benchmark expenses rates for employees travelling outside the UK. Those were first published on the Government’s website in 2013, with unique rates produced for almost every one of the world’s major cities, setting out the average cost of drinks, breakfast, lunch and dinner, a night in a hotel room and even the journey from hotel to office. Each city had also been given broader non-specific subsistence reimbursement rates. Demarcated across specific time boundaries, that is a rate for when employees spent more than five hours in a given city, with another for when they spent more than 10 or 24 hours there.

The detailed task of producing those rates over a decade ago is evidenced by the fact that HMRC went to the effort of making unique assessments city by city, and that the increase in reimbursement between five, 10 and 24 hours is not only non-linear but unique to each city. Despite the time and effort put into producing those bespoke rates, they have been upgraded significantly only once in the past 13 years—in October 2014, a year after they were first produced—and that only included a fraction of the cities listed.

Despite assurances that the Government keep under review all taxes, including overseas subsistence rates, if we check their website, we see that rates payable to an employee who has travelled to Zagreb for work are listed in Croatian kuna, even though Croatia joined the euro on 1 January 2023. The subsistence rates for at least 15 European capitals, including Athens, Madrid, Lisbon and Dublin, have never received an update. Due to more than a decade of inflation, those benchmark values have been eroded in real terms.

Ahead of this debate, using the total residual rates produced in 2013, and nation-specific consumer price index inflation figures from the World Bank Group, we have calculated today’s expected subsistence rates for European destinations. Amsterdam’s total residual rate in 2013 was set at €71; a year later it was raised to €72, where it remains today. According to World Bank Group data, prices in the Netherlands in the 12 years since have risen by an average of 2.6% a year. That compounds to a 36% increase over that period. Had the 2013 rates for Amsterdam increased in line with inflation, workers who had spent more than 24 hours in the city would now receive more than €96. The fact that those rates have been ignored for so long means that cabin crew and pilots—including constituents of mine and those in adjacent areas—are losing out on subsistence payments of more than €25.

[John Milne (Horsham) (LD)]

I represent Horsham, an adjacent constituency, and very much experience the same problems, so the issue is not rare. I have many cabin crew in my area who say the same thing. One of the people affected is trying to get leave to remain, but the visa application is made extremely complicated by going back and forth out of the country, so I very much support the hon. Member and emphasise to the Minister that it is not a small problem.

[Peter Lamb]

I take that fully on board. I am delighted that the hon. Member is here for this debate.

There are cities in Europe where the situation is even more pronounced than in Amsterdam. In Budapest, the total residual rate set in 2013 and unchanged since 2014 has been eaten away by a compound inflation rate of 67% in Hungary. The current payment of 16,000 forints is well over 10,000 forints, or 40%, lower than it should be. The worst example among European capitals, however, is in Ankara. In the years since the overseas subsistence rates were first set, Turkey has experienced huge inflation. Prices have risen at an average of 22.5% every year. Despite that, Ankara’s residual rate remains at 240 lira, as set in 2014. If it had increased with inflation, it would be over 2,500 lira today, which represents an unrealised tenfold increase.

In these situations, as a direct result of the Treasury not having revisited those rates over the last 12 years, airlines and other organisations are able to justify under-compensating their staff by pointing to what is essentially Government guidance. When I wrote to the Treasury with those concerns last year, the then Exchequer Secretary to the Treasury, my right hon. Friend the Member for Ealing North (James Murray), informed me that in situations where expenses rates do not cover the actual costs of needing to eat, drink and sleep while abroad for work, the employers can instead choose to “pay actual expenses incurred”. Unfortunately, not every company chooses to do that for their employees, with many of them instead choosing—I do not think this will be a surprise to any of us—to pay the lower rate, the Government’s fixed rate.

The issue has a real and detrimental impact on the working lives of cabin crew. A constituent of mine working for an airline operating out of Gatwick airport was blunt about this, telling me that the fact that the rates are so far behind reality means that they have been forced to “miss meals” while abroad for work.

Another constituent stated that

“current scale rate allowances do not reflect the real costs we face on these trips”,

and reiterated that

“the allowance provided does not cover even the most basic meals.”

It is evident, therefore, that overseas scale rates must be raised. That is why I was delighted when, in his written statement, my hon. Friend the Exchequer Secretary to the Treasury committed to reviewing and uprating them last month. This has been a long time coming. While simply increasing the 2013 rates in line with inflation would be welcome, I hope the Treasury takes the opportunity to undertake a full review of how subsistence rates can be systematically improved.

Having secured this debate, I was contacted by Virgin Atlantic, which, among other things, raised concerns that there are some destinations where the current rate might not reflect the full cost of subsistence for an individual visiting or living in the city. For instance, it provided the example of Lagos where safety restrictions require pilots and cabin crew to remain in their hotels and rely on higher cost room service or onsite dining. It is its view—one that I share—that any review should give consideration to those concerns and ensure that safe accommodation is made affordable under new rates.

I am well aware that questions related to tax pose difficult decisions for Governments, particularly in times of global economic uncertainty such as these. But I would hope that we would all accept that people should not go without meals while undertaking travel essential to their work, particularly where those individuals might already be on a very low wage. I will closely follow the outcome of the Treasury’s review of overseas scale rates, and I hope that the various issues I have highlighted today are reflected in its outcome.

16:08

[The Exchequer Secretary to the Treasury (Dan Tomlinson)]

It is a pleasure to speak in this debate with you in the Chair, Sir Christopher. I thank my hon. Friend the Member for Crawley (Peter Lamb) for raising this important issue today and for the work that he and neighbouring MPs, on a cross-party basis, have been doing to highlight the concerns that their constituents have raised with them.

I can see that hundreds of people in the Crawley constituency have signed the petition. It is similar in Horsham and people near Heathrow and other major airports have signed it, too. The issue clearly affects many staff who work in the airline industry and, as my hon. Friend points out, particularly affects those who are on lower wages. Yes, they might enjoy and love the travel and going to visit so many different places as part of their work, as well as the benefits that come from a job working in the sky and working for airlines, but there are costs associated with being away from home. It was right to have the overseas scale rates system in place back in 2014, but it is not right at that the system has not been updated since then.

The OSRs play an important role in reducing administrative burdens when employees incur subsistence costs while travelling overseas, and the key thing is that they provide a practical alternative to reimbursing and evidencing every single expense. As a result, if they were abolished at any point in the future, that could place a significant burden on airlines, which is certainly something we want to avoid.

As my hon. Friend set out, the rates have remained more or less frozen since 2014. I was doing the maths earlier today in preparation for the debate, and I came up with a similar figure to him. If they had been uprated in line with inflation in the UK, they would have increased by 40% since 2014. Of course, inflation rates vary across the globe, but that gives us a sense of the size of the gap that has opened up over the last 12 years.

The Government have been listening to representations made by airlines, individuals and Members of Parliament, including my hon. Friend. As we announced just a few short weeks ago, we will review both the OSRs and the benchmark scale rates, which are the domestic equivalents that set out the scale rates for lunches and dinners that employees may have when they are in the UK on business.

We will also look not just at uprating the rates but at whether there is scope to simplify the OSRs. We want to engage in detail with businesses on such a proposal, and officials in HMRC have already begun that work. Rather than having hundreds of individual rates for individual countries that need to be updated in a painstaking and administratively costly way, and that are also difficult for businesses to administer, we may find that having buckets or bands works better for employers and employees. That is something we will want to look at as part of this review, so I would really welcome representations from my hon. Friend the Member for Crawley and the hon. Member for Horsham (John Milne) on what changes their constituents would like to see.

Let me be clear: we have not taken any decisions on where we would like to go, and our mind is not made up. We are convinced that we want to review the rates to make the system better, but we want to consider the issues carefully and gather evidence from those who are affected before a decision is made. Just last week, I met the CBI, which represents some of the large airlines, and it welcomed the announcement of a review. I look forward to receiving further representations from the private sector.

As my hon. Friend pointed out, it is important for the Government to strike the right balance between supporting businesses and maintaining fairness in the tax system, while also protecting the Exchequer to ensure that, in the round, we raise the necessary revenue to fund and put right our public services after the last 14 years, when too many were cut back. We also need to ensure that any administrative arrangements such as these remain straightforward and proportionate.

Of course, there is political change in the air, but I hope that this review will conclude in time for the Budget. We do not want to be in a place where, in years to come, we are still waiting for these changes. I hope that we can make swift progress in the coming months, so that my hon. Friend’s constituents, as well as employees of airlines across the country, can see some improvement.

I am grateful to my hon. Friend for securing this debate, and I am grateful to the hon. Member for Horsham for his intervention. I will take the strength of feeling in their representations back to the Department, for as long as I will be there.

Question put and agreed to.

16:14

Sitting suspended.

Support for Pig Farmers

Tuesday 14th July 2026 Westminster Hall

16:30

[Harriet Cross (Gordon and Buchan) (Con)]

I beg to move,

That this House has considered Government support for pig farmers.

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Sir Christopher. I thank Members for coming to the debate. To say that the UK’s pig industry is worried is a gross understatement. The sector has always experienced ups and downs, but the current trough and range of difficulties faced by our pig farmers is sustained and significant, and there seem to be few routes to stabilising the sector.

The current downturn is considered to have begun back in the autumn of 2025, and has been driven by a combination of factors, including an oversupply of pigs, stagnant demand and falling prices in Europe, which have put downward pressure on UK pig prices. The situation has been exacerbated by constraints in the processing sector and by rising costs. Next came the substantial backlog of pigs at the start of 2026; at its peak, as many as 100,000 pigs were left on-farm.

Although the worst of the backlog cleared, the standard pig price fell markedly and has remained low: it has fallen from about 208p per kilo in August 2025 to 178p per kilo now—a 15% fall. In the context of profit margins across agriculture that are sometimes only 1%, it is understandable why the fall in price over such a sustained period is causing issues for the sector.

However, it must be acknowledged that the standard pig price is very much an average price metric. Many producers are receiving significantly less than that—sometimes in the region of just 130p to 140p per kilo, which is significantly below the farm’s break-even point. Indeed, a farmer I recently met in my constituency is losing about £50 per pig, and across Scotland, the industry has lost £5.7 million since January. Unless farmers are paid a price that at least covers the cost of production, there can be no future in the sector. It is as simple as that.

Lower welfare standards and the attractiveness to UK retailers of the flood of cheap pigmeat from the European continent is a key factor dictating the low UK price. Here lies a significant problem: the undercutting of UK pig farmers by retailers, food manufacturers and providers, be that in the food service sector or in local authority procurement, is making the viability of the UK pig sector even tougher. While I absolutely understand and appreciate the fine margins in hospitality, not least due to rising costs and seemingly ever-increasing taxation, and the tight budgets of our local authorities, more needs to be done to ensure that local British produce, be that pork, beef, lamb or other farm outputs, can be prioritised and offered to British consumers.

Fairness in the contracts for independent pig farmers is also a well-voiced concern. I recognise that the Fair Dealing Obligations (Pigs) Regulations 2025, which are designed to improve fairness and transparency across the UK pig supply chain, will come into effect for the sector next month. The regulations were introduced in recognition of the imbalance in bargaining power between individual pig producers and the relatively small number of large processors and purchasers. The changes will include principles such as mandated written contracts, a clear pricing mechanism, mutually agreeable term lengths and fair notice periods.

Those regulations will not immediately resolve every challenge facing the sector. The industry still has concerns, and has requested that the Government undertake an assessment of whether the fair dealing regulations are truly robust enough to address the pricing and margin concerns of producers when dealing with processors. Is that something the Minister would consider?

Biosecurity concerns are never far away from the pig sector. Indeed, the outbreak of African swine fever in Spain and elsewhere on the European continent and the impact that that had on the export market, including to China, is partly responsible for the oversupply and depressed prices we are currently seeing. There is real and growing concern about the emergence of diseases such as African swine fever and about foot and mouth entering the UK and infecting our livestock—no one needs reminding of the devastation that the 2001 foot and mouth outbreak had. Every possible effort must be put into ensuring that these diseases do not arrive on our shores.

In winding up, I ask the Minister to comment on what proactive and robust steps the Government are taking to ensure that diseases like African swine fever do not spread to the UK, because more robust checks are needed. His answers to my recent written parliamentary questions and a question asked by my hon. Friend the Member for Epping Forest (Dr Hudson) in the main Chamber last week show that these robust provisions are not in place. It feels like we have been lucky not to see cases of African swine fever, foot and mouth or any other significant livestock disease enter the UK. The UK’s biosecurity system cannot rely on luck, because the consequences of any of these diseases entering the UK and our livestock is hard to overstate.

Before I conclude, I want to reflect briefly on the situation in Scotland. Although I appreciate that agriculture is devolved, a robust agricultural sector and supply chain and strong food production and biosecurity controls are relevant UK-wide. Indeed, the UK pig industry, of which Scotland plays a significant part, is worth £2 billion at the farm gate, £7 billion in retail sales and, considering food service and export values, £14 billion in total. As I said, Scotland does contribute to that. The Scottish pig industry is facing even more acute pressures than those in England. With just one single processor in Brechin and distances too large to transport the pigs for processing south of the border, Scottish pig farmers are seeing an even lower standard pig price than their English counterparts.

According to data that I have seen, the price being paid has barely got above 140p a kilo since April. At present, Scottish pig farmers have no formal contracts, so there is no guarantee that their finished pigs will even be taken. Having spoken to pig farmers in my Gordon and Buchan constituency—most recently just yesterday—there is genuine fear for the future of the sector. Just since January, Scotland has lost 15% of its pig herds and the average price per kilo has fallen by more than 20%. The pig sector in Scotland is down £5.7 million since January this year, with continued losses almost guaranteed if prices remain suppressed. Almost half of those losses—more than £2.5 million—are in my constituency.

In closing, I want to ask the Minister just a single question, in the hope that it will be the most beneficial way to help the sector to address the challenges it is facing. My understanding is that Ministers in the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs last met the National Pig Association or the pig industry in November 2024. Will the Minister commit to meeting the NPA and, when he does, making sure that there is a substantial package brought forward that can help support the sector? The best way to support the sector, which is complex and facing a wide range of issues, is to meet those who know most about it. That is the best way that we can support our pig farmers going forward.

16:37

[Lee Pitcher (Doncaster East and the Isle of Axholme) (Lab)]

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Sir Christopher.

My constituency spans Doncaster and North Lincolnshire—two very proud agricultural areas with a long and important connection to British pig farming. We are part of a region at the heart of British pork production. Yorkshire and the Humber accounts for around 40% of England’s pig population. Pigmeat contributed £499 million to the region’s agricultural output in 2024. The Isle of Axholme also has deep roots in the farming and food traditions of Lincolnshire. Few products symbolise that heritage more clearly than the Lincolnshire sausage, yet consumers cannot always be sure that a product carrying a Union flag, British branding or a traditional British name actually contains pork from pigs born, reared and slaughtered in the United Kingdom. We must address that problem.

Unprocessed pork must already carry origin information, but once that meat becomes bacon, ham, sausage or gammon, the picture becomes far less clear. Pork can be imported and then cured, sliced or packaged in Britain, while the finished product is presented to shoppers as British. The place where food is packaged is not the same as the origin of the food itself. For pork, the origin is where the pig was born, reared and slaughtered. That is the information that consumers want to know and should be able to see clearly.

[Aphra Brandreth (Chester South and Eddisbury) (Con)]

The hon. Member is making a really important point about the need for consumers to be clear about where their food is produced and reared. I draw his attention to my private Member’s Bill on that very topic. I hope that he and others across the House will support it.

[Lee Pitcher]

The hon. Lady has my full support—and, I am pretty sure, that of my farmers.

My farmers have told me how much this issue matters to them. When consumers can easily identify British pork, they actively choose to buy it. That supports British farms, British jobs and our rural communities, while rewarding producers who meet the high standards of animal welfare, environmental stewardship and food safety that we rightly expect. There is nothing wrong with imported food being sold in Britain, provided it is labelled honestly. What is wrong is allowing the true origin of the meat to be hidden behind British branding. The principle should be simple: the Union flag on a pork product should mean British pork, not simply British packaging.

I therefore ask the Minister to genuinely consider—I was going to say genu-swine-ly, but I will not do that—extending mandatory country-of-origin labelling to processed pork products, requiring that information to appear clearly on the front of the packet, and ensuring that unqualified claims that a product is British are reserved for pork from pigs born, reared and slaughtered in the United Kingdom.

Pig farmers do not need another expression of sympathy; they need practical action that helps consumers to identify British produce and choose it with confidence. When shoppers pick up a packet carrying the Union flag or drawing on the proud reputation of UK farming, they should not have to search through the small print to discover where the pork came from. British branding should mean British farming.

16:41

[Edward Morello (West Dorset) (LD)]

It is a pleasure to serve with you in the Chair, Sir Christopher. I congratulate the hon. Member for Gordon and Buchan (Harriet Cross) on securing this important and timely debate.

Pig farming is an important part of our rural economy in West Dorset. Alongside several family-run pig farms, we are home to a large integrated producer and businesses that support local employment, veterinary services, feed supplies, agricultural engineering, haulage and food processing. We are also fortunate to have Dorset’s last remaining independent abattoir, which processes around 100 pigs a week and provides a vital local route to market for small family farms.

Since August 2025, the standard pig price has fallen from around 208p per kilogram to approximately 178p. However, many independent producers have said that they are receiving far less—in some cases, only 130p to 140p per kilogram. Some farmers are losing as much as £50 on every pig they sell. That is unsustainable. Once again, it is independent farmers who have borne the greatest burden. Around half of the UK’s pig herd is owned by independent producers. If they disappear, rebuilding the capacity will take many years. We should remember that the United Kingdom is only about 58% self-sufficient in pork. We should never accept a situation where British farmers, who produce to some of the highest welfare standards anywhere in the world, are undercut by cheaper imports produced to standards that would not be permitted here.

No future trade agreement should weaken UK food safety, undermine British farmers or lower our animal welfare standards. West Dorset farmers are proud of the standards they have achieved. Every farmer I have spoken to wants to see further improvements in animal welfare. I want to see, as they do, an end to farrow crates and to inhumane or distressing methods of slaughter, such as carbon dioxide stunning for pigs, through the implementation of DEFRA’s 2025 recommendations by the end of this Parliament.

We should work together to prevent unnecessarily painful practices in farming, but it must be properly funded. Farmers operating on small, or in many cases, non-existent, profit margins cannot absorb further mandated changes unless they are properly funded and accompanied by practical support. One pig farmer in my constituency told me that they fully support moving towards better systems, but estimate that a realistic transition could take up to 15 years. For many family farms already carrying debt from previous reforms, unfunded regulation is not an option. If we move too quickly without proper support, we risk reducing British production and replacing it with imported pork products produced to lower welfare and food safety standards.

Small and medium-sized abattoirs continue to disappear at an alarming rate, with fewer than 200 now remaining across the United Kingdom. Rising inspection costs, energy prices, waste disposal costs and increasing regulatory burdens have all contributed to their decline. For independent pig farmers in West Dorset, our local abattoir is essential infrastructure. Without it, transport distances increase, haulage costs rise and farmers lose access to local markets. Supporting local processing capacity is therefore every bit as important as supporting primary production.

Farmers manage more than 70% of our land. They underpin our food security and sustain the economies of rural communities such as West Dorset. All they are asking for is fair markets, fair treatment, practical regulation, acknowledgment of all their hard work and the confidence to invest in their future.

16:44

[Ben Goldsborough (South Norfolk) (Lab)]

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Sir Christopher. I refer Members to my entry in the Register of Members’ Financial Interests.

Around one in five pigs in the country are reared in my part of the world: Norfolk and Suffolk. That means that when we talk about the future of the pig sector, we are not talking about an abstract issue; we are talking about thousands of local jobs, family farms, and a sector worth billions to our local economy. The industry faces plenty of challenges. Rising costs, global competition and pressure on farm incomes have been covered, so I want to focus on the one issue that could undo everything else if we get it wrong: biosecurity.

African swine fever remains the single biggest threat facing our pig industry. It has spread across Europe and Asia, but thankfully has never been detected here in the UK. We have a window of opportunity to keep it that way, but only if we take border biosecurity seriously. If ASF got into this country, the consequences would be devastating for farmers and could cost the industry an estimated £100 million. Once it is here, we cannot simply rewind the clock, so prevention has to come first. What consideration has the Department given to providing the public with more information about the risks of bringing meat products into the UK, strengthening checks on personal imports and introducing measures such as amnesty bins before customs clearance?

The previous Government created what many in the industry see as a weakness in our border arrangements by moving customs checks to Sevington, over 20 miles inland from Dover. That leaves a significant stretch between the port and the inspection site. Will the Minister look again at whether that arrangement provides the level of biosecurity our farming sector deserves? I would suggest that it does not.

Good biosecurity is not just about stopping disease at the border; it is also about making sure that farms are as resilient as possible if the worst should happen. The animal health and welfare pathway is a good example. It provides funded veterinary visits, including dedicated biosecurity advice, yet I understand that uptake remains at only about 7%. What more is being done to ensure that farmers know about the scheme and feel confident in accessing it?

Finally, I want to touch on vaccines. When witnesses from the Veterinary Medicines Directorate gave evidence to the Environment, Food and Rural Affairs Committee, I asked about the resilience of veterinary vaccine supply chains. Their evidence highlighted the risk posed by manufacturing disruption, changing demand and wider global shocks. What is the Department doing in support of international efforts to develop an effective ASF vaccine and to ensure that, when one is available, we have resilient supply chains capable of getting it to farmers when they need it?

Our pig farmers produce world-class food to some of the highest welfare standards anywhere. They deserve a Government who match their effort by taking biosecurity just as seriously. If we get this right, we will protect livelihoods, strengthen food security and avoid an entirely preventable crisis. I hope the Minister will continue to make that his priority.

16:48

[John Lamont (Berwickshire, Roxburgh and Selkirk) (Con)]

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Sir Christopher. I congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for Gordon and Buchan (Harriet Cross) on securing the debate. We do not hear about pig farming as much as we hear about other farming sectors, but it is essential to our food system and rural economy. While this debate concerns the UK sector, I want to focus on the pressures facing producers in Scotland.

As we have heard, the Scottish pig sector is under enormous strain from low market prices, rising costs, processing constraints and competition from imports. Many farmers are now selling pigs well below the cost of production. NFU Scotland estimates that Scottish members of the United Pig Co-operative lost around £2.7 million in the first four months of this year alone. Some producers were losing up to £37 per pig, while a typical 500-sow unit could face annual losses approaching half a million pounds. Those figures are unsustainable for family farming businesses.

The consequences extend beyond individual farms. Scotland’s pig sector contributes around £300 million to the economy and supports around 2,200 jobs, as well as haulage firms, feed merchants, vets, processors and other rural businesses. Once that critical mass is lost, it will be exceptionally difficult to rebuild. In my constituency, farmers such as Adam Marshall in Berwickshire have spent decades investing in high-quality Scottish pork and adding value through local enterprises, including Reiver Country Farm Foods and Oink. That entrepreneurial spirit should be encouraged, but even innovative, well-run family businesses cannot absorb sustained losses indefinitely. If businesses such as Adam’s are struggling despite doing everything right, that should alarm us all.

I welcome the Scottish Government’s recognition of the crisis through their £2 million emergency package for independent producers, but the industry is clear that it does not go far enough; the losses being sustained are far greater than the support on offer. Further assistance will be needed to protect Scotland’s pig sector, rural jobs and domestic food production.

The UK Government must act too. Ministers should urgently convene an industry roundtable and resume regular engagement with the National Pig Association. It is concerning that no bilateral meeting has taken place since November 2024. The Government should review whether the fair dealing obligations are providing the protection that producers were promised, and farmers must not be left carrying an unfair share of commercial risk. We should also strengthen country-of-origin labelling, particularly in food service, so that consumers can support Scottish and British pork produced to high welfare and environmental standards.

Finally, biosecurity must remain a priority. African swine fever poses a serious threat, and robust border controls and disease preparedness are essential for protecting food security and the rural economy. Our pig farmers are resilient and innovative. They are asking not for special treatment, but for fair markets, sensible regulation, meaningful engagement and support proportionate to the crisis. I hope the Minister will listen and act.

16:51

[Terry Jermy (South West Norfolk) (Lab)]

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairship, Sir Christopher. I thank the hon. Member for Gordon and Buchan (Harriet Cross) for securing this important debate.

I am very proud of the more than 500 farms in my constituency. Since I was elected, I have been delighted to meet with more than 100 of them. Many of them are predominantly arable, as one might expect in Norfolk, but we also have plenty of farms that include pigs as either a significant or a smaller part of their operations. Farmer Ed Lankfer, based at Wereham in my constituency, was kind enough to host an NFU roundtable that covered a whole range of issues facing the farming industry. It has been said that there are more pigs than people in Norfolk, so when there are issues in the industry—as there currently are—communities like mine very much feel the impact.

The UK pig sector is going through a difficult period due to an oversupply of pigs, stagnant demand and falling EU prices that have put a downward pressure on UK prices. At the same time, there are rising costs, exacerbated by the conflict with Iran, as well as the constant risk of disease such as African swine fever. We may not have seen the worst of it yet. As I highlighted at DEFRA oral questions last week, the National Pig Association anticipates that by November we could see 10,000 to 15,000 pigs per week without an outlet to be sold, placing a significant financial burden on farmers and risking animal welfare issues.

Sadly, as in so many aspects of farming, there is a huge unfairness in the pig industry. That unfairness in the supply chain is hitting independent pig farmers, including those in my constituency. Independent producers are responsible for roughly 50% of the pig herd in the UK, and very often they lose out first and are the most financially squeezed in the industry.

So often when I meet farmers, we talk about issues that directly connect with my Labour values, particularly around fairness and justice. I urge the Minister to consider those values when discussing what can be done to support the pig industry. There is a huge power imbalance in the supply chain, and a lack of credible contractual relations between far too many pig sellers and buyers. Specifically, will the Minister review whether the fair dealing obligations are being upheld and whether they are robust enough?

Tackling the power imbalance, not just in the pig industry but in farming more generally, needs to be at the forefront of this Labour Government’s fightback to support British farming. The commitment to co-operatives included in the farming road map could support a change in that direction, and I very much welcome that approach, but we need to move quickly to achieve the change we seek. Smaller family farms are increasingly being squeezed out of operation, and we must act before it is too late.

We should do this not just because we recognise the importance of food security, but because of our commitment to achieve economic growth in every postcode, including in rural communities like mine. There is huge growth potential in rural areas, and so often it is the family farm that underpins that growth. If the farm is doing well, it will invest in new machinery, undertake repairs and maintenance to buildings, and reinvest in the local environment. The lack of profitability and weakened resilience in the industry is hampering that growth and, by default, diminishing the prosperity of rural communities.

Later today, the Labour rural research group, which I am proud to be a member of, will publish its latest report, “The Future of the Rural Economy”. I will not give too much away, but it confirms that there is huge public support for farming, and for the Government to do more to support the industry, and it recognises that food security is national security. Some 87% of respondents to our survey agreed that it is very important to sustain a strong UK farming industry, and 77% welcomed increased Government investment in the farming sector. As a Labour Government, we have an opportunity to do much more to support the pig industry, farming more generally, and our rural communities. I look forward to the Government grasping that opportunity.

16:55

[Brian Mathew (Melksham and Devizes) (LD)]

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairship, Sir Christopher. I thank the hon. Member for Gordon and Buchan (Harriet Cross) for securing this important debate.

Since becoming the Member of Parliament for Melksham and Devizes, I have been extremely fortunate to visit a number of farms, including pig farms, and meet many outstanding local farmers, including Cameron Naughton at West End farm, an independent pig farm with an attached farm shop. Cameron recently wrote to me to share his thoughts and to ask me to represent him, as an independent farmer, in this debate. He told me that his business is losing about £5,000 a week. Operating a high-welfare, outdoor-bred, RSPCA-assured farm like Cameron’s inevitably carries a much higher cost of production, but what he finds incomprehensible is that prices to the consumer keep rising while the supermarket supply chains continue to make substantial profits that are not reflected in what farmers are paid.

Independent producers like Cameron are bearing the brunt of a market that has been declining since 2025, driven by a combination of factors: an oversupply of pigs, stagnating demand and falling prices to the farmer. With the UK pig breeding herd at a historic low, high-quality British products like Cameron’s risk being replaced by lower-welfare imported meat, which brings with it a heightened risk of diseases such as swine fever and foot and mouth disease. The European Food Safety Authority has reported a 76% increase this year in African swine fever outbreaks among pigs in the EU.

I urge the Government, and particularly the incoming Prime Minister, not to forget our farmers and our rural communities. I ask them to sit down with the industry, particularly with independent farmers like Cameron, to determine what can be done to secure the survival of this vital sector and to help secure our country’s vital food security.

16:58

[Graham Stuart (Beverley and Holderness) (Con)]

It is a great pleasure to participate in this debate, Sir Christopher, and to have the Minister in his place.

I agree with practically every word that has been said by colleagues across the House about the importance of the pig industry. It is the largest agricultural output of Yorkshire and the Humber and worth more than half a billion pounds a year, but as colleagues have set out, there has been a gradual concentration into what is now no more than about four major processors across the United Kingdom. That puts up the costs of transport. More importantly still, it means a loss of competition and the potential for that imbalance in market power to be used in a way that is counter to fairness—as the hon. Member for South West Norfolk (Terry Jermy) mentioned when talking about Labour values—and to the interests of the consumer. If there is one thing the Minister needs to do, aside from keeping our pig industry safe from biohazards, it is ensure that there is healthy competition in the market so that the consumer is well served.

Earlier this afternoon, I spoke to a local Holderness pig farmer who was at the Great Yorkshire Show. She told me that she has had notice on contracts for the processing of the pigs, and she no longer has anywhere to send her pigs from 13 August. The pigs are literally going to be backing up on the farm, with nowhere to go.

[Harriet Cross]

13 August is obviously a very important date, because it is when the fair dealing regulations come in. There have been warnings from the sector that that sort of thing will happen and about why it is so important. I ask the Minister for a proper review of these obligations to assess how they are working for the sector, so that we do not have situations like the one that my right hon. Friend has just mentioned.

[Graham Stuart]

I have represented pig farmers in Holderness for 21 years—it has always been volatile, and the farmers accept the volatility, but never has there been quite such a concatenation of issues all at the same time, including the introduction of the regulations and the closure of abattoirs. Scotland was hit first, as my hon. Friend will know, with the closure of abattoirs there. The abattoir at Spalding has now gone. This is a very serious issue, which I hope the Minister will be able to look at.

Processors are also buying out the independents. Again, looking at the raw political elements of this situation, the truth is that independents who are struggling to find anywhere to have their pigs processed become more vulnerable and can be bought out, in which case competition will be further reduced.

I ask the Minister to use his good offices to get his officials to engage with major processors to ensure that no independent farmer is left unable to have their pigs processed, because that would create not only an animal welfare crisis, but a financial crisis for farmers, making them easy meat—pardon the language, Sir Christopher—for others to buy them out.

This genuinely is a crisis; the danger is that one hears that word too often, but this situation absolutely is one, not only for pig farmers, who are very important to my constituency, but for consumers in the long term. I hope the Minister will take that very seriously on board and will look to intervene, to ensure that every farmer has somewhere to have their pigs processed.

17:01

[Aphra Brandreth (Chester South and Eddisbury) (Con)]

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Sir Christopher, and I congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for Gordon and Buchan (Harriet Cross) on securing this debate. The financial pressures facing pig farmers—indeed, farmers in every sector of our rural economy—are serious. Independent producers have seen prices collapse and contracts withdrawn, and it is important that we take time to recognise those challenges.

I will focus on something that is fundamental to the future of the pig industry and indeed to the health of our nation: biosecurity. Last month I asked DEFRA whether it had met the National Pig Association since the last recorded meeting, more than nine months ago, the response confirmed that Ministers have not met the NPA directly for a bilateral meeting. Perhaps if they had, they would be more aware of the NPA’s stark warning that the UK remains poorly protected when it comes to biosecurity.

An outbreak of disease here would devastate British agriculture and our supply chains, impacting the taxpayer to the tune of billions of pounds. We must learn from the past. The 2001 foot and mouth outbreak cost the public and private sectors the equivalent of almost £15 billion in today’s money. An outbreak of African swine fever would immediately close export markets worth around £500 million each year. Yet despite those risks, the NPA warns that large volumes of illegally imported meat continue to enter the UK from countries where those diseases are present.

I hope that the Minister recognises the severity and urgency of this matter. I urge him to set out what steps the Department is taking to ensure that staff at borders and checkpoints are appropriately resourced and trained to manage the risk of imports, and how DEFRA Ministers are working with colleagues from across Government, including the Home Office and the Cabinet Office, to ensure a cohesive and joined-up approach.

As the Government negotiate a new sanitary and phytosanitary agreement with the European Union, we need reassurances from the Minister that the Government will not cave in any way on our world-leading biosecurity standards in an attempt to placate and pacify the EU. Reduced border checks under any future SPS agreement could undermine our market and increase the risk of animal diseases entering the UK.

Does the Minister recognise that risk? Would he consider providing multi-year funding for the Dover Port Health Authority and other agencies that protect our borders, to strengthen enforcement and deter criminal activity? British pig farmers have shown real leadership: they have reduced antibiotic use by almost 70%, invested in higher welfare standards and continually improved animal health. They are doing their part. DEFRA must now step up, match their commitment to our food security and wellbeing, and act accordingly.

17:05

[Jim Shannon (Strangford) (DUP)]

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairship again, Sir Christopher. I thank the hon. Member for Gordon and Buchan (Harriet Cross) for setting the scene incredibly well.

It is a pleasure to champion a sector that is not only vital to my constituency, but a cornerstone of the entire economy of Northern Ireland: our fantastic, resilient yet deeply struggling pig industry. When we talk about agriculture in Northern Ireland, we are talking about the lifeblood of our rural communities. There are some 27,000 family farms across the province and our intensive sectors, particularly pork and poultry, punch vastly above their weight. Northern Ireland holds the highest density of pigs and poultry anywhere in the United Kingdom, and for a nation of some 1.9 million, we produce more chickens and pigs than Scotland and Wales combined—that is not to boast, but it is a fact of life and a statistic I want to put on record. We feed millions of people across the United Kingdom and the globe with world-class, top-quality, traceable pork products. As I stand here today, however our independent pig farmers are facing an existential crisis.

[Adam Dance (Yeovil) (LD)]

As the hon. Member knows, small abattoirs are at breaking point in almost every imaginable way. One big issue is contradicting and inconsistent inspections. Does he agree that the Government urgently need to set out a clearer plan to streamline the regulation system?

[Jim Shannon]

I certainly do. That is one of the things that the hon. Member for Gordon and Buchan and others have asked for, and I look forward to hearing the Minister’s response.

Sadly, pig farming cannot simply be switched on and off like a tap. It requires immense long-term investment, precision and dedication, but it has been squeezed to the absolute limit. Our farmers have battled skyrocketing input costs: feed, energy and fertiliser prices have gone through the roof. I declare an interest as a member of the Ulster Farmers Union, which has been forced to hold emergency meetings with major processors such as Sofina Foods at its Cookstown site, because of severe contract reductions and reductions in weekly slaughter volumes. Our independent family farms are being left adrift in a sea of commercial uncertainty and Ulster Farmers Union has had to take those concerns directly to major retailers.

I ask the Minister in his speech to take up the issue of cost, and specifically what farmers are getting for their products and what Tesco—I name it—and other large supermarket chains are getting. The supply chain is simply broken, and we need intervention. The Northern Ireland Executive have to deal with the Department of Agriculture, Environment and Rural Affairs back home, but macroeconomic stability, supply chain legislation and national food security are firmly the responsibility of this Government.

Our family farms need protection from immediate financial ruin and the Government must engage with the major supermarket giants to ensure that they are paying fair and reasonable prices. If we do not support our pig farmers right now, we will see generational family businesses shut their gates forever. Let us remember this one thing: if there are no farmers, there is no food.

17:08

[Dr Danny Chambers (Winchester) (LD)]

It is an honour to serve under your chairship, Sir Christopher. I pay tribute to the hon. Member for Gordon and Buchan (Harriet Cross) for securing this timely debate.

I grew up on a sheep and beef farm, and when I was about 11 years old, I bought 13 pigs from market to take home. They became more like pets; I used to play football with them—

[Graham Stuart]

You used to kick them around?

[Dr Chambers]

No, I used to play football matches with them. They were a lot of fun, and I learned that of all livestock, they are potentially the most intelligent and certainly some of the most affectionate animals. I had a particularly interesting visit to Sparsholt agricultural college in Winchester with the National Pig Association. I used to love going there when I was a vet to treat the animals; now I go there as an MP to look at its teaching and facilities. It has a fantastic indoor, high-welfare unit that delivers piglets without the use of farrowing crates, and I pay tribute to the staff there for their teaching and the welfare standards that they maintain.

To touch on something that many Members have spoken about today, one of the top issues threatening the pig industry is biosecurity at the border. I have been to Dover and met the vets and border inspectors there who look at the potentially illegal meat coming in and the tonnes of it that get seized. The crazy thing is that currently, if I were caught smuggling meat into the UK, I could not be arrested and my vehicle could not be seized, but the meat would be confiscated and my vehicle would have to be cleaned, because it would be a biosecurity risk. The only deterrent to trying to smuggle illegal meat into the UK would be that I might get my van cleaned for free at the taxpayer’s expense. That is absolutely ridiculous. I totally understand that enforcing biosecurity at such a busy border is difficult and comes with huge challenges, there are not even suitable deterrents in place for people who get caught. I urge the Minister at the very least to look at implementing some.

One thing that the pig industry has done phenomenally well is to reduce antibiotic use by 72% since 2015—just over 10 years. That is hugely important, not only for animal welfare, but for public health. Antimicrobial resistance is like a slow pandemic; it never gets media attention, but it will kill 39 million people by 2050 if we do not take action. It is important that we do not undercut our high animal welfare and farming standards with products from countries that have lower standards. Countries that use antibiotics as growth promoters are not only farming with lower welfare standards, but contributing to this huge public health crisis, so we must do our bit to tackle that issue.

The hon. Member for Doncaster East and the Isle of Axholme (Lee Pitcher) mentioned labelling. It is hugely important that we can identify where meat has been produced. Consumers are currently being hoodwinked; they believe that they are buying products from animals reared in the UK, but it turns out that they were only processed in the UK. They want to support British farmers and high animal welfare standards, so it is completely wrong that they are being hoodwinked into buying products that potentially undermine UK standards.

My hon. Friend the Member for West Dorset (Edward Morello) made a very important point about the lack of small abattoirs in the UK. Their closure is a huge animal welfare issue, as animals have to be transported further than necessary to be slaughtered, and a huge economic problem too.

I urge the Minister to see how the Government can work with the pig industry to move away from the CO₂ stunning of pigs. It is a big welfare concern, and the British Veterinary Association and others are keen for the industry to make a sustainable transition away from it. It causes a lot of concern to a lot of constituents, and it really upsets me as a vet.

Finally, I urge the Minister to meet the National Pig Association as soon as possible to look at supporting UK farmers, maintaining high animal welfare standards and improving our nation’s food security.

17:13

[Robbie Moore (Keighley and Ilkley) (Con)]

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Sir Christopher. I thank my hon. Friend the Member for Gordon and Buchan (Harriet Cross) for securing this important debate.

The British pig sector is in crisis, and our pig farmers need our help. My hon. Friends the Members for Gordon and Buchan and for Berwickshire, Roxburgh and Selkirk (John Lamont) rightly spoke the challenges north of the border. My right hon. Friend the Member for Beverley and Holderness (Graham Stuart) rightly called on the Minister to ensure that no independent farmer is unable to have their pigs processed. That is absolutely the crux of the issue.

Let us be clear about what is at stake. The British pig sector contributes about £14 billion to our economy—£2 billion at the farm gate, £7 billion in retail sales, and exports to 88 counties worth almost £500 million. It is a major part of our farming industry, and we cannot afford to let the current financial challenges go any further.

[Jim Shannon]

The hon. Gentleman is right to outline the exports from the United Kingdom. In Northern Ireland, we export almost 80% of our product, so it is even more critical for us.

[Robbie Moore]

Absolutely. There must be a UK-wide approach.

The warning signs have been there for months. Since last autumn, the sector has been hit by oversupply, stagnant demand, falling European prices, factory disruptions and rising costs all at once. At one point earlier this year, around 100,000 pigs were backed up on British farms. That backlog has largely cleared now, but not without cost. The standard pig price has fallen by around 30p a kilogram, from roughly 208p to 178p.

That is only part of the picture, because the vast majority of independent farmers will be receiving much less than that, as was noted by my hon. Friend the Member for Gordon and Buchan. No market can survive on those terms. Without urgent action, the sector faces being pushed towards collapse. It is our independent producers who are bearing the brunt of the pressures faced by the sector, with thousands now seeing their contracts terminated early by major processors. Somewhere between 12,000 and 14,000 pigs a week are affected by notices being served on producers.

The Government simply cannot stand on the sidelines and hope that the market corrects itself, because by autumn, the industry fears that up to 10,000 to 15,000 pigs a week could have no market at all. If nothing changes, we know what follows—more farm closures, more herds reduced and more businesses walking away from the industry altogether.

The fair dealing obligations for pig contracts were brought in to fix the problem exposed by the last crisis—unequal bargaining power, poor contracts and a lack of fairness between producers and processors. We can all agree that those were worthwhile aims but if, during the implementation period, producers are still seeing contracts terminated early in record numbers and our farmers are still losing money on every pig they sell, the Government have to ask whether the regulations are doing what Parliament originally intended. Will the Minister commit today to an urgent assessment of whether the regulations are fit for purpose?

As my hon. Friend the Member for Chester South and Eddisbury (Aphra Brandreth) noted, there are also longer-term challenges. The threat from African swine fever and foot and mouth disease is real and ongoing. Protecting our borders from illegal meat imports and strengthening our disease defences must be a priority. What are the Government doing to work across Departments, including with the Home Office, to make sure that these live issues are addressed?

The industry also needs a sensible workforce strategy. Like much of agriculture, pig farming is struggling with labour shortages. It needs a strategy that builds a workforce based on domestic skills and apprenticeships.

We must also address the issue of transparency. Customers want to buy British and retail labelling has come a long way, but food services still rely heavily on imported pork, often with far less clarity about where that pork comes from. British producers deserve a level playing field and British consumers deserve to know what is on their plate.

That is why the Conservative party has proposed closing the loophole that lets imported food, once merely processed or packaged in the UK, carry branding that many shoppers reasonably mistake as British. What progress has been made since the Government’s response on the food labelling consultation? Do the Government intend to strengthen country of origin rules?

British pig farmers are not asking the Government to solve every single commercial challenge, but they are asking for regulations that genuinely protect producers rather than leave them exposed. Above all, they are asking the Government to recognise the strategic importance of British food production before more independent producers simply disappear for good.

We cannot lose more of this vital industry. For the sake of our farmers, our rural communities and our country’s long-term food security, the Government must engage with key stakeholders. It is disappointing to hear that the last bilateral meeting between Ministers and the National Pig Association was back in September 2025. I call on the Minister to have an urgent meeting—I understand there may be one tomorrow. If that is the case, will the Minister guarantee that those meetings will continue at pace and at regular intervals with the British Pig Association, so that we can make sure that this vital industry is protected long into the future?

17:19

[The Minister of State, Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Stephen Morgan)]

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Sir Christopher. I congratulate the hon. Member for Gordon and Buchan (Harriet Cross) on securing this incredibly important debate, and on the constructive manner in which she contributed this afternoon.

I am grateful to all Members who have contributed to the debate and for the thoughtful way in which they have raised a number of concerns currently facing the pig sector and their constituencies. As my hon. Friends the Members for South West Norfolk (Terry Jermy) and for South Norfolk (Ben Goldsborough) passionately alluded to, the pig sector is woven into the fabric of the UK’s food system, underpinning food security, sustaining rural communities and driving agricultural productivity across the country. Beyond its economic importance, pork has long held a place at the nation’s table, from cherished regional specialities and traditional Sunday roasts to the everyday meals enjoyed by millions of families. As both a source of nourishment and a part of our culinary heritage, British pig production remains integral to what we eat.

As my hon. Friend the Member for South West Norfolk said, however, this is a moment of considerable pressure for the sector. Pig producers are navigating a period of profound difficulty, confronting a range of economic and structural challenges across all nations of the UK. I thank my Scottish and Northern Irish colleagues for their contributions this afternoon.

Recent reports have highlighted concerns about processors seeking to reduce pig numbers and producers—particularly independent producers—receiving notice that their contracts will be terminated. Those developments reflect a difficult market environment. A combination of increased production in recent years, changing consumer patterns and wider pressures in European pork markets has resulted in excess supply across parts of the sector. We recognise that this market adjustment is creating uncertainty for producers, particularly those affected by changes to supply arrangements.

That is why the Government will continue to engage with the industry as it responds to the challenges it faces. I personally assure all Members that I have prioritised meeting with the sector and, indeed, am meeting with the National Pig Association tomorrow to discuss the pressures that the sector is facing. I also note the NPA’s request for ongoing dialogue in its briefing for today’s debate. I hope tomorrow is the start of that relationship.

Turning to intervention powers, in the event of exceptional market disruption, the Government have powers under section 21 of the Agriculture Act 2020 to provide support to farmers in England. Agriculture is a devolved matter, and there are similar powers available to devolved Governments should they consider intervention in the sector appropriate. The powers under the Agriculture Act in England are intended to deal with unforeseen short-term shocks to agricultural markets, where there is a significant adverse effect on price achievable for one or more agricultural products. Section 21 powers were previously used during the exceptional disruption faced by the pig sector in 2021, when a combination of reduced processing capacity, the impact of the covid-19 pandemic, interruptions to CO₂ supply and a shortage of skilled butchers led to a substantial backlog of pigs on farm.

We recognise the challenges facing the sector today, but our assessment is that the circumstances are materially different from those seen in 2021. The current pressures reflect broader market conditions rather than a breakdown in processing capacity or market function. As such, the threshold for intervention in England under section 21 of the Agriculture Act is not currently met. As it is a devolved matter, it is for devolved Governments to take a judgment on intervention.

[Graham Stuart]

I congratulate the Minister on the meeting he will have tomorrow and his offer to engage. I gently press him on reaching out. He has made it clear that he does not think that the current situation matches that of 2021. I accept that, but could he reach out and use his good offices to ensure that no farmer is left with pigs backing up on their farm? Could he lean, in the most genial manner possible, on the processors to ensure that farmers get those pigs off the farm and processed? They would be very grateful if the Minister could do so.

[Stephen Morgan]

I am very alive to the issues. That is why engagement with the sector is very important. I have powers available to me, if necessary, but we are keen to monitor the situation. That is why today’s debate has been so important.

We are aware that the sector experienced a temporary backlog on farms earlier this year. The industry took action to address the issue, including through increasing processing capacity, and the backlog has now been cleared. Although that was a welcome development, wider pressures remain and we will continue to monitor the situation closely.

Turning to points made by Members about Government actions to strengthen fairness and resilience in the pig sector, the hon. Member for Gordon and Buchan rightly raised the Fair Dealing Obligations (Pigs) Regulations 2025. They are designed to end unfair contract practices and give British pig farmers greater transparency and certainty in their commercial relationships. I will reflect on her points. The regulations will be fully in force from 13 April this year, when all contracts for the purchase of pigs will need to be compliant. While we are aware of some processors serving notice on their producers or reducing contract volumes, our understanding is that these notices are being issued in line with contractual provisions. The fair dealing regulations are enforced by the agricultural supply chain adjudicator, which producers can contact if they are concerned that their contracts are not compliant with the regulations. I assure the hon. Member that the regulations will be subject to statutory review processes that will assess their effectiveness and whether any changes may be required in future.

Alongside the UK-wide fair dealing obligation regulations, support is also available to pig farmers in England through the animal health and welfare pathway. Pig farmers can receive £648 for a vet on-farm to look at general animal health and welfare issues and carry out testing. Farmers can receive up to £1,087 for further testing and advice if their farm has PRRS. In 2026, £50 million was made available through the farming equipment and technology fund to help farmers in England to improve animal health and welfare, productivity and slurry management.

On the issues raised by my hon. Friend the Member for South West Norfolk, the ambition of our farming road map is not simply to help farmers weather immediate challenges, but to create the conditions for a farming sector that is productive, resilient and profitable for generations to come. That means backing innovation, improving animal health and welfare, strengthening fairness across the supply chains and ensuring that farmers are better equipped to respond to changing and challenging markets. A strong domestic pig sector has an important role to play in delivering food security, supporting rural growth and maintaining the high standards that British consumers rightly expect.

By investing in productivity and resilience today, we can help to ensure that British pig farming remains competitive and successful in the years ahead. My hon. Friend the Member for South Norfolk and the hon. Member for Gordon and Buchan raised the important issue of African swine fever. I assure her that to help to prevent the uncontrolled movement of meat products into the United Kingdom, DEFRA has introduced safeguard measures that prohibit personal imports of pork into GB from the EU. The commercial import of pork from areas under African swine fever controls is not permitted. We are also funding the Port of Dover to ensure that illegal movement of meat into England does not take place. Since 2022, we have provided over £14 million of operational funding to the Dover port association.

I thank Members again for their thoughtful contributions to the debate. The concerns they raised have reinforced the importance of continuing to work closely with producers, processors and the wider industry. Our commitment is clear: to support a farming sector that not only is able to withstand future shocks, but is confident, profitable and able to seize the opportunities that lie ahead.

17:27

[Harriet Cross]

Given that there is a Division in the House, I will keep this very short. I thank everyone for participating in the debate. I hope the Minister’s meetings will be constructive. I ask him to go in with an open mind and listen to what the NPA is saying. It is not sounding a false alarm; it is genuinely very worried about the future of its sector.

Question put and agreed to.

Resolved,

That this House has considered Government support for pig farmers.

17:28

Sitting adjourned.

Written Corrections

Tuesday 14th July 2026 Written Corrections

Tuesday 14 July 2026

Ministerial Corrections

Tuesday 14th July 2026 Written Corrections

Transport

Tuesday 14th July 2026 Written Corrections

East Midlands Railway Collision

The following extract is from the statement on the East Midlands Railway Collision on 22 June 2026.

[The Secretary of State for Transport (Heidi Alexander)]

With permission, Madam Deputy Speaker, I would like to make a statement on the tragic collision between two passenger trains on Friday 19 June… I was particularly moved to hear of a ticket inspector on the Corby train who, despite being injured, radioed in to close the rail line while checking that everyone else was okay. As I have said before, I truly believe the best of us show up in the worst of times, and that was the case here.

[Official Report, 22 June 2026; Vol. 788, c. 43.]

Written correction submitted by the Secretary of State for Transport, the right hon. Member for Swindon South (Heidi Alexander):

[The Secretary of State for Transport (Heidi Alexander)]

With permission, Madam Deputy Speaker, I would like to make a statement on the tragic collision between two passenger trains on Friday 19 June… I was particularly moved to hear of a train manager on the Corby train who, despite being injured, radioed in to close the rail line while checking that everyone else was okay. As I have said before, I truly believe the best of us show up in the worst of times, and that was the case here.

Business and Trade

Tuesday 14th July 2026 Written Corrections

Business and Trade Questions

The following extracts are from Business and Trade Questions on 2 July 2026.

[Richard Baker]

The EU is a key trading partner for Scotland, accounting for almost 40% of Scotland’s international exports. Can the Minister reassure my constituents in Glenrothes and Mid Fife that while we wait for a new date for the EU summit, this Government will press ahead with plans to align with more areas of the single market, so that we can continue to remove barriers for our businesses to trade with Europe?

[Chris Bryant]

My hon. Friend is absolutely right, not least because in the most recent figures, our trade in goods with Europe has fallen by 2% in the last year, whereas our trade in services has grown by 7%.

[Official Report, 2 July 2026; Vol. 788, c. 1008.]

Written correction submitted by the Minister for Trade, the hon. Member for Rhondda and Ogmore (Chris Bryant):

[Chris Bryant]

My hon. Friend is absolutely right, not least because in the most recent figures, our exports in goods with the EU have fallen by 2% in the last year, whereas our exports in services have grown by 7%...

[John Slinger (Rugby) (Lab)]

When I visited NDT Equipment Ltd in my constituency, the director Dan Lenton showed me the ultrasonic test calibration blocks and reference pieces that it uses and supplies to manufacturers in a wide range of sectors in the UK and abroad. This steel is not manufactured in the UK; it is imported and is high grade. I know Ministers are being flexible and talking to hon. Members. Will the Minister please consider the grade of steel that the company uses, which I believe is EN3B, and exempt it from the tariffs?

[Chris Bryant]

We have already laid out our steel trade measures, which are there to ensure that the UK has a steel industry. This is vital for our economic future. I want to make clear that 73% of all steel imports into the UK are not in scope of the measure, but I will, of course, look at this specific issue…

[Official Report, 2 July 2026; Vol. 788, c. 1022.]

Written correction submitted by the Minister for Trade, the hon. Member for Rhondda and Ogmore (Chris Bryant):

[Chris Bryant]

We have already laid out our steel trade measures, which are there to ensure that the UK has a steel industry. This is vital for our economic future. I want to make clear that 74% of all steel imports by value into the UK are not in scope of the measure, but I will, of course, look at this specific issue…

Other Correction

Tuesday 14th July 2026 Written Corrections

[Dr Shastri-Hurst]

Rearmament and Warfighting Readiness

The following extract is from the Backbench Business debate on Rearmament and Warfighting Readiness on 8 July 2026.

[Dr Shastri-Hurst]

I refer Members to my entries in the Register of Members’ Financial Interests, in particular my participation in a parliamentary delegation to Ukraine in February with the UK friends of the armed forces.

[Official Report, 8 July 2026; Vol. 789, c. 365.]

Written correction submitted by the hon. Member for Solihull West and Shirley (Dr Shastri-Hurst):

[Dr Shastri-Hurst]

I refer Members to my entries in the Register of Members’ Financial Interests, in particular my participation in a parliamentary delegation to Ukraine in February with the UK Friends of Ukraine.

Written Statements

Tuesday 14th July 2026 Written Statements

Tuesday 14 July 2026

Deepening the UK’s Trade Relationships

Tuesday 14th July 2026 Written Statements

[The Minister for Trade (Chris Bryant)]

Trade remains central to this Government’s mission to drive sustainable economic growth and to ensure that UK firms can access the opportunities presented by a rapidly evolving global economy.

This Government’s trade strategy places international partnerships at the heart of that ambition. We are focused on strengthening the UK’s position as a base for businesses to connect with global markets, while supporting high-value jobs, boosting investment and reinforcing our economic resilience. A key aspect of this pattern of international trading relationships is our membership of the comprehensive and progressive agreement for trans-Pacific partnership.

Today, I am announcing the launch of a public consultation to inform the next phase of the United Kingdom’s trade relationships with four global partners—Indonesia, the Philippines, the United Arab Emirates and Uruguay—as we explore how the UK should respond to accession talks with certain CPTPP candidate countries.

Parties to the CPTPP, including the UK, established an accession working group with Uruguay in 2025, and on 26 June 2026, CPTPP parties announced the start of preparatory discussions on accession with Indonesia, the Philippines and the UAE: https://questions-statements.parliament.uk/written-statements/detail/2026-06-29/hcws154 Uruguay’s accession working group is now well under way, with meetings scheduled



The Government therefore want to hear views on the opportunities, priorities and considerations associated with deepening the UK’s trading relationships with these economies. CPTPP accession represents the most likely route to deepening trading relationships with the majority of them, but the call for input does not assume a single route and also invites views on other appropriate trade policy mechanisms, including bilateral free trade agreements where applicable and relevant.

This consultation marks an early but important stage in the process of assessing future trade opportunities. The call for input published today provides businesses, civil society, consumers and individuals across the UK with the chance to share their insights and priorities, ensuring that any future negotiations are informed by a strong evidence base and reflect the needs of the UK economy.

The Government will carefully consider all responses alongside further economic and policy analysis. This will inform decisions on the UK’s overall approach to engagement with these partners. The call for input closes on 14 September 2026 and can be accessed here: https://www.gov.uk/government/consultations/deepening-uk-trade-relationships-with-indonesia-the-philippines-the-united-arab-emirates-and-uruguay

 

I will keep Parliament closely informed as this work progresses. Further updates will be provided in due course, including ahead of any decision to progress to an accession working group or other negotiations.

[HCWS235]

Horizon Family Members Redress Scheme: Registration

Tuesday 14th July 2026 Written Statements

[The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Business and Trade (Blair McDougall)]

On 19 March, I updated the House about this Government’s preparations to launch a redress scheme for family members of postmasters most affected by the Horizon scandal.

As we approach the anniversary of the publication of volume 1 of the Post Office Horizon IT inquiry report, which recommended that financial redress should be provided to close family members of those most adversely impacted by the Horizon scandal, I want to reassure those awaiting updates that this scheme is progressing and that we remain committed to helping this group.

I am happy to announce that the Horizon family member redress scheme will open for registration on 16 July 2026. This will allow potential applicants to come forward and begin the process by submitting information that will support the assessment of their applications later this autumn. Applicants will be able to access the registration form, alongside further information about the scheme, here:

https://www.gov.uk/government/collections/horizon-family-members-redress-scheme

Guidance for prospective applicants is also available at that link, setting out the type of documents that will be required to demonstrate eligibility once we start to consider claims. This guidance will help applicants to prepare the relevant documents in advance, so they are not unduly held up demonstrating their eligibility.

Processing of cases is expected to begin in the autumn of this year, once the Department has completed the necessary procurement steps to appoint an external supplier to manage this work.

At that point, cases will be dealt with in the order they were received. Those who register now will be among the first to have their cases examined. Those who are unable to register now or wish to wait until a later date are free to do so and this will not impact their cases other than them being considered slightly later.

[HCWS232]

Insolvency Service Annual Plan

Tuesday 14th July 2026 Written Statements

[The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Business and Trade (Blair McDougall)]

The Insolvency Service is the Government agency that delivers public services to those affected by financial distress or failure by providing frameworks to deal with insolvency and the financial misconduct that sometimes accompanies or leads to it.

The Insolvency Service plays a key role underpinning confidence in our financial markets: maximising economic returns to creditors from insolvency situations, supporting those in financial distress, helping them to return to economic activity, and tackling financial wrongdoing through its investigation and enforcement work. Its enforcement role is increasing substantially to meet the Government’s ambitions to tackle economic crime.

This year, the Insolvency Service has reinforced its commitment to supporting businesses and citizens. They are supporting the delivery of the Government’s priorities in supporting regulatory reform, reducing administrative burdens on businesses, and driving forward economic growth, putting more money in people’s pockets and helping to rebuild Britain. This will ensure that the UK is a key destination for investment, with a regulatory regime that is fit for purpose and achieves value for money for the taxpayer. I have asked it to focus on:

Pro-active review of the key regulatory requirements which are placed on the insolvency profession, both to reduce burdens and to enable and facilitate use of new and emerging technologies.

Developing policy proposals to specifically support small and medium-sized businesses and ensure proportionate enforcement action that better supports growth.

Continuous improvement of its service delivery and interface with businesses through investing in and modernising its systems and processes.

The Insolvency Service’s agency plan for 2026 to 2027 will be published in full on gov.uk.

[HCWS231]

Sixth Assimilated Law Report

Tuesday 14th July 2026 Written Statements

[The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Business and Trade (Blair McDougall)]

Today the Secretary of State has laid a report before Parliament pursuant to the Retained EU Law (Revocation and Reform) Act 2023 and published it on gov.uk. This report updates the House in line with the obligations under section 17 of the REUL Act, which requires a report to be published and laid before Parliament every six months until 23 June 2026 detailing all revocations and reforms of assimilated law. As this is the final (sixth) report being laid before the House, section 17 of the REUL Act removes the requirement to set out the Government’s future plans to revoke and reform assimilated law.

The report today summarises the data on the assimilated law dashboard, providing the public with information about the amount of assimilated law there is and where it sits across Departments. The dashboard was updated for the final time on 14 July 2026 and reflects the position as of 23 June 2026, showing a total of 6,921 instruments of REUL/assimilated law concentrated over approximately 400 unique policy areas. Since the previous update to the dashboard, 133 assimilated law instruments have either been revoked or reformed. In addition, Departments have undertaken further analysis and amended their record of assimilated law. As a result, a net figure of 2,700 instruments have been revoked or reformed in total. Section 17 of the REUL Act does not require the dashboard to be updated beyond the final reporting period of 24 December 2025 to 23 June 2026. As such, tracking and reporting of assimilated law, including publication of the assimilated law dashboard, will now end. After a six-month post-publication period, the dashboard will be taken offline and replaced by a downloadable version of the last dataset on gov.uk.

These steps are deemed proportionate as there is no clear policy rationale for continuing to track assimilated law once the statutory requirement expires. Any reforms to assimilated law would be made to truly support Government priorities.

The report provides details of 46 statutory instruments which were made by the Government using powers under the REUL Act and other domestic legislation since the end of the last reporting period. These statutory instruments amend assimilated law to deliver the Government’s priorities. This includes, for example, The Provision of Services (Amendment and Transitional Provision) Regulations 2026, which support this Government’s pledge to cut the administrative burden of regulation to business by 25% by the end of this Parliament. This statutory instrument supports an open, transparent, and proportionate licensing regime to reduce costs for business.

On 23 June 2026, the majority of REUL Act powers expired. The Government can continue making changes to assimilated law to support the national interest through other domestic legislation. Looking ahead, the Government will progress reform, where desirable, of assimilated law to ensure regulation creates the conditions for sustainable growth whilst upholding consumer and environmental protections.

[HCWS233]

National Resilience: Annual Statement

Tuesday 14th July 2026 Written Statements

[The Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster (Darren Jones)]

On 8 July 2025, the Government published our resilience action plan, committing to update Parliament with an annual overview of the UK’s resilience. Today I will fulfil that commitment alongside publishing an annual update on the implementation of both the resilience action plan and biological security strategy.

This resilience work is informed by the national security risk assessment, the Government’s assessment of the most serious risks facing the UK. Today we published a version of this document, the national risk register, which includes a summary of all but the most sensitive, classified risks. Ninety-five risks are listed in total.

For example, conflict in the middle east and Russia’s war in Ukraine have exposed the vulnerabilities in global energy supply chains and driven up energy prices, and the increasing sophistication and proliferation of artificial intelligence not only brings huge opportunities, but threats too if it is weaponised by criminals against us. This could include novel ways of developing or carrying out hostile cyber-attacks against businesses and our critical infrastructure.

As we saw with temperatures across the UK breaking records in May, only to be exceeded again in June, the risks we face from climate change cannot be underestimated, from our infrastructure, food and water systems or people’s immediate health. Climate change is also exacerbating the spread of high-consequence infectious diseases, alongside the changing boundaries of the human-animal interface. The incidence of highly pathogenic avian influenza, Ebola, and Andes hantavirus are examples from the last few months alone.

As we set out in the resilience action plan implementation report, also published today, having resilient public services and infrastructure is how we safeguard our national security. Under this Government, defence spending will rise to almost £80 billion a year by 2029—the biggest sustained boost to defence spending since the Cold War. We have also accelerated our home defence planning, including updating the Government war book and increasing the emphasis on aligning military and civilian efforts if international hostilities affect the UK. We will rigorously test these plans through the largest UK home defence exercise in several decades in 2027, to ensure that should the worst ever happen, we will always be ready.

Later this year, we will publish an energy resilience strategy to strengthen the resilience of our energy system in the UK and a transport resilience strategy, setting out how we will work across these sectors to deliver secure and resilient systems for the UK public.

While Government will do all it can, we can all play our part to keep ourselves and our loved ones safe. As the storms earlier this year showed, extreme weather events can cause significant and prolonged disruption to the essential services on which we all rely.

Today, I can announce that the Government will launch a national resilience public awareness campaign later this year, in order to inform the public of the small but important steps they can take to be prepared in case of emergencies and disruption—be that severe weather or a cyber-attack which can impact access to power, water, phone signal or local shops to get food.

The public sector resilience system is key and must continually evolve to the changing risk landscape. For over two decades, the Civil Contingencies Act 2004 has supported a consistent, co-operative approach to emergency preparedness and response across the UK, but it must keep pace to meet future challenges. To ensure this legislative framework remains strong and as relevant as possible today, we are launching a call for views on the Act’s implementation review of the Civil Contingencies Act 2004 to gather evidence from across the resilience community on where it may need updating to reflect the modem world we live in.

Turning to the UK Government’s biological security strategy, the biological security landscape has continued to evolve and the threats we face are more likely, diverse and interconnected. A future pandemic or the risk that hostile actors use biological weapons could permanently scar the UK’s social and economic resilience. Over the last year, we have made strong progress against our commitments on biological security, including:

delivering Exercise Pegasus: the largest tier 1 pandemic scenario simulation in UK history;

establishing a network of national biosecurity centres, backed by £1.83 billion of investment to ensure a rapid, holistic “One Health” response to future crises;

securing critical infrastructure with Moderna’s new mRNA vaccine manufacturing centre;

publishing a new pandemic preparedness strategy, supported by an additional £1 billion in health protection measures, and a new UK strategic approach to bio surveillance, to ensure that we are better positioned to detect biological threats; and

operationalising a biothreats radar to provide real-time data on biological incidents, while pioneering new approaches to monitoring the near-term convergence of AI and biology.

Today, I have published the biological security strategy implementation report, setting out further commitments to ensure that, by 2030, the UK is resilient against a spectrum of biological threats and a world leader in responsible innovation.

Copies of the following documents have been made available on www.gov.uk

today:

The UK Government Resilience Action Plan: 2026 Implementation Report

The UK Government Biological Security Strategy: 2026 Implementation Report

The National Risk Register and supplementary guidance

A Call for Views for Civil Contingencies Act 2004 Post Implementation Review

[HCWS244]

National Security and Investment Act 2021: Annual Report 2025-26

Tuesday 14th July 2026 Written Statements

[The Chief Secretary to the Prime Minister (Darren Jones)]

I am today laying before Parliament the annual report covering the operation of the National Security and Investment Act 2021 for the period 1 April 2025 to 31 March 2026. This fulfils the requirements under section 61 of the NSI Act and a copy of the report will also be published on gov.uk.

The Government are committed to ensuring the NSI Act supports growth by facilitating investment into our most sensitive sectors in a way that protects our national security. It must also do so as effectively, efficiently, and transparently as possible. This will give investors the certainty they need to promote ongoing growth across the UK.

The report shows that the Government took a decision on whether to call in or clear all notified acquisitions within the review period’s statutory 30 working days, and the vast majority were cleared to proceed within this period. Of the 1,220 notifications reviewed, 95.6% were notified that no further action would be taken, and 4.4% were called in. In this reporting period, nine final orders were issued and four called-in acquisitions were withdrawn before a decision was made.

This report shows that notifications, call-ins, final orders, withdrawals, and final notifications covered many different sectors and acquirers’ countries of origin.

[HCWS238]

Carbon Border Adjustment Mechanism: July 2026 Delivery Update

Tuesday 14th July 2026 Written Statements

[The Exchequer Secretary to the Treasury (Dan Tomlinson)]

The Government are introducing a carbon border adjustment mechanism from 1 January 2027 which will ensure that highly traded, carbon-intensive goods which are imported into the UK face a comparable carbon price to what is paid by manufacturers producing the same goods in the UK.

Following Royal Assent of the Finance Act 2026, which provides the legislative framework for the UK CBAM, the Government consulted on CBAM secondary legislation in early 2026. After considering the responses to the consultation carefully, the first tranche of secondary legislation has been laid today, setting out the majority of the detailed design and administrative framework for CBAM.

Further secondary legislation, confirming details on how to monitor, report and verify emissions, will follow. Comprehensive guidance will also be published later in the year, which will further assist businesses in complying with CBAM.

The scope of CBAM remains unchanged, with the sectors included being iron and steel, aluminium, fertiliser, hydrogen and cement.

The Government recognise that stakeholders are keen to know more about the UK’s approach to setting default values. The Treasury is carefully considering the methodology for setting these values.

The Government will set out specific values in the autumn; ahead of that, I can reassure interested parties that in line with schedule 17 of Finance Act 2026, the Treasury’s guiding principle in setting default values will be to ensure liable persons do not gain an advantage from using default values over determining the actual embodied emissions of imported CBAM goods.

This means that default values will not be set as a simple global average, but will instead be based on a trade-weighted average. In order to best reflect the imports most likely to rely on default values rather than actual emissions, we will look to exclude data from jurisdictions with robust mandatory MRV systems such as the EU. Where appropriate, we will consider applying additional mark-ups to ensure the environmental integrity of CBAM.

The Government committed previously to consider the feasibility of moving to an alternative approach in future, and will set out more detail on future plans for default values in the autumn, alongside the full list of default values for 2027.

[HCWS245]

Naval Base Infrastructure

Tuesday 14th July 2026 Written Statements

[The Minister for Defence Readiness and Industry (Luke Pollard)]

I am today announcing the largest investment in the United Kingdom’s naval bases since the end of the cold war.

As set out in the strategic defence review, improving readiness and strengthening our ability to generate maritime forces at pace is central to the Government’s approach to national security in an increasingly uncertain world. Our naval bases are critical national infrastructure, and their condition directly affects the availability, credibility and effectiveness of the Royal Navy.

As confirmed in the defence investment plan, I can announce today that the Government are delivering Project Royal Oak, which is the collective name we have given to the extensive strategic investment we have committed for improvements to His Majesty’s Naval Base Clyde in Faslane, His Majesty’s Naval Base Devonport, and His Majesty’s Naval Base Portsmouth. Collectively, this represents approximately £26 billion^[1] of investment over the next 10 years to increase the readiness, availability and lethality of the Royal Navy.

Investments at HMNB Clyde are governed by the Clyde Transformation Programme. This will see a multi-decade, multibillion-pound transformation of the site covering everything from dock infrastructure to training and accommodation facilities. It will also include Programme Euston which will see three new floating docks and shoreside infrastructure for submarine maintenance with a renewed focus on asset management that will sustain infrastructure over the long term. There will also be a separate, offsite engineering facility established to boost maintenance capacity. This comprises £15.1 billion over the next decade.

In the south-west, forecast investment of £7.1 billion over the next decade at HMNB Devonport will deliver major upgrades and new and replacement infrastructure across the naval base and dockyard. Devonport is the UK centre for submarine deep maintenance and supports the continuous at-sea deterrent, submarines, ships, sailors and the Royal Marine Commando Force. The programme includes upgrades to 15 Dock, modernisation of 10 Dock and work on 14 Dock to enable submarine defueling to recommence, and wider renewal and maintenance across the site. This reflects both previous under-investment in infrastructure and a changing operational requirement.

On the Solent, forecast investment of £3.9 billion at HMNB Portsmouth will ensure recovery from years of disinvestment alongside vital modernisation to meet the emergent demands of a hybrid Navy which is maximised for warfighting readiness. This includes Project Bentham to upgrade jetties, berthing and support systems; a capability accelerator to support the hybrid Navy and fast-track technological development; a skills development centre for apprentice and adult learning; and expansion of the Royal Navy warfighting centre.

Taken together, these projects will modernise docks, jetties and engineering facilities and support infrastructure across the naval estate, ensuring our bases are resilient, capable and fit to support current and future fleets.

In these uncertain times, this investment will ensure that the Royal Navy is better placed to meet the challenges it faces, strengthen deterrence, and protect the United Kingdom’s security and interests at home and overseas. The House will be kept informed as these projects progress.

^[1]Some of this funding sits within the nuclear ringfence.

[HCWS236]

Armoured Cavalry Programme

Tuesday 14th July 2026 Written Statements

[The Minister for Defence Readiness and Industry (Luke Pollard)]

I am releasing this statement to the House today to provide Parliament with a further update on the armoured cavalry programme, commonly known as Ajax, following issues raised on Exercise Titan Storm in November 2025.

Since Exercise Titan Storm, there have been a number of reports and investigations undertaken to understand the causes of the issues presented. I can now provide an update on the status of each of these reports and the associated next steps:

Army Safety Investigation Team investigation—as I outlined in my previous statement to the House on 28 Apr 26, the ASIT investigation has concluded, and found that there was no single causal mechanism, but rather a combination of multiple factors. Work is already under way to progress the findings of this investigation.

Defence Accident Investigation Branch investigation—the DAIB undertook initial investigations at the scene in the immediate aftermath of the incident and passed responsibility for the further investigation to ASIT.

A ministerial review was conducted to examine the quality of advice given to Ministers, senior officials and military leadership—I provided an update on this in my statement to the House on 22 Jan 26, and on 28 Apr 26 advised that a further review had been commissioned. This further review will be chaired by Jonathan Simcock and will evaluate the four previous reviews, looking specifically at the events leading up to the declaration of initial operating capability. Jonathan Simcock has significant experience of Government major projects, having led the Infrastructure and Projects Authority, as well as holding a portfolio of non-executive and advisory positions across Government. This review is due to complete by the autumn. I will provide a further update to the House on this review in due course.

Ajax independent expert panel review—I can confirm that this review has now concluded and the findings have been provided to Ministers. The panel comprised 51 independent subject matter experts from defence, science, medicine and industry. The panel agreed with the ASIT report that the platform is safe when operated and maintained within the correct parameters, but noted that further action is required to improve the user experience. The report made 41 recommendations, which are categorised into four groups: technical and maintenance; training considerations; environment, motion sickness and psychological factors; and vibration and noise. All priority recommendations have been agreed in principle and work is under way to align with extant ASIT activity. This will be completed in the summer, including a timetable for resulting actions. We are also considering whether any of the recommendations have broader applicability against other programmes and platforms, as a precautionary measure. I will report back to the House on progress against the recommendations in due course.

The strategic case for Ajax remains extant. The capability is critical to a fully networked, persistent and lethal capability that sits at the heart of the British Army’s recce strike complex.

We have resumed acceptance of the Ajax vehicles, with 16 vehicles accepted. Trials have now restarted and Army training is planned to commence shortly.

The safety of our service personnel remains paramount throughout this process, and we continue to work closely with General Dynamics to deliver the vehicle that provides the world-leading capability they need. I will continue to keep the House closely updated on the progress of the programme.

[HCWS237]

Unpaid Carers: Cross-Government Action Plan

Tuesday 14th July 2026 Written Statements

[The Minister for Care (Stephen Kinnock)]

The Government are today publishing a cross-Government action plan for unpaid carers.

This action plan delivers on the Government’s commitment to strengthen support for unpaid carers across England. It sets out a co-ordinated programme of cross-Government activity to improve the visibility of unpaid carers, improve access to support, and ensure caring responsibilities are better recognised across public services and the workplace.

The plan has been developed collaboratively across Government with input from delivery partners. It responds to the need for more joined-up information and advice, improved data sharing between services, and stronger recognition of unpaid carers in workforce planning and service design. It also reflects the diversity of carers’ experiences, including the specific needs of young carers.

The action plan is structured around three core themes: recognise, refer, and reach.

Under the recognise theme, we will improve the identification and visibility of unpaid carers across health, education and employment settings. Key actions include developing “my carer” functionality within the NHS app to support self-identification and care management; improving the identification of young carers in education settings; embedding carer identification within personalised care planning; supporting NHS staff with caring responsibilities; and commissioning further research to better understand barriers to identification and improve data collection and employer support.

Under the refer theme, we will make it easier for carers to access the right support at the right time. This includes developing a cross-Government information and guidance resource bringing together support on finance, employment, health and wellbeing; exploring the use of digital notification systems such as NHS Notify and Diagnosis Connect to support targeted communications; promoting best practice on involving carers in hospital discharge planning; increasing awareness of employment rights and benefits; and improving transitions for young carers moving from children’s to adult services, including through initiatives such as the Local Government Association’s “No Wrong Door” memorandum.

Under the reach theme, we will support unpaid carers to reach their full potential alongside their caring responsibilities. This includes promoting flexible working and supportive workplace practices; reviewing the effectiveness of carer’s leave; supporting small and medium-sized enterprises to better support employees with caring responsibilities; strengthening and promoting carer passports; improving support for young carers in education; and ensuring carers’ needs are reflected across wider health, social care and employment reforms.

The action plan is underpinned by governance and oversight arrangements to ensure clear accountability, regular reporting, and ongoing review. This will support transparency on delivery and allow the plan to evolve in line with wider Government priorities and implementation milestones.

I am grateful to colleagues and officials across Government who have contributed to the development of this action plan, particularly in the Department for Work and Pensions, the Department for Business and Trade, and the Department for Education. I am also grateful to delivery partners for their valuable contributions in shaping this plan. Delivery of this agenda depends on sustained cross-Government collaboration and continued close working with our delivery partners.

[HCWS234]

Quality Strategy for NHS-funded Care in England

Tuesday 14th July 2026 Written Statements

[The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Health and Social Care (Preet Kaur Gill)]

I am pleased to inform the House of the publication of our new quality strategy for NHS-funded care in England, developed by the National Quality Board, which sets out a clear and ambitious approach to improving the quality of care across the NHS in England, and represents delivery of a key commitment from our 10-year health plan.

The strategy reaffirms that quality must, once again, be the organising principle of the NHS. It sets a clear national objective that high-quality care should be available to everyone, everywhere, regardless of who they are or where they live.

The strategy makes clear that quality is defined across three inseparable and equally important domains: patient safety, clinical effectiveness and patient experience. While patient safety rightly remains the foundation, the strategy marks a renewed and explicit focus on the other domains of quality, so that our efforts drive improvements in outcomes and ensure a consistently high standard of care and experience for all patients.

The need for this renewed focus is clear. Too many people still experience variation in outcomes, fragmented care, and unequal access to high-quality services. The strategy responds directly to these challenges, with a strong emphasis on reducing unwarranted variation and tackling health inequalities across all three domains of quality.

Rather than introducing a new set of policies, the strategy provides a coherent framework for delivery, bringing together existing commitments from the Government’s 10-year health plan. It aligns national priorities and clarifies how improvement will be led, overseen and delivered across the system. It is a call to action for leaders, clinicians and staff across the NHS to treat quality as their primary purpose, to use data transparently, and to adopt value-based approaches that direct resources to the interventions delivering the greatest benefit for patients and communities.

The strategy sets out how the NHS will focus its efforts on the areas where improvements will have the greatest impact on outcomes, experience and value, including major conditions such as cancer, cardiovascular disease and severe mental illness. It also reinforces the importance of improving maternity and neonatal care, patient safety, and the consistent delivery of evidence-based care. The National Maternity and Neonatal Taskforce will be taking forward work to improve the safety, effectiveness, and experiences of maternity and neonatal care.

We are also placing a renewed emphasis on transparency, accountability and leadership. Quality must be owned at every level of the system: providers are accountable for the care they deliver, integrated care boards must commission on the basis of quality and population need, and national bodies must provide clear leadership and oversight.

Importantly, the strategy also places the patient voice at its centre, recognising that listening to and working with people and communities is essential to improving services and ensuring care is responsive, person-centred, safe and effective.

Delivery will be supported by a clear set of system enablers, including improved accountability, better use of data, and the wider adoption of innovation and technology. At its heart, quality is underpinned by leadership, culture, and a shared commitment to deliver high standards. The strategy is a clear call to action to collectively create the conditions needed for sustained improvement across all parts of the NHS.

I am pleased to confirm that delivery of the strategy is already under way, with the modern service framework for sepsis also being published today, and the MSF for cardiovascular disease having been published on 7 July. MSFs are intended to support the NHS in providing consistent, high-quality, high-value and equitable care across key clinical pathways. Where appropriate, they will span both health and social care services, including the points where services join up. In addition to the two MSFs already delivered, development is well under way on further MSFs covering severe mental illness, palliative and end-of-life care, frailty and dementia, and children and young people—this is one of the ways we are ensuring that the principles set out in the new quality strategy are translated into practical improvements for patients across the NHS.

[HCWS239]

National Policing Response to Antisemitism

Tuesday 14th July 2026 Written Statements

[The Minister for Policing and Crime (Sarah Jones)]

Recent attacks on our Jewish communities are completely unacceptable. An attack on our Jewish community is an attack on us all, and we must take the safety of our Jewish community very seriously. Jewish people must feel safe and Government will strain every sinew to ensure that is the case.

The rise in antisemitism is a scourge on our society. In the year to March 2025, there were 2,873 religious hate crimes against Jewish people—106 per 10,000 of population—the highest proportion for any group by some distance. In the Community Security Trust’s recent antisemitic incidents report, for the first time ever, the CST recorded over 200 cases of anti-Jewish hate in every calendar month in 2025. Shockingly, the CST also found that the terror attacks in Heaton Park and Bondi Beach triggered immediate spikes in antisemitism, ranging from face-to-face taunting to antisemitic social media posts. The Government have heard loud and clear the experiences of Jewish people in our communities in recent weeks and months.

While tackling this hatred requires a whole of Government response and a whole of society response, the police have an important role to play. This Government have already invested an additional £25 million into policing patrols and protective security to support Jewish communities.

I can also confirm today that we are providing additional funding of £251.1 million for the police to tackle antisemitism in our communities over the next three years. Alongside the investment in protective security, this brings total funding for protecting Jewish communities to £309.5 million.

This will fund:

a recognisable, permanent policing presence in key Jewish communities across the country;

a national surge capacity to ensure all Jewish communities, wherever they live, can be protected;

stronger national co-ordination and specialised capabilities to deliver a consistent approach, with specified funding to deliver antisemitism training for all police officers in England and Wales and a centralised online hate crime investigations hub; and

additional protective security and other capabilities to be deployed by Counter Terrorism Policing, in recognition of the threat from state actors and proxies to Jewish communities.

The majority of British Jews in England and Wales live in London, which has the highest concentration of synagogues and Jewish schools in the country, and this community has faced significant threat in recent months. We are therefore providing £85.8 million to the Metropolitan Police Service to fund around 300 officers to support increased policing in Jewish communities. They will increase specialised capabilities, strengthen intelligence, investigative and co-ordination functions, all of which will allow for better operational deployment in response to specific threats. This is in addition to the £18 million uplift the Government announced in April.

A further £65.9 million will go to forces outside of London with a significant Jewish population to provide a permanent presence in Jewish communities and ensure they are equipped to provide the communities with the support they need. Of this funding, £22.5 million will be provided to Greater Manchester Police to sustain the increase in policing presence in response to the tragic attack in Heaton Park last year. The £43.4 million will be distributed across seven other forces with significant Jewish communities: Hertfordshire, Essex, Northumbria, Sussex, Thames Valley, West Midlands and West Yorkshire.

In recognition of the need to ensure consistency of policing responses to antisemitism across England and Wales, £40.8 million will be provided to support national policing co-ordination and capabilities. Jewish people and communities should feel confident that antisemitic crimes will face the full force of the law wherever they live. We will fund antisemitism training for officers in England and Wales and ensure surge resources are available to all forces to protect Jewish communities, during events or times of increased threat. This is in addition to the £2 million uplift the Government announced in April.

Finally, Counter Terrorism Policing will receive a further £58.6 million over the three-year period to provide further security to vulnerable communities, places and people.

Our Jewish community is an integral part of this country. To be antisemitic is to be anti-British. We will continue to do everything in our power to protect Jewish people, communities and places, and to bring those who seek to cause them harm to justice. This additional funding aims to establish a sustained police presence in Jewish communities, provide a national response to the threat of antisemitism, and most importantly reassure Jewish communities across the country at a time of great fear and concern.

[HCWS246]

Independent Review of Disclosure and Fraud Offences: Part Two

Tuesday 14th July 2026 Written Statements

[The Minister for Security (Dame Angela Eagle)]

My noble Friend the Minister of State, Home Office (Lord Hanson of Flint), has today made the following written ministerial statement:

I am pleased to inform the House that the Home Office is today publishing Jonathan Fisher KC’s second and final report from the independent review of disclosure and fraud offences, Fraud in the Digital Age. The report examines the effectiveness of the current fraud framework and the barriers that inhibit the detection, investigation and prosecution of fraud committed against individuals and businesses.

I would like to record my thanks to Jonathan Fisher KC for this significant and authoritative contribution, and for his sustained leadership of the review across both phases. This includes his earlier report, Disclosure in the Digital Age, to which the Government has responded.

Together, the two reports reflect extensive engagement across the criminal justice system, law enforcement, regulatory bodies, academia and the private sector, and provide a comprehensive assessment of how fraud is now perpetrated and how the system should respond.

This second report lays bare the scale and seriousness of the challenge. Fraud now accounts for nearly half of all surveyed crime, making it the most prevalent offence faced by the public, including businesses. It is not a victimless or technical crime: it strikes directly at personal autonomy, causes profound emotional harm to victims, imposes significant costs on businesses and the wider economy, undermines public trust, and poses a growing threat to our national security and economic resilience.

The report identifies a set of structural and systemic factors that have allowed fraud to proliferate. It describes an age-old crime that has been supercharged by digital technology: offenders can operate at scale, at distance and across borders; and the likelihood of detection and prosecution remains low. Lengthy investigations, the growing complexity of digital material, limited specialist capability and fragmented responsibilities have combined to weaken deterrence and to create the perception among criminals that fraud is a low-risk, high-reward activity. The report is clear that the Government must match criminals’ innovation with their own.

Against that backdrop, the report emphasises that enforcement alone will not be sufficient. It makes 47 recommendations which collectively argue for a decisive shift in posture: from a system that is predominantly reactive and post-harm, to one that is proactive, disruptive and preventative. The recommendations are grouped around strengthening upstream disruption; improving public-private partnership and data sharing; increasing corporate accountability; responding to emerging technologies; and ensuring that consequences for fraud and fraud-enabling conduct are swifter, more certain and more visible, in order to increase deterrence and reinforce public confidence.

As set out in the Government’s fraud strategy 2026-29, we are already strengthening the tools available to disrupt fraud earlier and at scale, including through the exploration of civil penalties and international sanctions against high-harm overseas fraud actors. We are expanding international co-operation, sponsoring the Global Fraud summit 2026, to tackle fraud as a transnational threat.

Alongside this, through the Online Safety Act 2023, we are ensuring that tech companies are responsible for preventing fraudulent content and adverts from appearing on their platforms. We are deepening public-private partnerships by launching the online crime centre to disrupt online and volume cyber-fraud at scale, and to make the UK a harder place for criminals to commit fraud.

We are also working to improve the sharing and use of economic crime data, including through a recent call for evidence, and will consider the effectiveness of whistleblower incentivisation as part of the Government’s broader approach to strengthening the detection, prevention and enforcement of economic crime. Trusted reporting channels can play a vital role in surfacing information on fraud, corruption, sanctions evasion and other illicit activity, enabling earlier intervention and more effective disruption.

The report’s recommendations cut across the responsibilities of multiple departments, agencies and sectors. The Government will now consider them carefully and will respond in due course.

Tackling fraud requires sustained collaboration between Government, law enforcement, regulators, industry and civil society. This Government are determined to build momentum in the fight against fraud: to support victims, to pursue those who profit from deception, to strengthen deterrence, and to make the UK a safer place to live, work and do business.

The report is being presented to Parliament today as a Command Paper (CP 1600) and will be available on gov.uk.

[HCWS240]

Independent Review of Disclosure and Fraud Offences: Government Response to Part One

Tuesday 14th July 2026 Written Statements

[The Minister for Policing and Crime (Sarah Jones)]

Today the Government publishes “Modernising the Criminal Disclosure Regime”, setting out our response to recommendations made by the independent review of disclosure and fraud offences and the independent review of the criminal courts on the operation of the criminal disclosure regime.

We are grateful to Jonathan Fisher KC for his thorough independent review of disclosure and fraud offences which has been published in two parts. This Government response refers to part one of his independent review: “Disclosure in the Digital Age”. The Government response to part two on fraud offences will be published in due course.

Disclosure is a statutory regime that applies to all criminal proceedings in England and Wales and is central to the right to a fair trial. It governs how material gathered in criminal investigations is recorded, reviewed, retained and shared, ensuring that relevant material capable of assisting the defence or undermining the prosecution is identified and disclosed.

Part one of this review reflects extensive engagement across the system and offers a practical package to raise standards, embracing appropriate technology, strengthening case management with an intensive disclosure regime for the most complex cases, and consolidating guidance and learning so that good practice is embedded consistently.

We also thank Sir Brian Leveson for his work on the independent review of the criminal courts, which included proposals related to disclosure, set out in chapter 5 of part 2 of his independent review. Our response considers Sir Brian Leveson’s proposals, alongside Jonathan Fisher KC’s proposals, which have enabled the Government to evaluate and implement disclosure reform collectively, drawing on the findings of both reviews. The Government’s full response to Sir Brian’s independent review of the criminal courts will be published separately in due course.

The Government response to these recommendations sets out how we will improve the disclosure regime while preserving its core legal safeguards. In summary, it supports the responsible and transparent use of advanced technology to manage large volumes of material more efficiently; strengthens learning, training and consistency across law enforcement and prosecutors; and considers improved court processes, including exploring a pilot of the proposed intensive disclosure regime to support earlier, more focused engagement between the prosecution and defence in the most serious and complex cases.

Taken together, these measures are designed to reduce unnecessary administrative burden on police and prosecutors, improve the speed and accuracy of disclosure, support victims, and uphold the right to a fair trial. This will deliver a disclosure regime that is transparent, modern and fit for the future.

This response has been developed jointly with the Ministry of Justice, owners of the Criminal Procedure and Investigations Act 1996 and its code of practice, and the Attorney General’s Office, which owns the Attorney General’s guidelines on disclosure. I am very grateful to the Solicitor General, the Courts Minister and officials across all three Departments for their close collaboration in producing a coherent, system-wide response.

The response is being presented to Parliament today as a Command Paper (CP 1601) and will be available on gov.uk.

[HCWS241]

UK Covid-19 Inquiry: Module 5 Report

Tuesday 14th July 2026 Written Statements

[The Prime Minister (Keir Starmer)]

The chair of the UK Covid-19 Inquiry has today published the inquiry’s module 5 report, which examined the procurement and distribution of key healthcare equipment and supplies, including personal protective equipment, ventilators, and testing equipment.

The chair finds that the lack of preparation ahead of the covid-19 pandemic meant that the UK’s stockpile of PPE was in a perilous condition, with shortages and expired stock. The chair adds that there were no proper plans for the procurement and distribution of key healthcare equipment in an emergency. Health and social care workers were therefore left without adequate PPE to protect themselves, and those for whom they cared.

The chair acknowledges the logistical challenges of simultaneously obtaining the same supplies as other Governments across the world. Those involved in the emergency procurement of healthcare equipment had to act under pressure with extraordinary speed, and were confronted with unenviable choices.

The inquiry identifies 11 recommendations to ensure that the UK is better prepared ahead of a future healthcare emergency.

I would like to thank Baroness Hallett and her team for their thorough work on this report. The Government will carefully consider the findings and recommendations of the report and respond in due course.

I have laid a copy of the report before both Houses of Parliament.

[HCWS242]

Revised Telecommunications Security Code of Practice

Tuesday 14th July 2026 Written Statements

[The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Science, Innovation and Technology (Kanishka Narayan)]

I am repeating the following written ministerial statement made today in the other place by my noble Friend, the Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Digital Economy, Baroness Lloyd of Effra.

The Government have today issued the revised telecommunications security code of practice, under sections 105E and 105F of the Communications Act 2003.

The draft revised code of practice was laid before Parliament on 3 June 2026, and the statutory period required under section 105F of the Communications Act 2003 has now ended without either House having resolved not to approve it.

The UK telecoms supply chain review 2019 identified the need to establish an enhanced legislative framework for telecoms security. In response, the Government established a stronger telecoms security framework, which consists of:

The Telecommunications (Security) Act 2021—primary legislation which established new duties on public telecoms providers to prevent security compromises within their networks and services.

The Electronic Communications (Security Measures) Regulations 2022—secondary legislation setting out specific cyber security requirements with which the public telecoms providers must comply.

The Telecommunications Security Code of Practice 2022—technical guidance on how providers can comply with the requirements set out in the regulations.

The UK’s future prosperity rests on the public electronic communications networks and services—PECN and PECS—that provide our telecoms and internet connectivity. It is important therefore that the telecoms security framework keeps pace with the scale of the threat to UK telecoms networks and services, adapting to evolving threats to network security and new innovations in telecoms technology.

This revised code updates some areas of the technical guidance provided within the “Telecommunications Security Code of Practice 2022” to:

Provide further clarity on specific security measures: in response to feedback from providers, the revised code includes updates intended to give clearer direction to support compliance with legal duties in the legislation. This includes clearer guidance on the use of privileged access workstations, approaches to security testing, and the encryption and protection of data.

Reflect evolving technology: since 2022, increased use of certain technologies warrants updated technical guidance to support safe adoption. The revised code includes new security guidance on the secure use of public cloud, automation, and application programming interfaces.

Reflect emerging security threats: recent hostile state linked attacks underline growing risks. Guidance to public telecoms providers must evolve to help ensure providers respond appropriately. The revised code includes updates to reflect the need for providers to take appropriate and proportionate steps to protect their networks against such threats.

The issuing of the revised code represents an important step in ensuring the UK’s telecoms security framework remains robust and effective in the face of rapidly evolving cyber threats and technological change. By providing clearer and more up-to-date technical guidance, the revised code helps telecoms providers to comply with their statutory duties, strengthen the security and resilience of the UK’s public electronic communications networks and services, and protect citizens, businesses, and critical services that rely on them.

[HCWS229]

Equal Pay and Pay Discrimination

Tuesday 14th July 2026 Written Statements

[The Minister for Equalities (Seema Malhotra)]

The Government have today published a consultation on equal pay and pay discrimination.

In our manifesto and plan to make work pay, we committed to strengthening equal pay provisions and eliminating pay discrimination. This is an important milestone in the Government’s wider plan to break down the barriers to opportunity and make work pay for women across the country, address racial inequalities, and champion the rights of disabled people.

The UK’s prosperity and long-term economic growth depend on a national renewal that is grounded in the principles of equality and opportunity. This includes reinforcing our commitment to upholding the fundamental right to equal pay for equal work. This Government’s ambition is to remove barriers to opportunity, provide greater certainty for employers, and reduce the burden on business and the justice system through less protracted litigation.

Concerns have been widely expressed by employers and employees that the existing law on pay equality has become excessively complex, costly, and protracted. With tens of thousands of claims stuck in the system and cases taking a decade or more to resolve, workers are trapped in endless litigation and employers face intractable uncertainty. No one benefits from this.

We know what the problems are: a system that fails to provide the data and tools needed to reliably and efficiently identify discriminatory pay practices; that places too much of the burden for enforcing the law on individuals; that incentivises arguments over minor details of a dispute, multiplying time, stress and expense; and that does not do enough to protect women or others who need it, such as ethnic minority and disabled employees and outsourced workers.

It is therefore crucial that we address the issues raised by workers, businesses, and the justice system, ensuring the pay discrimination framework works effectively for everyone.

This consultation seeks input from stakeholders regarding policy proposals designed to deliver the following commitments:



make the right to equal pay effective for ethnic minority and disabled people;

establish an equal pay regulation and enforcement unit with the involvement of trade unions;

ensure that outsourcing of services can no longer be used by employers to avoid paying equal pay.

In addition to these commitments, the consultation seeks input on the proposed introduction of allied pay transparency measures where the evidence shows that these are proportionate and effective in supporting a preventive approach to pay equality.

In April 2025, the Office for Equality and Opportunity launched a call for evidence on equality law which invited feedback on areas of existing equality legislation and possible equality law reform. This included questions on the equal pay commitments outlined above, as well as possible related pay transparency measures. The responses received, as well as Government-commissioned research on the socio-legal and lived experience impacts of the equal pay scheme, demonstrate a need for serious reform of the current system before broadening protections to address inconsistencies in the law.

That is why we are consulting on a phased and future-facing approach to reform which commits to fixing the system first, before broadening protections to ethnic minority, disabled and outsourced workers. In doing so, we would seek to protect employers from unforeseen liabilities for historic practices. We want to get this right, working in partnership with businesses, civil society and trade unions to make sure that our reforms account for all parties’ needs and circumstances. We also invite views from stakeholders on whether they think there are alternative ways to achieve our objectives. The launch of this consultation will inform how we can change the law for the better.

Specifically, the consultation includes proposed measures designed to proactively prevent pay discrimination, ensure enforcement agencies are empowered to drive good practice, and simplify the resolution of disputes when they arise. It also includes proposed measures to address gaps and inconsistencies affecting ethnic minority and disabled employees and outsourced workers. These measures are intentionally proportionate, prioritising targeted action that minimises administrative burdens and simplifies compliance.

As a result, these measures will support the Government’s ambition to remove barriers to opportunity, make work pay, provide greater certainty for employers, and reduce the burden on business and the justice system through less protracted litigation.

The consultation will be open for 15 weeks. In connection with the above, my Department has made the following documents available on gov.uk:

An independent analysis of the responses to the pay discrimination sections of the call for evidence on equality law, undertaken by an external contractor.

Independent research commissioned by OEO.

I will also deposit a copy of the consultation in the Libraries of both Houses.

[HCWS243]

Office for Nuclear Regulation: Annual Report and Accounts 2025-26

Tuesday 14th July 2026 Written Statements

[The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Work and Pensions (Andrew Western)]

The Office for Nuclear Regulation’s “Annual Report and Accounts 2025/26” is being laid today. This document will also be published on the ONR website.

I can confirm, in accordance with paragraph 25(3) of schedule 7 to the Energy Act 2013, that there have been no exclusions to the published document on the grounds of national security.

[HCWS230]

Grand Committee

Tuesday 14th July 2026 Grand Committee

Tuesday 14 July 2026

Environmental Permitting (Waste Controlling or Transporting) and Relevant Functions of Primary Authorities (Amendment) (England) Regulations 2026

Tuesday 14th July 2026 Grand Committee

Considered in Grand Committee

11:00

Moved by

[Baroness Hayman of Ullock]

That the Grand Committee do consider the Environmental Permitting (Waste Controlling or Transporting) and Relevant Functions of Primary Authorities (Amendment) (England) Regulations 2026.

Relevant document: 3rd Report from the Secondary Legislation Scrutiny Committee (special attention drawn to the instrument)

[The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State, Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Baroness Hayman of Ullock) (Lab)]

My Lords, these regulations were laid before the House on 20 May 2026. I would like to acknowledge the work of the Secondary Legislation Scrutiny Committee in its review of this statutory instrument. The committee’s scrutiny is a vital part of our legislative process, ensuring that the policy intentions behind secondary legislation are clear and well-founded.

Waste crime blights our communities—across our streets, fields and woodlands, criminals dump waste illegally. This an eyesore and causes damage to our environment. A light-touch registration system for those who transport and deal in waste has been exploited over the years by waste cowboys who dump waste and leave a huge clean-up bill. This system is not fit for purpose. Today we seek to reform it, introducing stricter checks and requirements, closing the loopholes that allow illegal operators into our waste system.

We will bring those in England who control and transport waste within the scope of the 2016 environmental permitting regulations, while repealing the current carriers, brokers and dealers’ registration system. These regulations will introduce permits for those who control and transport waste, bringing the system in line with site-based waste activities. Permitting will mean that those who apply will need to undergo a stricter range of background checks, including criminal record checks, as well as demonstrating that they are technically competent to do the job.

The new system of permitting will be managed the Environment Agency, which will be responsible for managing applications and ensuring compliance. The Environment Agency will be able to suspend and ultimately revoke permits where conditions are breached. It will be able to prosecute, leading to fines or up to five years’ imprisonment. The fees introduced for permits will mean that the Environment Agency will be effectively resourced for compliance work.

These regulations will make it easier for the public to trust the people they hand their waste to. Alongside permits being able to be checked online, we are requiring that waste controllers and transporters include their permit number on advertising. Whether this is a Facebook ad or a branded van, the public will be able to spot and check on the operators they work with.

This reform is one of a number outlined in the Government’s Waste Crime Action Plan, published in March, which together strengthen the regulatory framework and the Environment Agency’s ability to prevent, detect and act against waste crime. We have taken further legislative action by replacing outdated paper-based methods for monitoring waste movements with digital waste tracking. We will also be tightening the waste permit exemptions system by removing three exemptions and tightening the conditions of seven others that have long been abused by waste criminals.

Alongside the reforms, it is important that we provide those responsible for tackling waste crime with the tools needed to effectively stamp it out. We have committed an additional £45 million for the Environment Agency to spend on waste crime enforcement over the next three financial years to support this. This funding will mean that there are more boots on the ground to expand its enforcement activity and ensure waste criminals face the consequences.

I want to acknowledge the strength of support from the industry and its patience over the years as it has been developed. These regulations represent a significant change for the waste system and will help level the playing field for operators, as well as protecting our communities and the environment from waste criminals.

Alongside the reforms to the carriers, brokers and dealers’ system, the regulations also bring the Environment Act 2021 into the scope of primary authority by adding it to Schedule 3 to the Regulatory Enforcement and Sanction Act. Primary authority is a means for businesses to receive assured and tailored advice on meeting regulations such as environmental health, trading standards and fire safety through a single point of contact. This amendment is particularly necessary to enable primary authorities to play a role in effectively supporting retailers in undertaking their obligations as required in the deposit return scheme. I beg to move.

[Baroness Coffey (Con)]

My Lords, I briefly want to congratulate the Government and to say, well done. I think this was first put forward eight years ago, and it is finally happening. I appreciate it is not happening until next year, but we need to recognise the long amount of time it took to get here. I hope the results will be very rapid.

[Earl Russell (LD)]

I thank the Minister for introducing these regulations, which we on these Benches welcome warmly. As the Minister is all too aware, I have raised the issue of waste crime in the House several times. I am genuinely pleased that these regulations are arriving as a crucial part of the of the long-term solutions we need to get control of our waste system and lock the criminals out.

As the Minister said, this SI does not arrive in isolation; it follows the Waste Crime Action Plan and the instrument beginning the rollout of real-time digital waste tracking. Together with the exemptions reform promised later this year and next April’s instrument completing end-to-end digital tracking ahead of the deposit return scheme, we are finally beginning to see the basic architecture this sector has needed for years, so that we can know who is moving waste and where it is going, and make sure our systems are fit for purpose. This is the first time I have been able to say that I am really hopeful and see a future and a way forward. I really do welcome this.

On the Environment Agency’s own estimates, around 18% of the waste in England passes through criminal hands at some point in its journey. This structural feature of the current system has been allowed to flourish for a number of years. As a result, we have a big historic legacy of waste sites that need to be cleared.

I note that the Environment Agency’s watchlist for high-priority sites has grown to 139 as of 10 July. I welcome this transparency but, again, this legacy still needs further work. I thank the Minister and officials in the Environment Agency for all their work and for the change of culture under this Government over the last 18 months or so. That is genuinely welcomed.

Turning to the instrument itself, as the Minister said, it replaces the older carriers, brokers and dealers’ registration system with a proper environmental permit split sensibly into three categories: waste controlling, waste transporting and combined activities, so that oversight can match risk rather than applying as a single blunt instrument. Gone, hopefully, are the days when it was possible to register your dog as a waste carrier. Permits will run for three years, and the Environment Agency gains real power to check before granting a permit, rather than acting only after the damage is done. It also gains powers to suspend and revoke. This is a genuine structural improvement.

I want to be fair to the Minister on timing—she has already spoken about this—but obviously, this instrument has been a long time coming. Consultations closed in 2022, but the delay is not down entirely to this Government, but to past Governments. It is great that this instrument is here.

I have several questions. On exemptions, how will the department ensure that charities and other low-risk categories are not quietly colonised by operators or organised criminal networks seeking to avoid scrutiny? Will monitoring be ongoing, not one-off assessments at the drafting stage? On interrogation, how will permitted regimes interact with the digital waste tracking that has already been rolled out? Obviously, a permit is only as good as the data behind it. On exports, illegal and misdescribed waste exports remain a major route for criminal activity. What assessment has been made of this instrument’s bearing on waste that should not be leaving our shores or that is doing so mis-permitted?

On funding and delivery, with £45 million in new money for the Environment Agency—we obviously welcome that—and several reform strands running in parallel, how will the Government monitor and review the programme as a whole, not just instrument by instrument, so that we know how the money is working and that it is delivering the results we expected? Does the Minister agree that we need overall benchmarks and reporting across this piece, as we are undertaking these various strands of structural reform?

On industry awareness, reform closes a loophole only if waste producers know that carriers need a permit and that there are checks that one is in place. What steps will ensure that businesses understand this, that they are encouraged to apply for the right permits and that they know what they need to do? I slightly worry that the resources for this information part of working with industry may not be sufficient for that structural change across the whole industry.

This instrument is to be renewed in three years’ time, so can the Minister confirm that at that point, proper checks will be in place to review what happened over the first three years, on an individual carrier and broker basis? A permit granted once and never revisited would simply not resolve the problem and could allow illegal activity to continue.

On transition, criminals and the organised criminal networks adapt quickly—sometimes much more quickly than Governments can. We have this 12-month window during which the old registration remains valid. In this transition period, what work is being done to make sure that that is not an additional opportunity for the organised networks to exploit the change of system?

None of this works without an Environment Agency properly funded and staffed to issue permits, monitor compliance and take enforcement action against those who ignore them. So what continuous review are the Government undertaking to make sure that the Environment Agency has the staffing, the computer systems and the ability to conduct all the tasks that it needs to do?

We absolutely welcome this instrument and are really pleased to see it. It is about time that we turned the tables on these organised criminals. The noble Baroness, Lady Sheehan, has a Private Member’s Bill coming up, and I encourage the Minister to work with her on trying to offer whatever support the Government can for it.

[Lord Blencathra (Con)]

My Lords, I thank the Minister for bringing these regulations before the Committee. I can be commendably brief—or briefer than I normally am—because we give a very warm welcome to these excellent regulations. We on these Benches have repeatedly raised waste crime and called for tougher measures against the perpetrators. During consideration of the Crime and Policing Bill, the Government did not support our amendments to give police the powers to seize the vehicles of perpetrators of these crimes. I am sure that, if the Minister were to draw this to the attention of the excellent, caring and meticulous Lords Minister for Crime and Policing, he might wish to reflect on this again.

Nevertheless, we welcome this step to better monitor the transportation of waste, taking into account which activities are low risk and which are high. These regulations are at least intended to ensure compliance and better identify criminal activity. I understand that the consultation demonstrated that a majority of respondents supported replacing the carriers, brokers and dealers’ registration system with this permitting regime under the Environmental Permitting (England and Wales) Regulations 2016. That said, can the Minister outline how the Government will ensure that businesses are made aware of the changes, as well as their ability to afford the costs involved, because there will be permit fees, registration fees, time costs, technical competence costs, tax, et cetera?

These regulations give more power to the Environment Agency, as well as responsibilities to issue permits. The increased enforcement costs are estimated to be £22.1 million, but the Explanatory Memorandum also states:

“The Environment Agency may benefit from efficiency savings”.


So can the Minister provide an exact figure for how these savings will be made?

More broadly, I come back to the one major quibble we on the Opposition Benches have had—making the National Crime Agency the lead in the joint unit on tackling waste crime. We are dealing with massive, organised crime here. I perfectly well accept and believe that if a farmer’s slurry tank leaks, the Environment Agency is the perfect body to investigate it, as with a leak from a factory.

11:15

When I served until recently on the Food Standards Agency, I was the lead for the national food crime unit. The briefing we would get was that the people who were moving hundreds of tonnes of condemned food were in the business of transporting anything illegal. They would be moving condemned food one day, rubble the next, and stolen high-value vehicles the next. It is part of a big, organised crime syndicate. Quite frankly, we on these Benches believe that the Environment Agency is not capable of dealing with the massive £1 billion cross-county border fraud.

We all want to see a crackdown on waste crime. All I am asking of the Government is, will Defra and the Minister please consider carefully, with the extra money they are giving to the joint unit on waste crime, putting the National Crime Agency in the lead in this regard in tackling waste crime, keeping the Environment Agency working there as second-in-command? The National Crime Agency is the only one capable, in our opinion, of handling a £1 billion criminal enterprise. With these few little quibbles, I look forward to the Minister’s response.

[Baroness Hayman of Ullock (Lab)]

My Lords, I thank noble Lords who have taken part in the discussion and all noble Lords for their strong support for the measures being brought forward. As noble Lords have said, this has been a long time coming, so it is really good to see that we have finally got this in front of us today. One thing that has come across really clearly, not just today but in a number of questions and parliamentary debates, is the huge problem of criminal waste activity that now blights so much of our countryside. There were a number of questions asked. I will do my best to cover them off, and if there is anything else I have missed, I will make sure I get back to noble Lords in writing.

First, on evaluation and monitoring, we recognise that tackling waste crime requires sustained effort and a willingness to adapt as circumstances evolve. Delivery of the waste crime action plan will be accompanied by a process of continuous review and improvement. We will also regularly assess the effectiveness of the measures that are introduced. We will consider any new evidence as it emerges and, importantly, identify opportunities to go further where existing interventions are not achieving the desired outcomes. This is designed to ensure that our approach to tackling waste crime remains agile, responsive and focused on achieving lasting change.

The Environment Agency is also developing improved indicators for 2026-27, including measures on larger-scale offending, response times and deterrence. The current Environment Agency scorecard metric covers only a narrow proportion of illegal waste activity. Waste crime is hard to measure as it is deliberately hidden: only around 27% of incidents are actually reported. Defra is working closely with EA to deliver new indicators, improving visibility of the problem and getting a better grip on it.

Defra is leading the delivery of the waste crime action plan, working closely with the Environment Agency as the national lead for waste crime. That is being done alongside HMRC, the Home Office, police forces and local authorities, because if we are going to successfully tackle this, we need co-ordinated cross-government action. As I mentioned in my speech, we have committed an extra £45 million over three years, and an extra £5.6 million uplift in 2025-26, designed to increase front-line enforcement, intelligence and operational capacity, so we have more officers, specialised units and multi-agency activity.

We are also bringing in structural reforms, including CBD reform, digital waste tracking and exemption reforms. They are being implemented to design crime out of the system so that prevention and compliance are integral, rather than relying on reactive enforcement alone. We are also driving through other concrete operations measures: earlier interventions, permit action, restriction notices, prosecutions, use of advanced technology including drones and satellite imagery, and strengthened intelligence via the Joint Unit for Waste Crime, which I will come on to shortly. On monitoring effectiveness, we will deliver improved metrics but also review the multi-agency waste crime response and adapt its delivery so that the action plan remains live and responsive.

The noble Earl asked about digital waste tracking. It will work by requiring information to be submitted to a central system of all movements of hazardous and non-hazardous waste, with a few pragmatic exemptions, from the point the waste is produced to the point it arrives at the waste receiving facility. It will replace paper processes with consistent, near real-time data, improving traceability and highlighting any unusual movements linked to misdescription, diversion or illegal export. That is one of the ways in which we will tackle the illegal export issue that the noble Earl asked about. The first phase started in April, and it will be mandatory from October. The second phase will cover the whole waste movement chain. It is planned that that will be available for all relevant operators to use voluntarily from spring next year, with a mandatory rollout from the following October.

The noble Earl raised the exemptions. We need to reform the waste exemption regime because we need to stop criminals having the opportunities they currently have to hide illegal activity behind permit exemptions. That is why we are removing the three most abused exemptions and tightening up conditions on the others. Exemptions allow low-risk waste activities to operate without a permit, but we know that some have been widely abused by criminals. We will also bring in limits on quantities, tougher operating conditions and stronger record-keeping. We need to remove the weak points and protect the permitting regime. We are currently working on what the necessary legislative amendments would look like for that. Again, when doing that, we will take into account some of the issues that the noble Earl raised, as we do not want to cause problems for people who are legitimately doing their work.

The noble Earl also asked about businesses and people working in the system. Clearly, when designing regulations such as this, we have to work with those who will use them, to ensure that they work in the most effective way and we do not end up realising that they are not practical when we start monitoring. It is all about how things will practically make a difference.

On the Explanatory Memorandum, the noble Lord, Lord Blencathra, asked about the Environment Agency and efficiency savings. The new controllers and transporters system will mean that operators are required to submit more detailed information as part of their permit applications. This information will be used by the Environment Agency to more efficiently identify high-risk operators and conduct monitoring and compliance work.

The noble Lord referred to the £1 billion cost of cross-county organised crime. The way that we will try to work with the National Crime Agency, which is the point the noble Lord was speaking to, is that the Joint Unit for Waste Crime will provide the crucial collective operational capability. To ensure that the wider system for tackling waste crime remains effective in the face of an evolving threat, Defra is working closely with the National Police Chiefs’ Council and the Home Office to undertake a review of the end-to-end multi-agency response to waste crime. That will cover areas such as information sharing, local-to-national co-ordination and prosecution capabilities. The review will also identify opportunities to strengthen how agencies work together and ensure that the overall system remains effective, resilient and equipped to meet future challenges. The existing capabilities, including the JUWC, will continue to play a key role within this strengthened framework.

[Lord Blencathra (Con)]

I take that to mean that, although the National Crime Agency will not be put into the lead, it will have an enhanced role. Is that what the Minister said?

[Baroness Hayman of Ullock (Lab)]

Defra and the Environment Agency will be the lead, but we will work absolutely hand in glove with those other agencies to make sure that they effectively tackle the problem we have. As I say, we will monitor anyway so, if we find that it needs changing in any way to strengthen that, we will be able to do that once we have continued to review and monitor. We are bringing all these changes in because we want to make a difference and we want to stop what has been happening.

I have mentioned to the noble Baroness, Lady Sheehan, that I would be very happy to meet her to discuss her Private Member’s Bill, and I hope we can do that in the not-too-distant future.

I appreciate the noble Baroness, Lady Coffey, coming in to offer her support for this SI. As she said, this has taken a long time, and I am sure she did quite a bit of work on it, so it is important to see that work started by one Government has been completed by another. With that, I commend the regulations to the Committee.

Motion agreed.

Industrial Training Levy (Engineering Construction Industry Training Board) Order 2026

Tuesday 14th July 2026 Grand Committee

Considered in Grand Committee

11:27

Moved by

[Baroness Smith of Malvern]

That the Grand Committee do consider the Industrial Training Levy (Engineering Construction Industry Training Board) Order 2026.

[The Minister of State, Department for Education and Department for Work and Pensions (Baroness Smith of Malvern) (Lab)]

My Lords, I am grateful for the opportunity to debate this instrument today. In my view, the provisions in the instrument are compatible with the European Convention on Human Rights. The statutory purpose of the Engineering Construction Industry Training Board—ECITB—is to make better provision for training across the engineering construction industry in England, Scotland and Wales.

The engineering construction industry is critical to the delivery of the Government’s wider ambitions for economic growth, clean energy and energy security. It provides the skilled workforce needed to build, maintain and operate major energy, manufacturing and industrial infrastructure across Great Britain. The ECITB’s and the Construction Industry Training Board’s continued value was confirmed by a 2023 independent review. It found that a statutory levy remains the most effective model for industry-wide investment in training and is needed to address persistent and structural workforce challenges within the ITBs’ industries.

This statutory instrument gives effect to the ECITB’s levy proposals for 2026, 2027 and 2028. The levy remains the ECITB’s primary source of funding, and this order is required for the board to raise mandatory assessments on in-scope employers. The ECITB continues to receive strong support from employers. Over 85% of levy-paying employers supported the levy proposals, representing almost 98% of total levy value, exceeding the “more than 50%” statutory threshold for support required from industry.

Before we consider the levy proposals in further detail, I want to point out that a 12-week government consultation has just closed on a proposal to bring together both ITBs—the ECITB and the Construction Industry Training Board—into a single unified body to support the combined skills needs of the engineering construction and construction sectors. The Government are now carefully considering the views raised before making any decisions on reforms that may be needed to ensure the system delivers the support employers need. We cannot prejudge the outcome, but it is vital to the continuity of the ECITB’s support for employers that the levy order we are debating today continues. If the Government choose to proceed with this proposed reform, the earliest that a single body would be in place is spring 2028. Should the direction of reform require a new ITB levy order, this would come to the House through the proper parliamentary process.

11:30

Returning to this levy order, I give my thanks to the Secondary Legislation Scrutiny Committee and the Joint Committee on Statutory Instruments for their scrutiny of the regulations laid on 1 June 2026. It would be fair to say they have a clean bill of health from those committees. This order retains levy assessment rates from the 2023 levy order and retains the exemption threshold to protect small and microbusinesses, which are nevertheless still eligible for ECITB grants and support. An estimated £137.9 million will be raised in levy over 2026-28, which will be invested in supporting the skills needs of the engineering construction industry. That investment will fund vital programmes to widen participation, raise skill levels, increase opportunity and maintain occupational standards for the industry. This includes targeted grant support to employers to develop the skills pipeline in the engineering construction industry.

Since 2023, over 5,000 apprenticeship starts have been supported through ECITB employer funding, across vital disciplines including electrical, mechanical and nuclear-specific roles. This could include direct grants to employers, travel and accommodation costs, or costs for any additional qualifications required. The funding raised by the ECITB levy directly underpins the country’s broader economic priorities. Over 90,000 people are employed in the leviable workforce, with an estimated contribution to our economy of £33 billion in gross value added, rising to £100 billion when including the wider sectors serviced by the engineering construction industry.

The industry faces significant long-standing and future challenges in recruiting and retaining a skilled workforce, which makes voluntary investment in training less likely to occur. Without a statutory levy, we cannot guarantee that the skills that industry urgently needs will materialise at the scale required. If this order is not approved, the ECITB would be unable to collect levy in 2026, with potential impacts on apprenticeships and vital industry qualifications, employer support programmes, training standards and the future capability of one of the UK’s most economically significant sectors.

According to the ECITB, the UK faces an estimated requirement for an additional 40,000 engineering construction workers, and agreeing this order will play a critical role in supporting major infrastructure projects across Great Britain. In addition to industry support, the proposals before the House today have received the full support of the devolved Governments of Scotland and Wales. They recognise, as do we, that maintaining the ECITB’s ability to raise and invest levy income is vital to ensuring that employers across all three nations can access the engineering construction skills they need. I commend this order to the Committee.

[Baroness Coffey (Con)]

My Lords, I do not seek to oppose this order today, but I have a number of questions. I again start by praising the Government, and I strongly support the move to the DWP and the CITB, as well as, more broadly, the changes that the Government have made to the apprenticeship approach. I fully support the merger of the two bodies, which is under consultation, and I hope that that consultation review will be concluded quickly.

One thing that the Minister mentioned was that 85% of the levy payers, who contribute 98% of the levy, are supportive. I was interested in paragraph 33 of the impact assessment, which said that the independent

“customer satisfaction survey in 2024 … found that 65% of employers agreed or strongly agreed that without the levy and grant system the training would not take place”.

As it says elsewhere in the impact assessment, we have a situation where, in order to generate more income, the ECITB has started increasing its training of overseas learners. I do not really understand where this is going.

I am sure the Minister has been diligent more broadly in thinking about what is happening with the amount of people going on to training who do not complete the training or do not continue into work. That is very worrying, given the amounts of money being invested and what is happening with the follow-up. The Government are using powers, as this is an executive non-departmental public body, so is there an element here of thinking about how this could get a bit more refocused, working independently but also in partnership with the department, given that 47% of young people are dropping out? The figures of people who just do the course and, within so many years, drop out of this industry entirely are even higher.

I know that there is work on how to help employers onboard people into apprenticeships, traineeships and the like, but I suggest that some more focus could perhaps help with that. I suggest thinking about how the objectives and key performance indicators for this board could perhaps be published more regularly. On that, 9 July 2025 is when we last saw the annual report and accounts for 2024, so when does the Minister expect the report and accounts to be laid for 2025? As I say, there is a lot of value in this body and its sister body.

I do not expect the Minister to have an answer to this today, but this body is also a charity, and I am unclear about why that is still needed. Is that limiting what can happen in trying to make this more effective? As I say, a good number—65%—of businesses interviewed said that all this training stuff probably would not happen without this board. But, again, on some of the link-up with the other organisations involved in this, including the Government and particularly the Department for Work and Pensions, I think this is a better home for it than where it was, the DfE.

I would be interested in getting some further understanding on the need for this to be a charity. According to the Charity Commission accounts, it is not eligible for gift aid. There is a lot of complexity in why someone is a trustee, when actually they are all appointed by the Secretary of State. The Minister may not have the answer today, but I would be grateful for a follow-up more broadly.

[Lord Palmer of Childs Hill (LD)]

My Lords, I thank the Minister for producing this order and giving us such welcome information. It is a key job of any Government to grow the economy, and productivity is central to that. This levy is a proven way to fund skills in the construction sector, because the market alone has not invested enough in training. The 2023 review confirmed that this problem still exists, so the case for keeping the levy is strong. Turning to the detail, the order keeps the current rates in place: 0.35% on directors’ pay and 1.25% on payments to subcontractors. These rates have not changed since the pandemic-era reductions ended.

I welcome the extra help for small firms. The exemption threshold is rising from £135,000 to £150,000, which means that 69% of employers will now pay nothing at all. There is also a 50% reduction for firms with wage bills of between £150,000 and £500,000, helping around 10,000 small businesses, I believe. This strikes a reasonable balance: it protects small firms while larger employers continue to pay their fair share, with no cap on their contributions. The Minister has given lots of statistics. There are so many statistics going around, some of which are contradictory.

As Liberal Democrats, we believe in partnership between employers and educators, and that is exactly how this proposal was developed. As we have been told, the CITB ran a formal consultation last year, called “Consensus”, and over 67% of levy payers backed the plans. Those firms represent almost 72% of the total levy value. This is a genuine mandate from the industry itself, not something imposed from above, and it is the right way to build support for a levy like this.

The sums involved are substantial. I believe the levy is expected to raise around £243 million a year between 2026 and 2028. Last year, the CITB raised £228.1 million and used it to fund £129.8 million in grants and £53.4 million in other schemes. This supported around 30,000 apprentices and, I believe, nearly 20,000 people in gaining a qualification. This is a serious investment in skills, and it costs the taxpayer nothing, since the CITB receives no grant from the Government.

The noble Baroness, Lady Coffey, mentioned charities. I should say that charities are exempt from the levy, but I would welcome hearing anything that the Minister can say in answer to the questions raised about them.

I have one question for the Minister: how will the Government check that this money is working? We need to see real gains in skills and productivity, especially given the scale of the construction skills gap across England, Scotland and Wales. I would welcome the Minister’s thoughts on that. As a nation—or, as the Minister said, nations—we need to up our game in providing training and reduce our reliance on imports to address skills shortages.

On the whole, we on these Benches support this order. It keeps a levy system that the industry itself backs, protects small businesses through a fairer approach and funds real training for a skilled workforce.

[Baroness Spielman (Con)]

My Lords, I thank the Minister for introducing this order. We support the continuation of the Engineering Construction Industry Training Board levy for the 2026, 2027 and 2028 levy periods. This provides continuity for the industry without imposing additional costs. As others have said, the levy system clearly commands the support of the vast majority of those who pay for it. It works precisely because it is driven by industry need. Companies understand their workforce requirements far better than Whitehall ever can. The role of government should be to create the conditions in which businesses can invest, recruit and train, rather than to control industries with centrally designed employment schemes.

But it is important to look at the levy in the context of both current and likely future pressures. The scale of the challenge is considerable. The Minister cited estimates of a need for another 40,000 workers by 2030. Demand is rising in nuclear construction and decommissioning, offshore wind, hydrogen, carbon capture and storage, industrial decarbonisation, and the maintenance of existing energy infrastructure. The industry is competing for workers with other infrastructure sectors that need the same skilled trades and technical professionals. The central challenge is how to make sure that the country has the capacity and skills to deliver projects that are already planned.

Employers are facing considerable difficulties in recruiting and training. The workforce is ageing and few new entrants are coming through to replace retiring workers in key occupations. We need more and better technical education. Undervaluing technical and vocational education is a perennial British problem that stretches back for well over a century, and good technical education is not cheap. Successive Governments have wrestled with this for decades, and I can say with confidence that the problem will not be solved by a few soundbites about parity of esteem or by an education policy that is driven by social justice ambitions and that treats educational excellence, national prosperity and growth as afterthoughts. The Government should be taking a hard look at their equivalence and performance tables policy which, over 20 years, has done so much to push young people at school away from technical subjects at GCSE and into non-technical classroom BTECs.

11:45

Engineering construction is also project based and cyclical. A business may have a substantial future pipeline but be justifiably reluctant to take on permanent workers or apprentices when projects are repeatedly delayed, paused or rephased. Businesses are just less able to make long-term workforce investments when they have little certainty about their order books.

The sector is contending with tight margins, high borrowing costs, wage pressures and material inflation. Many specialist contractors and subcontractors simply do not have the financial headroom to recruit and train workers significantly in advance of confirmed work.

The pressures have of course been made worse by the Government’s increase in employer national insurance contributions and the substantial additional burdens imposed by the Employment Rights Act. It is disingenuous for Ministers to express concerns about skills shortages while simultaneously making it riskier and more expensive to employ workers.

I would be grateful if the Minister could address several questions in addition to those already put by my noble friend Lady Coffey. First, what assessment have the Government made of the effect of the policies that they have implemented so far on recruitment, apprenticeships and permanent employment in the engineering construction industry?

Secondly, how are they working with the ECITB and employers to align skills provision with the actual timetable for major nuclear, energy, carbon capture, hydrogen and infrastructure projects? In particular, how will Ministers ensure that delays and uncertainty in government-backed projects do not discourage employers from investing in training and recruitment?

Thirdly, what outcomes will the Government use to judge whether the levy is delivering value for money? Can the Minister provide figures showing how many apprenticeships, qualifications and training places have been supported by the levy and grant system, and how successfully these interventions have addressed shortages in the occupations where demand is greatest?

Finally, what steps are being taken to ensure that the levy system remains responsive to employers, administratively proportionate and focused on training that leads to genuine employment opportunities?

As I have explained, we support the levy order, but the levy cannot succeed in isolation. Its effectiveness will depend upon a stable infrastructure pipeline, a strong vocational education system and a wider economic environment in which businesses are encouraged to hire and retain rather than penalised for it. The Government must now ensure that their wider policies properly support employers to recruit, train and retain their workforces.

[Baroness Smith of Malvern (Lab)]

I thank the Committee for its contributions to the debate, and I welcome the noble Baroness, Lady Spielman, as this is the first time we have faced each other in her new role. I congratulate her on that.

The debate has underlined not only the importance of the ECITB’s work but the scale of the challenge facing one of our most economically vital industries, with a core workforce of 90,000 people and responsibility for £33 billion of output. As noble Lords have recognised, the industry plays a vital role in supporting our energy security, manufacturing capability and critical infrastructure.

As has come through clearly today, the engineering construction industry cannot meet the skills demands of the coming decade without a stable collective system of investment in training, alongside government support. I will return to this in a moment. The evidence is consistent that market forces alone will not deliver the pipeline of skilled workers that the industry urgently needs to meet the demand for new major infrastructure projects.

The ECITB’s levy is the mechanism that enables the collective benefits of a focused skills strategy for the engineering construction industry. It ensures that employers can access support for training and share the benefits of a skilled, competent and resilient workforce. It also opens opportunity, helping apprentices and other new entrants to complete high-quality training and helping existing workers to reskill or upskill to progress their careers.

I will respond to some of the specific points raised. The noble Baroness, Lady Coffey, rightly emphasised the need for success in the spending of the levy and the successful completion of training courses and apprenticeships. The ECITB has confirmed that it currently tracks apprentices and graduates while they are on programmes and receiving grant support. The data that the ECITB collects indicates a positive impact of its grant support on, for example, apprenticeship completion rates. Based on the ECITB’s latest available data for England, Scotland and Wales, of the apprentices who started an apprenticeship in 2020 and were supported by ECITB, 78% have successfully completed their apprenticeship as of December 2025. While we have seen improvements in the completion rates of apprenticeships over recent years, I think that is above the average rate.

The noble Baroness also raised the question of when the annual reports and accounts will be published for 2025. They will be laid in the autumn.

On the point about charitable status, it is not determined by the Government; it is determined by whether an organisation’s purposes are exclusively charitable and legally deemed to provide a clear public benefit. It was therefore a decision for the training bodies themselves—CITB, equally, is a charity—to take on that charitable status.

The noble Lord, Lord Palmer, raised the success of the levy consultation. It would be fair to say to the noble Lord that there are a lot of statistics around. Some of the statistics the noble Lord quoted related to the Construction Industry Training Board rather than the Engineering Construction Industry Training Board; perhaps it would be easier were the Government to decide to go ahead with the merger of the two. Nevertheless, they are different sizes and they do different jobs. The point he made is right: for the ECITB there is, if anything, an even greater level of approval as a result of the levy consultation than the figures he quoted.

Several noble Lords rightly cut to the chase of what the ECITB is responsible for. In other words: what does it actually do, and how, in the broader context, are the Government supporting the need for skills in the engineering and construction industry? On the former, the ECITB continues to invest in skills hubs, training standards and competence assurance across key sectors, including energy, nuclear and renewables. It has supported more than 6,900 new entrants since 2022 and invested £32.6 million in 2025 in training grants and new entrant programmes. During 2024, the ECITB funding supported over 2,000 new entrant starts, including over 1,000 apprentices and 500 graduates. Almost 64,000 learners were trained or assessed using ECITB-approved products, including more than 31,000 learners achieving industry-recognised safety passports and 2,763 learners supported through competence-related programmes. Of course, while the ECITB and the levy we are discussing are important for addressing some of the market failure in delivering skills in the engineering construction industry, it is just part of the broader work the Government are doing to support the engineering construction industry and wider skills. This relates to the points made by the noble Baroness, Lady Spielman.

The Government are delivering significant investment to strengthen engineering construction skills, as part of wider reforms, helping employers to respond to current and future workforce needs. This includes an additional £1 billion of investment to help deliver around 50,000 more apprenticeship opportunities for young people over the coming years—that is particularly important given the 40% fall in young people’s apprenticeships over the last years of the last Government—alongside increased flexibility through the new growth and skills levy and specific sector skills packages in engineering and construction that are worth over £800 million.

Additionally, we are providing targeted incentives for employers, including payments of up to £2,000 for taking on foundation apprentices. We have developed a new foundation apprenticeship in engineering, helping more young people to enter skilled careers, as well as other incentives, particularly for taking young people who may have been out of work on to these apprenticeships. We have continued and in fact increased investment in skills bootcamps and increased devolved approaches through mayoral strategic authorities, enabling local areas to respond to local employer demand and skills shortages.

The noble Baroness specifically raised technical and vocational education. I reassure her that this Government’s action, even in the two years that we have been in government, goes far beyond the soundbites that she characterised. A major reform of post-16 education is in progress, and stronger vocational routes are being developed through the new V-levels, an expansion of the possibility for young people to gain an in-depth technical education through T-levels, improved level 2 qualifications to get young people on to those vocational routes, and the investment I have already outlined in turning around the fall in the numbers of young people who have been able to start apprenticeships, ensuring that those opportunities are available for young people in the future.

Together with the ECITB support, these measures will strengthen the pipeline of skills available to the engineering construction workforce and support the delivery of major infrastructure projects across Great Britain. I hope that, in responding, I have reassured noble Lords about the role of this levy order, its importance in supporting the needs of small and larger businesses, ensuring maximum impact and value for money from employers’ levy contributions, and the important role the ECITB plays in ensuring that this key industry for growth, the development of infrastructure, energy security and manufacturing capability is supported both by the ECITB and the wider policies of this Government.

[Baroness Spielman (Con)]

Can the noble Baroness address my question about the impact of government policies enacted over the last two years on the engineering construction sector, particularly increased national insurance and employment rights?

[Baroness Smith of Malvern (Lab)]

I spelled out some of the impacts of the Government’s policy on the numbers of apprenticeships, the shift to vocational and technical education, the support this Government are providing to turn around the decline we have seen, and the £800 million of sector skills support we are providing for the industry. Is the noble Baroness genuinely arguing that this Government should now reverse the national insurance increases, which is where the investment in the National Health Service, which is also of considerable importance to employers, will come from? If she got her way and we reversed that, I think engineering employers, along with others, would not want their employees to be sitting on the waiting lists we inherited from the last Government.

Motion agreed.

Misuse of Drugs Act 1971 (Temporary Class Drug) Order 2026

Tuesday 14th July 2026 Grand Committee

Considered in Grand Committee

12:00

Moved by

[Lord Hanson of Flint]

That the Grand Committee do consider the Misuse of Drugs Act 1971 (Temporary Class Drug) Order 2026.

Relevant document: 6th Report from the Secondary Legislation Scrutiny Committee

[The Minister of State, Home Office (Lord Hanson of Flint) (Lab)]

This instrument, laid before Parliament on 10 June, takes urgent action to control a new and very dangerous class of synthetic opioid. In the space of little over a year, orphines have been involved in at least 22 deaths in the United Kingdom, and 14 of those deaths were sadly between December and March. The UK is not alone in this respect: between 2024 and April this year, the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime received 206 reports from numerous countries of drug samples that contained orphine compounds.

I am particularly grateful to the Advisory Council on the Misuse of Drugs for prioritising an assessment of these deeply harmful substances. Its report was published on 30 April, and the dangers we face here are encapsulated in the following line from that report:

“the risk to the population from these recently emerging compounds is sufficiently great that urgent steps are required to protect public health”.

The Government have heard that message loud and clear, and we are acting at pace. We enacted a temporary class drug order, TCDO, to control these drugs, less than six weeks after the council produced its report. The TCDO covers seven orphines: three that have tragically been involved in those deaths here in the UK, and four that the EU Drugs Agency has notified as being present in EU drug markets.

This is the first TCDO in 10 years, so I will take a moment to remind noble Lords about what these orders do. A temporary class drug order makes it a specific offence to produce, supply or offer to supply these seven orphines; to export or import them; or to possess them when there is also an intention to supply. Doing any of these things can result in up to 14 years in prison, the same as for a class B drug.

The TCDO also provides that the substances should be treated as if they were in Schedule 1 to the Misuse of Drugs Regulations 2001. Scheduling here covers the circumstances in which a controlled substance can be used legitimately, and the procedures that must be followed in doing so. Schedule 1 covers substances with no known medical uses, which is the case with these seven drugs. Anyone who needs to make legitimate use of them, for example in research, would need to apply to the Home Office to obtain a licence.

This instrument uses the made affirmative procedure. This reflects a balance between the requirement to put in place urgent measures to safeguard public health and the need for proper parliamentary scrutiny of measures, which expand the scope of criminal law. Under the provisions of the Misuse of Drugs Act, the TCDO must be approved by both Houses of Parliament within 40 days of it being made. I know noble Lords will be pleased to note that the other place, the House of Commons, approved it last night, and I hope this House will do so by Friday’s deadline.

My colleague Sarah Jones MP, the Minister for Policing and Crime, also accepted the further recommendation from the advisory council that the TCDO be followed by a permanent control, which would make orphines class A drugs. This would cover not only these seven substances but also two “generic definitions” of orphines. The purpose of those is to make it harder for criminals to circumvent the controls by making slight tweaks to the chemical composition of what they sell. Noble Lords will doubtless agree with colleagues on the Secondary Legislation Scrutiny Committee that the class A control should come into force swiftly. So, although I am not able to give a precise timetable today, I can confirm that we will act as soon as possible.

Self-evidently, the devastation that harmful drugs inflict on our society is intolerable, and it demands a response commensurate with the scale of the threat. The order before the Committee today stands as further evidence of the Government’s commitment to mounting such a response. I beg to move.

[Lord Cameron of Lochiel (Con)]

My Lords, I thank the Minister for bringing the order before the Committee. It is a simple and uncontroversial order, and I am pleased to support it. As the Minister established, the purpose of this legislation is to make a temporary class drug order under Section 2A of the 1971 Act in respect of seven substances that fall under the category of orphines, which are a class of synthetic opioids that have been recommended for control by the Advisory Council on the Misuse of Drugs. Given the reports that the UN Office on Drugs and Crime have received regarding the presence of orphine compounds in drug samples and their links to deaths, the Government are absolutely right to seek to control these substances.

However, I seek a couple of clarifications. As its title suggests, this order makes a temporary class drug order for the listed substances. I note that Section 2A of the 1971 Act states that TCDOs expire within one year of the order being made, which means that the Government will need to come forward within one year with a new Order in Council under Section 2 of the Act that lists these substances as controlled drugs. If the Government do not do that, these substances will cease to be controlled, so will the Minister confirm that the Government will bring forward a new order within that timeframe?

As a linked query, it is interesting that the Government have sought to make a TCDO now rather than simply to bring in an Order in Council. Why make a temporary order and then a permanent order later? There is an argument for the Government to have added these substances straight away to Schedule 2 to the 1971 Act. If we accept that they cause enough harm to justify a temporary order, surely they should be controlled permanently in the first place. I would be grateful if the Minister could explain the rationale for their approach.

Other than that, as I said at the start, I am more than happy to support the Government in their endeavours on this order.

[Lord Hanson of Flint (Lab)]

I am grateful to the noble Lord, Lord Cameron of Lochiel, for his broad support for the order. As he said, it is quite sensible that we do this, but he asked two legitimate questions. In answer to his first question, we are mindful that the TCDO lasts for just one year and we will lay a permanent control before Parliament as soon as possible, as the Secondary Legislation Scrutiny Committee has urged us to do. I cannot give the noble Lord a timescale for that but, self-evidently, with the expiry of the order, we want to get that done and make sure that it is covered as a whole.

As the noble Lord said, we could have brought in an urgent, permanent class A control, which the advisory council has suggested is preferable. However, controlling new substances as class A, B or C drugs takes some time, and rightly so. Such controls expand the scope of the criminal law and amend primary legislation, and it is right that Parliament has the opportunity to scrutinise them. That is precisely why the legislation also allows for these temporary class drug orders. They do everything that class A, B or C controls do, except that the maximum sentences are not as long as for class A drugs.

I say with due respect to my colleagues in the Privy Council, of which I am a member, that the need for the relevant order to be made at the Privy Council adds some weeks to the process, and there is no real need for that at the moment. In the previous Session of Parliament, the Government supported a Bill sponsored by the honourable Member for Gloucester which would have removed this requirement. For the moment, we think that we can put the controls in place, mindful of the expiry, and revisit that in due course. We will look at the longer-term procedure more slowly, but the purpose of this order is to make sure that we put some definitive controls in place on the seven new opioids that have, sadly, caused deaths in the past year. I hope that that answers the noble Lord’s questions.

Motion agreed.

Committee adjourned at 12.10 pm.

House of Lords

Tuesday 14th July 2026 Lords Chamber

Tuesday 14 July 2026

14:30

Prayers—read by the Lord Bishop of Newcastle.

Business Hiring

Tuesday 14th July 2026 Lords Chamber

Question

14:36

Asked by

[Lord Hunt of Wirral]

To ask His Majesty’s Government what assessment they have made of current business hiring intentions and their implications for the wider economy.

[Baroness in Waiting/Government Whip (Baroness Ramsey of Wall Heath) (Lab)]

The UK labour market and economy remain resilient despite geopolitical uncertainties. The UK had the fastest-growing economy in the G7 in the first quarter of this year. For the labour market, ONS data shows that there are 399,000 more people in work than a year ago, and its business insights survey shows that over 80% of businesses intend to either maintain or increase their staff levels in July this year.

[Lord Hunt of Wirral (Con)]

My Lords, on behalf of the House, I welcome the Minister for her first Question. But is she aware that, last week in the other place, speaker after speaker condemned the Employment Rights Act, the impact of the increase in national insurance contributions and regulations generally, which have created the largest number of young people not in education, employment or training for well over 10 years? Is she further aware that the other place then proceeded to pass a Motion, without one vote against, to say that the Government should change course to support summer jobs, flexible working and seasonal work? Does the Minister accept that judgment of the elected House? What specific changes of policy is the new Prime Minister, Mr Burnham, going to bring in?

[Baroness Ramsey of Wall Heath (Lab)]

That is a nice and easy first question. It is an honour, and slightly terrifying, to answer my first Oral Question from a previous Secretary of State for Employment. It is, however, a very interesting Question.

Summer jobs—particularly in hospitality, retail and tourism—are often a young person’s first step into the labour market. My own first summer job was as a guide at the Black Country Museum. As a Government, we are not complacent about the challenges that we face. The Government are investing £2.5 billion through the youth guarantee and the growth and skills levy to support almost 1 million young people and create up to 500,000 opportunities to earn and learn. This includes expanded work experience opportunities, skills boot camps, foundation apprenticeships, sector-based work academy programmes and incentives for employers to hire young apprentices. Alongside this, the Government are supporting hospitality businesses through business rates reforms, sector-specific funding and measures to boost summer demand.

[Lord Fox (LD)]

My Lords, the Minister’s statistics match mine. There has been a bit of an uptick in employment, but not in one area: graduates. Graduates are facing a terrible time. Entry-level hiring has dropped to a 13-year low, and it dropped by 45% in January this year. There are graduates with excellent degrees from very good institutions who are receiving literally hundreds of rejections. So widespread has this become that it is deeply demoralising for an important section of society who cannot even get an interview, never mind a job. Does the Minister accept that this is a market failure? If she accepts that, what are she and her colleagues going to do to fix it?

[Baroness Ramsey of Wall Heath (Lab)]

I thank the noble Lord for his question but remind him that, thanks to our industrial strategy, employment is rising. Employment rights are improving too. We are determined to reduce unemployment further, especially among the young, which is why we are investing so much in the youth guarantee and are poised to go further when the Milburn review reports back later this year. I am aware of the situation where AI recruiting is impacting on graduate appointments and recruitment, and I am also aware that the Government have issued guidance to employers to ensure that this is a reducing problem, not an increasing one.

[Baroness O’Grady of Upper Holloway (Lab)]

My Lords, is my noble friend aware of the latest Manpower survey of employers that reports a surge in hiring intentions for the third quarter of this year, placing the UK in the top division of the global league? Does she agree that any efforts to suggest that stronger workers’ rights hit hiring intentions do a disservice to the many decent employers who already offer enhanced sick pay and other stronger protections?

[Baroness Ramsey of Wall Heath (Lab)]

Yes. As my noble friend quite rightly points out, it is very encouraging to see Manpower reporting an 18 percentage point increase in businesses planning to recruit since last year, and also reporting that we have the fourth most positive hiring outlook globally. That is undeniably good news, though I am sure the whole House will agree with me when I express my keen hope that the England men’s football team goes beyond fourth to become the very best team globally by the end of the week—with apologies to Welsh, Northern Irish and in particular Scottish colleagues across the House.

On the second part of her question, I completely agree with my noble friend that our country has many good employers who see absolutely no conflict between protecting their employees from the consequences of ill health, for example, and running successful companies that compete profitably.

[Lord Londesborough (CB)]

My Lords, the Government’s White Paper Get Britain Working aims for an 80% employment rate, but 20 months on we remain stuck at 75%. With the recent steep drop in new recruits, can the Minister, who I welcome to her position, point to where these 2 million net new jobs will be coming from?

[Baroness Ramsey of Wall Heath (Lab)]

I thank the noble Lord for his question. The UK’s employment rate is in the top half of the OECD economies and is above the G7 average. Unemployment also remains low by international standards: in the bottom half of the OECD and lower than Canada, France and the euro area average. The UK has the third-highest employment rate in the G7. Employment is up, inactivity is down and wages continue to grow. We are particularly pleased to see that 399,000 more people have moved into work in the past year.

[The Lord Bishop of Manchester]

My Lords, the area of Greater Manchester, which is largely coterminous with my diocese, has been showing better growth and better employment figures than most other parts of the country. I wonder whether the Minister might reflect that what the wider country needs is a good dose of Manchesterism.

[Baroness Ramsey of Wall Heath (Lab)]

That is a very topical question from the right reverend Prelate. Greater Manchester has shown the value of putting decisions closer to the people and places they affect. Ambitious growth plans are at the heart of its strategy, linking jobs, skills and public services. Collaborative local leadership has supported pathways into work, enabled by infrastructure connecting people to opportunities. Jobs have also flowed from procurement and investment. One of the benefits of devolution is enabling innovation. We look forward to sharing the learning from the success of Manchester across the country.

[Lord Deben (Con)]

My Lords, my family owns the local pub, and therefore I can speak from trying to employ people. We have very high employment standards in our business, and we have had to reduce staff because of what the Government have done on employment taxes of all kinds. That is true of the whole hospitality industry. It is all right for people to groan, but those who are actually running pubs know that we are closing one after another because the Government have not helped us; they have made life much more difficult.

[Baroness Ramsey of Wall Heath (Lab)]

We are not complacent. I hear what the noble Lord says. We have introduced permanently lower business rates for retail and hospitality properties. The average pub gains £1,650 this year, and that is in addition to increased hospitality support of over £10 million funding over the next three years. For young people in pubs and hospitality, we are introducing hospitality foundation apprenticeships.

[Lord John of Southwark (Lab)]

My Lords, I also congratulate my noble friend on her well-deserved appointment. Many of us will share the concerns about the number of young people—16 to 24 year-olds —not in education, employment or training at this time. She has already mentioned the Milburn review, but can she tell the House what she hopes the Milburn review will do to help that young cohort of our people so that their futures are not blighted?

[Baroness Ramsey of Wall Heath (Lab)]

Alan Milburn’s review has reported on an interim basis, and we are expecting the full report in September. This Government will not leave an entire generation of young people behind. We are investing an additional £2.5 billion into the youth guarantee and the growth and skills levy to support nearly 1 million 16 to 24 year-olds into work, education or training. Over the next three years, this investment will deliver up to 300,000 opportunities for workplace experience and training and will unlock up to 200,000 jobs through the £3,000 youth jobs grant to employers and the £2,000 apprenticeship hiring payment for SMEs.

Autism: Parenting Support Programmes

Tuesday 14th July 2026 Lords Chamber

Question

14:47

Asked by

[Baroness Leaman]

To ask His Majesty’s Government what assessment they have made of the availability of parenting support programmes for families following a child’s diagnosis of an autism spectrum condition; and what plans they have to improve access to support.

[Baroness in Waiting/Government Whip (Baroness Blake of Leeds) (Lab)]

My Lords, we fully recognise the difficulties that families face in accessing the right support following a child’s autism diagnosis. In local areas, post-diagnostic support may be accessed via health, social care, education, and voluntary and community services, depending on what the individual needs. Alongside local support offers, a national peer education programme, Autism Central, is available for families and support networks of autistic people. The Government are reforming the SEND system to improve access to earlier support.

[Baroness Leaman (LD)]

My Lords, I thank the Minister, although her Answer confirms that no assessment has been made of the adequacy of parenting support programmes and that data is not held centrally. Earlier this year, Open University research found that only one in four parents of neurodivergent children feel confident in the advice they receive. Will the Minister commit to collecting national data on waiting times and capacity so that progress can actually be measured?

[Baroness Blake of Leeds (Lab)]

The noble Baroness raises a very interesting point. One of the most important directions of travel is that we robustly increase capacity at a local level, to bring together all the key people so that we get an accurate picture of what is happening. That can then be collated up to national level, but it is local decision-making, and the involvement of families themselves, who can bring so much information to the table, that is key.

[Lord Patel of Bradford (Non-Afl)]

My Lords, can I go back one step? Many families wait months, if not years, before receiving a diagnosis. Approximately how many children and young people are currently waiting for an autism assessment, and what support is available to them and their families during that period, rather than waiting until a diagnosis has actually been made?

[Baroness Blake of Leeds (Lab)]

The figures that we are working from say that 270,701 people were waiting for an autism assessment in March 2026. We know that the average waiting time for assessments varies across the country: for 0 to 17 year-olds it is about 67 weeks, and for patients aged 18-plus it is about 20 weeks. The noble Lord is absolutely right to stress the importance of not having to wait for the actual diagnosis before things are put in place. That is why we are putting such focus on SEND reforms in schools and in early years provision, to make sure that we get early assessments and can put in place the support that we know is available as early as we possibly can.

[Baroness Pitkeathley (Lab)]

My Lords, while acknowledging the great importance of services to these families, will my noble friend the Minister also acknowledge the importance of peer support in these circumstances and commend the work of the many charities enabling families in the same circumstances to talk to each other, to share information and to get support?

[Baroness Blake of Leeds (Lab)]

It will not come as any surprise to noble Lords that I support my noble friend completely on this. In those early days when the suspicion starts to arise, there is absolutely no substitute for having someone you can go and talk to in confidence, without escalating a situation, and to share experiences with. As she rightly highlights, the charity sector can signpost people to the support available and show them how to get on track in the system, moving towards diagnosis and further support.

[Lord Sterling of Plaistow (Con)]

My Lords, even if we had all the money in the world, I suggest that our real problem is that it will take years to build up the number of people who understand this and have the relevant experience. How would the Minister respond to that view?

[Baroness Blake of Leeds (Lab)]

The noble Lord raises an interesting point. At the moment, we are talking more openly and exchanging more information about what is actually happening because more people are sharing experiences, putting in place support networks and raising awareness. There are still too many people—whether in our education sector or in businesses and employment—who do not understand the needs of autistic people in particular, although we are talking about learning disabilities across the piece. We are on a very steep learning curve, but the most important thing is that we get provision in place to help people at the time of greatest need.

[Lord Addington (LD)]

My Lords, the Government sound very confident about this, but on the 29th of last month, in Committee Room 10, I was in a room full of parents of people on the autism spectrum who have gone through the process. Generally, they were terrified of the idea of integration into schools with untrained staff—schools in which their children have already spent their time in corridors or quiet rooms, with one TA looking in occasionally. Will the Government give an assurance that supported special schools will be part of this and that integration will not be done as a religion but merely when it is appropriate?

[Baroness Blake of Leeds (Lab)]

I have heard the noble Lord speak about this many times, and I reassure him that there will not be a one-size-fits-all approach to this. It is vital to recognise that there are young people who have particular needs that will be addressed through specialist schools, for example. However, there is so much evidence that, if we get this right—by putting in the investment, putting in the training that we are funding and working with young people—the benefits of integration and inclusive learning, where they are being done successfully, are enormous. The noble Lord is right that it is important that we get this right. I understand the nervousness, particularly from parents who have spent a lot of time getting their cases heard, so it is up to us to make sure that we go out and give the reassurance that their needs will not be left behind.

[Baroness Nargund (Lab)]

My Lords, research has consistently shown that mothers make up the majority of primary caregivers for children with autism spectrum disorder, often at the cost of their own health, well-being and employment. What specific support is available for these mothers in order to protect their health, well-being and paid employment?

[Baroness Blake of Leeds (Lab)]

It is a well-recognised fact that women bear the brunt of caring responsibilities, at whatever age they are presented. Raising awareness of this, making sure that it is understood and acknowledging how unfair the lack of support has been is pivotal in making sure that we arrange the support mechanisms that are required to move us forward.

[Lord Bellingham (Con)]

My Lords, further to the question from the noble Baroness, Lady Pitkeathley, about charities, I declare an interest because I am involved with a number of autistic charities in my old constituency in King’s Lynn and across Norfolk. Is the Minister aware that one of the biggest challenges is when these children who are on the autistic spectrum come out of college and try to find their way into further training or jobs? Can she comment specifically on what the Government are doing to help that transition?

[Baroness Blake of Leeds (Lab)]

The noble Lord touches on a particular obsession of mine. It is not just about the transition into adulthood, which is absolutely pivotal, but starts earlier than that and is about the transition through the different stages of education. We need to make sure that we completely get away from the awful situation where young people fall through the gaps and there is no information exchange. That is why cross-government working is so critical here. We need the education sector to talk to the health sector and DWP, to make sure that we have a holistic view of young people so that they can move on to the appropriate location and get the right support.

[Lord Kamall (Con)]

My Lords, in responding to the Question from the noble Baroness, Lady Leaman, the Minister confirmed that the Government have not assessed the adequacy of parenting support for families following a diagnosis and do not hold national data on either provision or waiting times. Does the Minister’s department intend to carry out that assessment nationally or to ask ICBs to collect that data locally? If not, without that information, how can the department be confident that families are receiving the appropriate level of support that they need?

[Baroness Blake of Leeds (Lab)]

I do not want to stand here and say that we have got things right. The system is broken and needs so much attention throughout. To pick up the noble Lord’s point about ICBs, the medium-term planning framework gives clear expectations for local ICBs and trusts. We need them to work to improve access, experience and outcomes, focusing on quality and productivity. So many areas have data and gather information, but they do not do anything with it. That is what we absolutely need to address, to make sure that we have an accurate picture and can make the appropriate assessments.

Violence Against Retail Workers

Tuesday 14th July 2026 Lords Chamber

Question

14:58

Asked by

[Lord Walker of Broxton]

To ask His Majesty’s Government what steps they are taking to tackle rising violence against retail workers.

[The Minister of State, Home Office (Lord Hanson of Flint) (Lab)]

Violence and abuse towards retail workers is unacceptable. Through the Crime and Policing Act 2026, the Government have created a new stand-alone offence of assaulting a retail worker, which we are working to commence as soon as possible. We are also restoring neighbourhood policing to tackle retail crime and improve safety for retail workers, with more than 3,100 additional neighbourhood officers and PCSOs since March 2025. I declare my interest as a long-standing member of the Union of Shop, Distributive and Allied Workers.

[Lord Walker of Broxton (Lab)]

My Lords, needles, knives and hammers are weapons regularly used by violent criminals—let us stop calling them shoplifters—against retail staff on our high streets. These incidents are now routine. For the next month, I will publish weekly summaries of violent attacks against my colleagues so that noble Lords can see the reality on the ground. While some improvements in police responsiveness are welcome, it remains a major issue. Will the Minister acknowledge that two-tier policing is real and issue clearer guidance to forces to ensure that violence against shop workers is properly prioritised?

[Lord Hanson of Flint (Lab)]

Violence against shop workers is properly prioritised. In fact, recorded shop theft fell by 1% in the year to December, the number of charges for shop theft rose by 21% over the previous year and a British Retail Consortium report has shown that violence and abuse fell from 2,000 incidents a day to 1,600. As somebody who has sat in a shop front and worked in a shop, I know that such abuse is not acceptable. I know the threats that people face. We have invested £5 million into Operation Opal, which is a specialist policing unit, so we do take this issue seriously. When we bring the measures forward, they will be a further deterrent to those who choose to attack shop workers and undertake shop theft. I welcome my noble friend’s support.

[Baroness McIntosh of Pickering (Con)]

My Lords, convenience stores recorded 5.8 million incidents in 2025 alone. The total cost of that was £354 million, with an average cost of over £7,000 per store. Not only is there the human cost on shop workers but the economic cost to convenience stores and larger stores. The Government must do more. What does the Minister intend to do?

[Lord Hanson of Flint (Lab)]

We have done two things that the previous Government did not do. We have introduced an offence of assault on a shop worker and lifted the £200 threshold under which the police did not have to report and act on shop theft. I remind the noble Baroness that, as a shadow Minister in the other place in 2014, I opposed the £200 limit and have since had the pleasure of lifting it as a Minister. We take this matter seriously. Shop theft is a cost to us all. It is a cost to the workers who face those threats, to the businesses—particularly small ones—and to all of us as purchasers of goods. We must drive it down. That is what the figures show that we are trying to do; it is not an easy task to drive it down still further, but we have to take further action.

[Baroness Doocey (LD)]

My Lords, violence against retail workers does not stop at the shop door. Staff who refuse unlawful sales or challenge theft can face online threats and harassment. This includes sharing their images and personal details. What steps are the Government taking to address this rapidly growing problem and ensure that online threats and doxing of retail staff are treated every bit as seriously as violence within a shop?

[Lord Hanson of Flint (Lab)]

The noble Baroness is absolutely right. It is not acceptable and should be looked at. The legislation covers those potential online threats in other areas, but the bottom line, going back to my noble friend’s Question, is that we are asking shop workers to uphold sales of cigarettes, alcohol, solvents and a whole range of other things and to help prevent people walking into a store feeling that they can steal something with no recourse whatever. We are trying to say through policing, the legislation that we have passed and support for the type of areas that the noble Baroness has mentioned that shop theft—I will not call it “shoplifting”—is unacceptable. We need to drive it down.

[Baroness Hazarika (Lab)]

My Lords, I thank my noble friend for the work that he has done on this and for taking the time to come to Brixton recently to meet shop workers in my community, many of whom told him some harrowing stories of the violence that they have faced. He heard that a small number of relatively persistent shop offenders are responsible for quite a lot of the theft. What work has been done to target those persistent offenders and what role can technology play, particularly facial recognition technology?

[Lord Hanson of Flint (Lab)]

My noble friend is right. I was pleased to visit Brixton with her some months back to look at this issue and to see the impact of shop theft on a range of shop owners. We have given additional resources to specific police forces, including the Met, to deal with town centre disturbances and shop theft. That operation is ongoing. The Policing Minister in the Home Office chairs a regular meeting with the lead chief constables on this matter. We have also put great emphasis on looking at the range of other issues, including facial recognition for persistent offenders. There has been a consultation on that recently, which we intend to respond to shortly. Overall, if there are persistent offenders, we have a range of mechanisms, including those passed through the Crime and Policing Act, such as respect orders banning people from particular areas of a community. I hope that the full force of all those will further reduce this plague.

[Baroness Fox of Buckley (Non-Afl)]

My Lords, last week I met a group of retail workers from across the country, not represented by the big trade associations but from local convenience stores and corner shops. Is the noble Lord aware that their specific concerns at present focus on the violence coming from pop-up vape shops? These are a blight on our high streets and are fronts for black market sales, especially of cigarettes, which the workers believe are one of the unintended consequences of the Tobacco and Vapes Act. Following the BBC and Channel 4 exposés of this murky world, often populated by thugs and illegal migrants threatening legitimate retailers, will the Minister meet these small businesses to discuss these very specific threats?

[Lord Hanson of Flint (Lab)]

I am always happy to meet any businesses with colleagues. We have put £10 million of funding, announced in the Budget, into the very issue that she mentioned. We have increased dedicated support for the National Crime Agency to tackle high street money laundering. We have had a multi-agency crackdown on money laundering through the high street. We have had an HMRC targeted surge against tax evasion and illicit finance in the high street, and we will undertake further closures of premises that are not performing as they should, because they are undermining legitimate businesses. A lot has been done, but I accept that there is a lot more that can be done.

[Lord Cameron of Lochiel (Con)]

My Lords, if the Government are truly committed to tackling retail crime, such as shop theft and violence against retail workers, they need to improve enforcement and policing. Have the Government given any consideration to hotspot policing, whereby more officers are deployed to areas with particularly high rates of crime and greater use is made of stop and search?

[Lord Hanson of Flint (Lab)]

Yes, we have. We have highlighted particular areas through the policing assessment of shop theft, and we have identified a number of areas where we have been able to put in resource to do that. We have also, dare I say, increased the number of police officers on the beat. We have a commitment to increase that by a significant number. We have managed 3,100 in the 18 months or so that we have been in office, and we intend to increase that. With our police reforms, we intend to give additional support to look at what the priorities are at a local level, with smaller police forces more focused on neighbourhood policing. I look forward to the noble Lord’s support on those measures.

[Lord Pannick (CB)]

The Minister has mentioned new offences, more resources and more charges. Does he accept that the effect of these welcome measures will be undermined unless offenders are brought to court speedily? Does he accept that, at the moment, the delays in bringing these matters to court are far too great and the deterrent effect is severely undermined?

[Lord Hanson of Flint (Lab)]

We take a whole of government approach to this. One of the reasons why we are looking at the range of issues on retail crime implementation is to make sure that we can manage new pressures in the system. The noble Lord is right: it is important from the Home Office’s perspective that we catch them or prevent them, but for the Ministry of Justice and other departments it is important that we have speedy justice and, if need be, imprison them. That is a whole of government approach. The key point I would leave the House with is that this is a really important issue.

[Baroness Sater (Con)]

My Lords, at a meeting of the APPG on Sport and Physical Activity in the Criminal Justice System, which I co-chair, Nike highlighted the growing scale of retail theft and violence against shop workers. Given the evidence that sport and physical activity can support early intervention, diversion and rehabilitation, I would be grateful if the Minister would be willing to work with organisations in the sector to explore how these approaches could form part of the Government’s wider strategy to tackle retail crime.

[Lord Hanson of Flint (Lab)]

It is extremely important that we prevent crime. That is why it is important that we go back to the ultimate basics on this. If people at school age involve themselves in retail crime, there need to be efforts and support to give them an alternative lifestyle. Retail crime does grow, and people who engage in what they would term low-level activity will find themselves at some time doing higher-level, more damaging activity. I go back to the basic principle that shop theft damages the shops, it damages all of us as consumers, it damages the individuals who undertake it and we have to try to drive it down. To do that, we have put in place measures on prevention of retail attacks and measures of change to shift the balance so the police can focus on shop theft. On the point the noble Baroness made about early intervention, if people are involved and come to the attention of the authorities, there should be mechanisms to help support them to turn away from that life.

National Crime Agency: Reform Party Funding

Tuesday 14th July 2026 Lords Chamber

Question

15:10

Asked by

[Lord Bassam of Brighton]

To ask His Majesty’s Government how many Suspicious Activity Report enquiries are currently being conducted by the National Crime Agency concerning the funding of the Reform Party.

[The Minister of State, Home Office (Lord Hanson of Flint) (Lab)]

The Government do not comment on the submission of suspicious activity reports. The National Crime Agency is operationally independent and has been clear in its statements that it does not confirm or deny the receipt of a suspicious activity report nor comment on how such reports are used. Suspicious activity reports are confidential and breaching that confidentiality risks committing a tipping-off offence under the Proceeds of Crime Act 2002.

[Lord Bassam of Brighton (Lab)]

Notwithstanding the Minister’s honest Answer, perhaps he can advise the House on how many suspicious activity reports the Government would expect to be lodged against political parties annually as a result of political donations. Does the Minister agree with me that it is extraordinary for a party, Reform UK, which pitches itself as being anti-establishment and always claims the moral high ground in politics, to be reliant on funding from questionable—not to say dodgy—donors?

[Lord Hanson of Flint (Lab)]

I always try to be helpful, but, for the reasons I have mentioned, I cannot give information to the House or to my noble friend on the number of reports that are taken. I can say that it is in the interest of all of us in this House to make sure that our politics is clean and not funded by illegal sources, and that we take action to make sure that all political parties are held to account for the funding they receive to exercise their political activity and to get themselves elected—or not, as it may be. I am very happy to talk through the details of the Rycroft review; the Government have received the review and have accepted all the recommendations made. That includes a range of measures, which I think my noble friend will welcome, that will put great pressure on a number of political outlets, which will find that their involvement in some of the areas that the Rycroft review is trying to tighten will make it much more challenging for them to receive donations from various sources.

[Lord Jackson of Peterborough (Con)]

My Lords, on the subject of alleged dodgy donations, can the Minister update the House on whether the Cabinet Office or the Electoral Commission is able to commence or conclude inquiries into the £740,000 of secret, undeclared donations generated by Labour Together and funnelled to Labour Party members, including MPs Nick Thomas-Symonds, Darren Jones and others? Is he aware that calls for an independent inquiry were backed by Labour MPs in the other place via an EDM in May? Failure to properly deal with this scandal definitively simply undermines faith and trust in party funding and politics.

[Lord Hanson of Flint (Lab)]

What I will say to the noble Lord is that I think it is important we have clean financing of political parties. I refer him to the Rycroft review—let me say some of the things we have agreed and accepted that we will have: a cap on donations from overseas electors; a tightening of corporate donation rules; a moratorium on crypto donations, which will be of interest to my noble friend Lord Bassam; strengthened non-party campaigner and candidate controls; strengthened “know your donor” checks; and standardised political financing reporting. Any political party that wishes to adopt clean funding should sign up to those principles, and, when we bring measures before the House, I trust that the noble Lord will support them. I will look at what he said with regard to Labour Together, but I also say to him that we should try to take the party politics out of this and have an even and level playing field, so that all political parties know who has been funded, why and how, and ensure that those fundings are clean, transparent and open.

[The Earl of Kinnoull (CB)]

My Lords, is it not the case that one thing that has allowed Reform and Nigel Farage to get off a little here is the sheer complexity of electoral law and the whole area around this? We are about to start consideration of the 27th Representation of the People Bill, and the 26 others are not consolidated; is there not a good case for the Government to decide that we need to consolidate electoral law? In the simplicity that might follow that, there would be greater control over dodgy dealings in party funding.

[Lord Hanson of Flint (Lab)]

The Bill that the noble Earl mentions will probably now go before the House of Commons in September: it was due this week, but we have put the Hillsborough law in place this week, which I welcome, and that has been moved back. It is important that we have clear electoral law. He tempts me to talk about issues that are not my direct departmental responsibility, but I will reflect on what he has said, listen carefully to representations and pass them on to the appropriate Minister.

[Lord Pack (LD)]

My Lords, the National Crime Agency gave evidence to Parliament earlier this year in which it said:

“There are quite a lot of our covert powers … that we can only use if the sentence is three years or over”.


However, many political finance offences do not have a tariff of three years or over. Therefore, the NCA is not currently able to use its full range of investigatory powers to ensure that it is playing its role in keeping our politics clean. That is a topic that the Rycroft review raised, but so far the Government have not tabled any amendments to the Representation of the People Bill to rectify this loophole in our investigatory framework. Will the Minister commit to looking at this issue again with colleagues over the summer and make sure that amendments are tabled in the autumn so that we can close this loophole?

[Lord Hanson of Flint (Lab)]

As I said to the noble Earl, Lord Kinnoull, Report and Third Reading of the Representation of the People Bill will take place as soon as parliamentary time allows. I am not the Minister directly responsible for that Bill, but I will pass on the noble Lord’s comments. I hope that I share with the noble Lord the aspiration of ensuring that we put as tight a ring as possible around those donations, so that there is transparency, clarity and openness, and so that, if any amendments are made, the National Crime Agency has the independent policing ability to follow through.

[Lord Carter of Haslemere (CB)]

My Lords, as I understand it, the Electoral Commission will be given the power to share information with third parties, which is very welcome and long overdue. But will it also be given the power to require information from third parties, which is normal for any regulator that one can think of, with tough sanctions for non-compliance?

[Lord Hanson of Flint (Lab)]

One of the Rycroft recommendations is that we standardise political finance reporting, and the Government have accepted that. Accepting that means that we have given the Electoral Commission powers to prescribe standardised reporting formats. We are continuing to work with the Electoral Commission on a number of other areas. I will reflect on what the noble Lord has said.

[Lord Cameron of Lochiel (Con)]

My Lords, the Labour Together episode has already been mentioned. Not only did that organisation fail to declare donations but it paid to have journalists investigated. Does the Minister agree that it would be inappropriate for anyone involved in these scandals to be given a senior role in government?

[Lord Hanson of Flint (Lab)]

Ultimately, who gets senior roles in government is a matter for the Prime Minister. The Prime Minister will make a judgment on that and, with due respect, I do not think he will be taking advice from the Conservative Front Bench on whom he appoints.

[Lord Watts (Lab)]

My Lords, no matter what action is taken by the Government, dodgy people will try to find a way around it. Will the legislation be drafted in such a way that it is flexible enough to take into account things that might happen in the future?

[Lord Hanson of Flint (Lab)]

The acceptance of the Rycroft recommendations means that the Government have accepted a whole range of measures on tightening up political donations from overseas, crypto currency, reporting and transparency. We have yet to put those measures into effect, but we have accepted the recommendations and will bring forward legislation to give effect to them at the earliest opportunity. That will help everybody in this House, from His Majesty’s Opposition to the Government to other political parties represented here, to have that transparency. I look forward to taking that forward in due course.

[Lord Hayward (Con)]

My Lords, further to the question from the noble Earl on the Representation of the People Bill, pages 104 to 193 of that Bill are there only because the legislation has not been consolidated. The people who have spent their time preparing all those pages could have spent their time preparing consolidation. When the Bill comes to our House, we will waste time debating things that would have been much better considered as a consolidated piece of legislation. I have had a very good discussion on this subject with the noble Lord, Lord Lemos, because it appears to be an enormous waste of time.

[Lord Hanson of Flint (Lab)]

The department I am responsible for is about making sure that, through the National Crime Agency and policing, we catch those people who are committing offences under legislation. The framing of future legislation, which the noble Lord just mentioned, is a matter for another government department. But, with the involvement of the Home Office, the Rycroft review recommendations have been accepted, we have introduced a moratorium on political donations through crypto assets, and we are progressing wider reforms through the Representation of the People Bill. The point about consolidation, which he and the noble and Earl mentioned, is one that I am sure my noble friend Lord Lemos will reflect on.

Cheltenham Borough Council (Markets) Bill

Tuesday 14th July 2026 Lords Chamber

Third Reading

15:20

Bill passed.

Supply and Appropriation (Main Estimates) Bill

2nd reading & Committee negatived & 3rd reading
Tuesday 14th July 2026 Lords Chamber

Second Reading (and remaining stages)

15:20

Moved by

[Lord Livermore]

That the Bill be now read a second time.

Bill read a second time. Committee negatived. Standing Order 44 having been dispensed with, the Bill was read a third time and passed.

Death of Ann Widdecombe

Tuesday 14th July 2026 Lords Chamber

Statement

15:21

The following Statement was made in the House of Commons on Monday 13 July.

“With permission, Mr Speaker, I wish to make a Statement about the death of Ann Widdecombe. It is with great sadness that I say those words. My thoughts today are with her family, her friends and all those who loved her.

Ann Widdecombe dedicated her life to politics and public service. She was a fixture of our political life for nearly 40 years. She brought conviction to our politics, grounded in her profound Catholic faith. She was forthright in her opinions and argued courageously for the things she believed in. But, perhaps most of all, she brought an inimitable style to politics. She was forthright and fearless. As Lord Howard of Lympne can attest, she had a memorable turn of phrase. And she was joyful: she thought seriously about ideas but did not take herself too seriously, and that allowed her to reach beyond this place and charm the country at large. She was one of those rare politicians who was bigger than politics.

There have been so many moving tributes in the past few days, reflecting Ann’s impact both within this place and beyond politics. But I think her outlook on life is best summed up by Ann herself. Sitting on Graham Norton’s sofa, she said:

‘We get one go this side of eternity—one go. Life is not a dress rehearsal. You take opportunities that you like, and you go for it’.

Ann took her opportunities. She was the proud MP for Maidstone for 23 years—a champion of her constituents. She served the country in government, as Minister for Employment and then Minister for Prisons. She took politics out of these ancient walls and became a bona fide TV star. Her contribution to our politics and national life will never be forgotten.

On Wednesday, Ann Widdecombe was murdered in her home. The circumstances of her death are extremely distressing. Counterterrorism policing has now taken the lead in the investigation. As Laurence Taylor, the head of national counterterrorism policing has said:

‘We now have new information and evidence that means Counter Terrorism Policing is leading the investigation … We are pursuing multiple lines of inquiry to establish the motivation for this attack’.

The police now have a suspect in custody: a 28 year- old white British man. I can confirm to the House that this man was not known to Prevent. The police have cautioned against speculating about the case. That is the right thing to do for Ann’s family and friends. It is also vital that the police are given the space they need to carry out their work.

For now, what matters most is supporting the investigation, so that we can see justice delivered for Ann and all who loved her. I urge anyone, with any information at all, to come forward immediately.

I know this raises questions about the security of those in public life. I will not be the only one in the Chamber also thinking of two other beloved Members of this House: Jo Cox and Sir David Amess. Politics is a calling for those of us here, but it should not be a dangerous one. It is incumbent on the House and the Government to work together to protect those who choose to serve. The Home Office and the police work closely with the Parliamentary Security Department to provide practical advice and support directly to MPs. But we must always be vigilant and respond to changing threats.

Security measures are kept under constant review to ensure that MPs can carry out their duties safely. The police intend to issue guidance to MPs soon, and they will be contacting parliamentarians in their constituencies to offer support. I also recently commissioned the former Lord Chancellor, Sir Robert Buckland, to review the lessons from Sir David Amess’s murder, including into required improvements to security for MPs working in their constituencies.

I recognise the particular concern that the Reform UK party will feel today, and of course Nigel Farage, the party’s leader. I am happy to offer a meeting for Mr Farage with the chair of RAVEC—the Royal and VIP Executive Committee—the independent body within the Home Office that manages the security of those in public life. I will also be looking at what security guidance can be provided to former Members of Parliament, which I hope to work with you on, Mr Speaker, as well as to those who serve a party outside of this place.

Today is a dark day in our political life, but we must also use it as an opportunity to celebrate Ann Widdecombe’s memory. She was a unique figure in our politics: a distinctive and devoted public servant, the likes of whom we will rarely, if ever, see again. Ann had a profound faith. Her journey in this life has ended too soon, but may she now rest in eternal peace. I commend this Statement to the House”.

[Lord True (Con)]

My Lords, no 78 year-old woman deserves to be bludgeoned to death in her own home. The whole House will wish that the search for anyone who may have incited or abetted her cowardly killer will be far-reaching and remorseless and their punishment unbending. To those who sneered about Ann Widdecombe after the news of her death or, worse, welcomed her death, I say that to try to unsay such things when you learn of the manner of her death does not make it okay. Your shameful words are indelible, and their stain lies not on her but for ever on you. There is too much easy hatred in politics today. We must confront all its perpetrators and root them out.

There was no hatred in Ann Widdecombe. Strong principles? Yes, you sure knew where you stood. Convictions expressed with clarity? Certainly. A zeal to serve her community? Absolutely. Readiness to debate fiercely and then make up with a drink and a laugh afterwards? Very much so. People who knew her in the House of Commons say there was never a harder-working constituency MP. She worked for the causes in which she believed day in, day out, right to the very end. Her killer found her after one engagement, and he took her as she was preparing for her next one.

The response from her own community in recent days has shown how dearly she was loved by her neighbours and those with whom she so faithfully worshipped her divine creator at Buckfast Abbey. She was one of those rare politicians that non-politicians, real people, related to and liked. Yes, she was a character. She loved her country. My goodness me, how much she loved this land. Eccentric, maybe, but how English is that? My party leader, Kemi Badenoch, spoke simply and eloquently, as a woman of a woman, of the shock that we in the Conservative Party feel at the loss of a dear colleague of decades. Like Kemi, I reach out to the members of Reform, to whom Ann lately hitched her redoubtable wagon. Her loss is a loss, in my judgment, to the whole of public life, and it is another darkening of the happiness and the cheerful innocence of things.

I thank the Minister for the kind words that we have heard from the Government and from so many in the party opposite. Sometimes, we know that we are all brothers and sisters under the skin, on the same journey, for the same purpose of public duty. Ann’s death is another reminder of the real threats to many in public life. We remember David Amess, Jo Cox, Ian Gow, Anthony Berry, Robert Bradford, Airey Neave —all slain by terrorists while serving MPs.

I know that there is a limit to what the Minister will be able to say about the ongoing investigation, but the announcement that counterterrorism police are now leading the investigation has only deepened concern felt here in Westminster and across the country. The Home Secretary said that the suspect was not known to Prevent. Can the Minister give the House any update on latest information that he can share?

Understandably, there was much in the Statement about the advice available to MPs and new provision that may be made at the other end of this palace. Can the Minister say anything about what provision may be made for Members of your Lordships’ House, who are not free from daily threats of violence? We must never, ever close the gates of democracy, but we must safeguard all those, Members or not, who come to Parliament to serve their fellow countrymen and women.

Surprise has been widely expressed about the haste with which the Devon and Cornwall Police downplayed any idea that there was a political motive to this killing. Is the Minister satisfied with protocols for releasing information to the public in high-profile cases in this social media age? Will he commit to reviewing the handling of this case so that the right lessons are learned?

That is for the future. For now, all our thoughts and prayers should be with Ann’s family and friends. I know that the whole House will join with me in expressing our deepest sympathies to them all.

[Baroness Doocey (LD)]

My Lords, from these Benches, we join others in extending condolences for the death of Ann Widdecombe. The reaction to this tragedy has rightly included tributes from every party and from all sections of society. That is a reminder that, under fierce disagreement, there is a shared commitment to our democratic institutions and a shared vulnerability when violence enters political life.

Like every Member of this House, we were shocked and saddened by her death, the circumstances of which are subject to an active police investigation. The police have been clear right from the outset that they are treating this as a suspected murder. However, they have not yet established a motive. The situation seems to change constantly, and I suspect that it will continue to do so, as they uncover more and more evidence.

They have also asked us to respect their request not to speculate and to allow them to do their work. If only we could have the same lack of speculation on the internet and on social media. Would that not be great? Unfortunately, however, it is never going to happen.

Ann Widdecombe commanded widespread respect for her commitment to democratic debate and public services, first as a councillor, then as an MP for two decades, then as a Government Minister and, finally, as a Member of the European Parliament. This tragedy is a reminder that those who serve in public life should be able to do so safely.

We depend on people from all parties and none to put themselves forward and speak their minds without fear or favour, but my personal experience suggests that younger people, in particular, will not even consider the possibility of making politics their life. When you ask them, even though they are highly articulate and very happy to tell you what the Government should and should not do, they say, “We are not going to put ourselves forward to be shot down”. I honestly think that we all ought to work together to change this system. They should not be feeling like that. They should want to serve and realise how great it is to do so.

From these Benches, we send our sympathy to Ann’s family, her friends, her former colleagues, her constituents and her community, who will all be grieving her loss. Our responsibility now is to continue our arguments, definitely with seriousness but also with civility, and to give the police the space they need to establish the facts of her very sad death.

[The Minister of State, Home Office (Lord Hanson of Flint) (Lab)]

My Lords, I am grateful for the contributions from both the noble Lord, Lord True, and the noble Baroness, Lady Doocey. Everybody in this House knows that politics is about beliefs, about standing for things, and about making your views known. No one can deny that Ann Widdecombe did that in a way that was energetic, forthright, occasionally humorous and, unlike many Members of this House, occasionally on “Strictly Come Dancing”, which is important.

I spent 18 years in the Commons with Ann Widdecombe, and I cannot think of many areas where we ever agreed, but we disagreed with civility, with humanity and with mutual respect for views that we held. The loss of her in these circumstances is devastating for her family and for all who knew her, particularly for Members of this House who knew her as well. She brought conviction to our politics. She was forthright in her opinions. She argued courageously for things she believed in. She did not deserve to be murdered in this way.

As the noble Lord and the noble Baroness have mentioned, I cannot comment on the current police investigation; it is not appropriate for me to do that. What I can say in answer to the noble Lord, Lord True, is that the police are making a further statement on the developments in the murder investigation possibly as I speak—they were due to hold a press conference between 3 pm and 3.15 pm and they may well be doing that now; I am trying to check whether anything further has been said. It is important that we give the police time to examine that.

The issue that the noble Lord and the noble Baroness mentioned about Devon & Cornwall Police and the counterterrorism police is a step that has been taken in co-operation with both forces to look at further leads. It does not necessarily mean that terrorism was involved, but it is important that we give the police the opportunity to investigate. The counterterrorism police have now taken the lead on the investigation. As Laurence Taylor, the head of national Counterterrorism Policing, has said:

“We … have new information and evidence that means Counter Terrorism Policing is leading the investigation … We are pursuing multiple lines of enquiry to establish the motivation for this attack”.


Ann Widdecombe had an inimitable style in politics. She was valued by her own side and across both Houses of Parliament. She served Maidstone for 23 years as a champion for her constituents. She served the country in government as Minister for Employment and then Minister for Prisons. She served with pride and with a commitment that means that today we mourn her loss tremendously.

Both noble Lords who have spoken mentioned security for elected politicians. I can remember every case of the murder of a politician that the noble Lord, Lord True, mentioned. I have seen colleagues of mine, Jo Cox and Sir David Amess, murdered. I have watched from afar as Airey Neave, Ian Gow and Reverend Robert Bradford were murdered. It is not a way to do politics. We do our politics by discussion. It is important that we ensure that Members of Parliament and Members of this House have the support to be able to do that job free of fear. I do not think there is a single Member of Parliament who has not faced threats at some time or other, and many Members of this House do so as well.

Ultimately, it is the parliamentary authorities who are responsible for the security of this House, but we in the Home Office will work with them and we will continue to review how we can work with Operation Bridger, which is the police support, through local forces and through national support to ensure that we get that protection. It will be done on the basis of threat and of particular support for Members of Parliament who require it.

Ultimately, we will find out who murdered Ann Widdecombe and they will face a severe prison sentence in due course. But we should remember the contribution that Ann made and the affection in which she was held, and remember, dare I say, the differences we had. We should engage in our parliamentary democracy and our public life to reflect those values in the way in which we know they should be reflected—mutual respect, honest disagreement and sometimes open discussion. Ultimately, we should recognise that Parliament is there for a purpose—to reflect the will of the people—and our job is to make sure we do that, as Ann would have wanted, in a civilised, humorous but principled manner.

15:35

[Lord Alton of Liverpool (CB)]

My Lords, the noble Lord, Lord Hanson of Flint, just referred to the assassination of Airey Neave here in the precincts of Parliament in 1979. It was the day after I was elected in a parliamentary by-election, so some of the horrors we have witnessed in the years that have passed have left an indelible mark on me, not least because Sir David Amess was a very close friend, as indeed was Ann Widdecombe, so much so that Ann was a godparent to one of my children and a close family friend.

On one occasion, after a particularly tough battle on a Home Office Bill in another place, where she at the time was a Home Office Minister, Ann told me that I was “her favourite bleeding-heart liberal”. But as the House may imagine, we often had our differences, and as recently as last month in a curry house which was a favourite watering-hole of Ann’s—where I have seen the noble Lord from time to time and indeed the noble Lord, Lord Clarke—we argued again about so many things, respectfully recognising our differences.

Ann was intelligent, principled and kind. Yes, her beliefs were founded on those twin pillars of faith and patriotism in a very toxic environment, fuelled often, as the noble Lord, Lord True, and the noble Baroness, Lady Doocey, have said, by hatred. We have to do far more to respect difference and diversity and uphold minorities in our community. We must work far harder to create a climate in which difference of opinion can be expressed with tolerance and respect. Now, we must do all we can to honour Ann’s memory. I hope there will be a book of condolence which we can all sign. In addition, we have to honour her memory by creating an environment where people can express their differences in tolerance and respect.

[Lord Hanson of Flint (Lab)]

I am grateful to the noble Lord and, may I say, he is one of my favourite bleeding-heart liberals as well. But, that said, his point is vital. Essentially, this is about expressing our political differences in a way that understands our basic humanity. Whatever the circumstances, and we cannot speculate as to how and why Ann was murdered, she held her arguments in a way that understood that humanity underneath.

I hope that we can look at how we can develop that still further. I know that other government departments will continue to look at how we can support the development of mutual understanding and parliamentary democracy in a way that respects differences and respects the individuals concerned. To reflect further on what the noble Lord, Lord True said, we want to look with the House authorities at Operation Bridger as it works currently for MPs. It is also worth us examining the lessons to be learned for individuals in this House and that is something the Home Office is quite happy to do in due course.

[Lord Harper (Con)]

My Lords, I associate myself with the remarks of the noble Lord, Lord True, and thank the Minister for what he said about our friend Ann Widdecombe. There has been much conversation in the media about whether the Government or the police take seriously the protection of those in public life. I know from my own experience, both in the Home Office and as a Minister, that they absolutely do. Members of Parliament receive enormous numbers of threats, some credible and some not. Can the Minister say one or two things about what the Home Office and the police do, and take seriously, to assess what is credible and what is not, and to put in place both the appropriate steps to advise those in public life and the necessary measures to protect them? Threats to people in public life are not just an attack on them but an attack on democracy and therefore the public. It is important that that protection is put in place.

[Lord Hanson of Flint (Lab)]

I am grateful to the noble Lord for his comments. He will know that Operation Bridger was established and, since 2024, the Home Office has funded a full-time network of national official advisers across all territorial police forces in the UK to bolster the Operation Bridger network. Each officer appointed by each force, funded by the Home Office, is a dedicated point of contact for MPs and, indeed, for candidates. In specific instances, such as by-elections, the police make assessments of the security threats, as they would have done in Makerfield recently and as they will do in the Clacton by-election that is occurring in August. There is a greater level of support for MPs now within constituencies than ever before. All MPs are advised to report incidents to the police and to reference Operation Bridger. The police will then do what I expect the noble Lord would do: triage those, look at what are serious, credible threats and take action accordingly, independently of government and of the House. As I mentioned, we will examine how the House of Lords can be involved in that as well.

[Baroness Royall of Blaisdon (Lab)]

My Lords, like my noble friend, I pay my respects to Ann Widdecombe and her family. She was an extraordinary woman. Like my noble friend, I did not agree with her, but I respected her. I associate myself with the comments that have been made about respecting politics, and the way in which a lack of respect in politics diminishes our democracy. Debate has become so polarised; it is frightening in many ways. Does my noble friend think that now is the time to do more to tackle online algorithms? Social media and the algorithms that perpetuate violence and threats against politicians have gone too far. We absolutely must do something so that we can truly restore respect in politics and have a healthy democracy.

[Lord Hanson of Flint (Lab)]

I am grateful to my noble friend; I do not disagree with any word she said. Increasingly, threats and views are delivered in an online way. That online way has increased the toxicity of the debate we have in the public forum. We need to ensure that we examine that. Legislation is currently available to look at the online space and how it is managed.

I come back to the main point, which I want to re-emphasise for all noble Lords: there has been a vicious murder. We do not know the motivation for that murder yet, and speculation and the discussion today have strayed into potential political aspects. We do not yet know the causes of that murder. We will have proper investigation and I hope that charges will at some point be made against somebody for that murder and that they will be held to account in the courts. We can then examine whether there are lessons to be learned, whatever happened with the murder of our colleague Ann Widdecombe.

[Lord Evans of Weardale (CB)]

My Lords, I offer my condolences to the family and friends of Ann Widdecombe. I have felt for many years that the Government underinvest in the protection of those in public life who face potential terrorist threats. I realise that there has been considerable progress in recent years, both on resourcing and co-ordination of support to those at potential risk, but would the Minister agree that although it is very important that there should be an assessment of the threats that individuals face, in reality that is merely informed guesswork in most cases? There is no specific intelligence. Therefore, if we opt not to take action, we expose ourselves to very considerable risk. We see the implications of that for our public life more widely. Therefore, the default should be to act, rather than to dismiss threats on the basis of their assessment.

[Lord Hanson of Flint (Lab)]

The noble Lord speaks with great authority about the type of threat that many elected politicians and Members of this House may face, and I bow to his experience and knowledge. We keep this under review at all times; in fact, following the murder of Sir David Amess, my right honourable friend the Home Secretary commissioned Robert Buckland, a former Conservative Justice Secretary, to examine the security arrangements for Members of Parliament and others. We expect him to report as soon as possible. It is extremely important that we keep ourselves safe, for the very reasons the noble Lord mentioned: a Member of Parliament represents 70,000, 80,000 or 90,000 people in their constituency. They are sent here by the population to do a job; they should not face threats in doing that job. They should face political discussion and debate, but should not be intimidated or face intimidation in undertaking that role.

[Baroness Hoey (Non-Afl)]

My Lords, Ann and I were on totally different sides in the hunting debate, which went on for many hours in the other place. All through that we remained friends, because Ann understood that differences could be respected. She was in a minority in her party on the hunting Bill and I was in a minority in my party on it. More recently, I was delighted when she came over to Northern Ireland to speak in a unionist meeting in an Orange hall, as a Reform spokesperson, against the protocol. That raised all sorts of questions: how could Ann Widdecombe, a devout Roman Catholic, speak in an Orange hall? She got a rousing reception when she came in. She said, “I’m Ann Widdecombe. I’m a unionist. I’m a Roman Catholic. I’m in an Orange hall and proud to be here”. The place absolutely erupted.

Ann was someone who understood and could cope with any kind of audience. She was also—and it is important that we say this today—a proud member of Reform UK and a close friend to Nigel Farage. Does the Minister not think it was really unacceptable that when Nigel organised a memorial, down near where she lived and with members of the family present, members of the Minister’s party, at senior level, were really nasty? They said that Nigel Farage was using her death as some kind of political football. That was disgraceful. I hope that he, as a Minister, will renege from those remarks and say that that was totally wrong. Ann would have been proud of what Nigel Farage did.

[Lord Hanson of Flint (Lab)]

It is important that we allow people to grieve and express their view on the death of Ann in whichever way they feel appropriate. I am not going to criticise anybody for laying flowers or a wreath at the site of Ann’s home. That is a matter for individuals to do personally. Again, what the noble Baroness has exemplified in her comments is that Ann Widdecombe was a politician who was not afraid, who was committed to a matter of principle, and who could do it in a way that deflected criticism and tried to win round support to her view. We all have our differences and members of Reform are entitled to their political views. I do not agree with them, but they are entitled to their views. What they are not entitled to is intimidation and threats, just as any other Member is not. I come back ultimately to this: let us not make a judgment on how Ann was murdered yet. Let us just grieve for her and resolve to learn the lessons in due course.

[Baroness Browning (Con)]

My Lords, I am grateful to put on the record of the House that I met Ann in the early 1980s and we became close friends. We worked together to become Members of Parliament. We debated with anybody and on anything, and she taught me a lot. She was ahead of me, having already fought one election. We did so well that, even before we were elected, we were invited once to go to No. 10 to have coffee with Margaret Thatcher. As we came out of the door of No. 10, Ann said to me, “Come on!” I said, “What do you mean?”, and she said, “We’ve got to get a press release out”. We went back to her office and she taught me such a lot about campaigning. She got into Parliament before me, but we were Ministers together in the Major Government and in my noble friend’s Lord Hague’s shadow Cabinet.

I always remember standing in my kitchen in Devon one day. I lived quite close to Haytor at one time, so I have sadly pictured it all horribly in the last few days. I was making a fruit salad when Ann stood in my kitchen and instructed me every step of the way on how to make it. In the end, I was so annoyed that I said, “Ann, I used to be a cookery teacher”, and she said, “I think I’ll lay the table”. I shall miss her sadly. I just pray that whoever has done this foul deed is caught quickly.

[Lord Hanson of Flint (Lab)]

I am grateful to the noble Baroness for her personal tribute to and recollections of Ann Widdecombe. I cannot say I ever had a fruit salad with her and I cannot say I ever went for tea in No. 10 with Mrs Thatcher, but I understand the mood in which she has placed those comments and I thank her for them. I also echo wholeheartedly her wish that, at some point and at some time, somebody will be charged with this murder, will be brought to account and will face the consequences of their foul deed.

[Lord Barber of Chittlehampton (Lab)]

My Lords, I am humbled by the quality of this debate and conversation about somebody I did not know. My association comes from being a resident of Devon, living on the other side of Dartmoor and having spent significant time at Buckfast Abbey, and the shock of hearing of her death was very great. I send condolences to her family and friends, many of them in this Chamber.

Looking at it from the outside, I thought Devon & Cornwall Police handled things rather well in the first few days and I think it is collaborating well with counterterrorism police now. As the investigation continues, I believe that what we all need as we get new insights and facts is to wholeheartedly support all the police involved in this investigation, the counterterrorism police and Devon & Cornwall Police, because they are collaborating very well.

[Lord Hanson of Flint (Lab)]

I am grateful to my noble friend and I agree with and wholeheartedly support his wish for the police to be allowed to get on with the investigation. I was just checking my phone because the police are in fact making a statement as we speak. I cannot update the House on the level of co-operation between Devon & Cornwall Police and Counter Terrorism Policing, but both have the same objective, which is to bring to account an individual, at some point and whoever that individual may be, for this crime. I wish them well in their success and I hope they have speedy outcomes to those investigations.

[Baroness Stuart of Edgbaston (CB)]

My Lords, I send my condolences to Ann Widdecombe’s family. I served as a Member of Parliament with her on the other side and, rather surprisingly, when I stepped down as an MP in 2017, a very kind letter arrived from Ann thanking me for my public service. There was always a side to her that we did not anticipate.

One of the things in the light of this is again quite extraordinary. Apart from the armed services, which other profession could say, as many of us in here have said, that three, four or five of our colleagues have been killed in the performance of their duty? One very concrete thing I ask of the Minister is to take a very close look at our home addresses, whether of Members of Parliament or of Members of this House. This is probably the most vulnerable data, and we need to ensure it is not publicly accessible.

[Lord Hanson of Flint (Lab)]

If the noble Baroness will allow, I will not give an opinion on that immediately. It is important that, through the Robert Buckland review, we look at the security issues for all elected parliamentarians and Members of this House. I say that simply because we can jump to speedy conclusions on a whole range of matters, but ultimately we commissioned a review from Robert Buckland in the light of the murder of Sir David Amess and I am waiting for that review to come back with a general review of security. We will work with the authorities in the House of Commons, and indeed with the House authorities here, to see whether improvements can be made. The bottom line in all this is that every person who holds public office has the right to hold that office free from fear and free to enjoy their property free from demonstrations. The noble Baroness will also know, as I have reminded myself in my comments now, that in the police and crime Act we passed legislation that prevents demonstrations outside the properties of Members of Parliament.

[Baroness Fox of Buckley (Non-Afl)]

My Lords, like many other people, it seems to me, I was an unlikely comrade of Ann Widdecombe across the political divide when we were Brexit Party MEPs. I think she started off with some hostility to me but, one way or another, we ended up hugging, laughing and arguing civilly more than we had both anticipated. We were great friends, so it is very hard to accept what has happened.

One concern from what I have heard today—it was also a feature in the Statement in the other place and in the media—is about calls to clamp down on online speech, as though that was the cause of the violence. I urge noble Lords—a little bit of homework, if they do not mind—to listen to Ann’s Oxford Union speech on free speech. It is full of moral clarity and great courage. It is preposterous for me to say this, but I am going to say it: she would not want this brutal murder to be used politically to bring in more censorship, or even for people—such as those academics and activists who have wallowed in her murder and said that she more or less deserved it—to be sacked or cancelled. She would want us to have a debate about it and to argue over it, and truth, not censorship, to prevail. Please let us not go down that road.

[Lord Hanson of Flint (Lab)]

I do not know what Ann Widdecombe would have wanted in relation to that, and I am not going to opine on it. I want to have a free and open debate on those matters, free from intimidation outside this House, and for people to be able to hold their views, whatever they might be, explain them, outline them, defend them and hopefully do so—as all parties in this House do—from the perspective of trying to make this great country a better place to live in for all our citizens. I am not going to give a view on what Ann would or would not have wanted. We should remember her life, not the circumstances of her death, and ensure that, whatever we do, we find whoever perpetrated this act and learn any lessons to be learned. Ultimately, we must accept that a murder has taken place and that somebody needs to be held to account for it. Today, as the whole House has done, we celebrate the life that has been ended by that act.

[The Lord Speaker (Lord Forsyth of Drumlean)]

My Lords, perhaps I could be permitted a few words of my own. Ann Widdecombe was a friend of mine for more than 50 years, believe it or not. She had that quality that guarantees all other virtues: immense courage. She also had great empathy for people, even those she disagreed with. In the absence of anyone on the Bishops’ Bench, perhaps I could be permitted to say that she had a deep and abiding faith, and she believed that she would be with her maker now. If anyone deserves to be with their maker, it is Ann, because of her dedication and deep-held beliefs. We may not have believed in everything she said, but all of us who are sending our condolences to her family should take pride in and have gratitude for her record of public service, which honoured us all and which adorned our Parliament and our democracy.

State of Climate and Nature

Tuesday 14th July 2026 Lords Chamber

Statement

15:59

The following Statement was made in the House of Commons on Monday 13 July.

“With permission, I would like to make a Statement about the nature and climate crisis. Nature is the monopoly provider of everything we need to live. We are living through the Anthropocene, an age where human activity is now the dominant influence on our planet’s climate and ecosystems. We are seeing its consequences: pollution, climate change and mass extinction. Last year, the Energy Secretary gave the first ever Statement to this House on the crisis. One year on, I am here to set out the Government’s commitment to tackle those challenges.

Climate change drives nature loss, and nature loss drives climate change. We must tackle both. Droughts and floods are disrupting harvests, straining supply chains, and pushing up costs. Our nature security assessment published in January shows that if the current rate of biodiversity loss continues, every critical ecosystem is on a pathway to collapse, from the coral reefs that protect our coastlines to the peatlands that store carbon and prevent floods.

The UK’s climate is getting hotter and wetter, with more extreme events—2025 was the UK’s hottest year since records began. In the heatwaves in May and June this year, the Met Office reported that as many as 2,700 people may have died, railway tracks buckled, over 1,000 schools closed, and the London ambulance service had its busiest day on record. Since 1901, the UK’s sea level has risen by about 20 centimetres, but that rate is accelerating, because two-thirds of this rise has happened in just the last 30 years. That is why this Labour Government are stepping up, leading globally on nature recovery, climate mitigation and adaptation. In the UK, we are working in partnership with local communities, businesses, conservationists and farmers. Before the Paris Agreement, the world was on track for around 4 degrees of warming; now, national commitments put us on course for around 2.5 degrees. There is so much more to do, but this represents real progress.

In December, we launched our environmental improvement plan, which, for the first time, set out delivery plans to underpin our targets to restore nature, boost our recycling rates and protect our environmental security. Since then, we have published the land use framework, the water White Paper and the farming road map. We have invested a record £2.65 billion in flood resilience, invested in new food waste collection services and invested £1 billion in our national biosecurity infrastructure in Weybridge. Over the next three years, we will invest more than £7 billion in nature—the largest investment in nature ever. That includes £5.9 billion for environmental farming schemes, £816 million for tree planting and £85 million for peatland restoration.

Last October, we published the carbon budget and growth delivery plan to set out how the UK will continue to reduce emissions in order to lower bills for consumers and secure good jobs for British people. Last month, the majority of Members in this place voted to cut emissions by almost 87% from 1990 levels for the carbon budget 7 period, which runs from 2038 to 2042. Under this Government, more than £100 billion of private investment in the net-zero economy has been announced.

We have done much on mitigation. However, following advice from the Climate Change Committee, we are setting stronger objectives for climate adaptation. We are building our resilience for a minimum of 2 degrees of warming by 2050 and supporting combined authorities to increase their resilience to climate change, too.

In 2024, we saw a single year exceed 1.5 degrees of warming, which is why we are committed to working with our domestic and international partners to keep the Paris Agreement goal of limiting temperatures to a rise of 1.5 degrees. Global warming is likely to reach 1.5 degrees in around 2030, but 1.5 degrees is and will remain the right limit. Every fraction of a degree of warming reduces the severity of impacts on people and nature worldwide. Every species saved reduces the risk of losses to the ecosystems we rely on—pollination, disease prevention, and food and climate regulation.

The key to delivering our nature and climate goals is how we use our land and seas. Our land use framework shows that we have enough land to achieve our priorities across economic growth, housing, food production, climate and nature recovery. However, we must make better decisions about how we use our land. We are moving from paper-based systems to making land digital and opening up the Land Registry free for all. Today, we have published an interactive story map of our spatial evidence to support decision-makers to use their land more effectively.

The UK has also committed to protect and conserve 30% of our land and seas for nature by 2030. Today, we are publishing the 30 by 30 delivery plan for land in England and guidance to land managers on how to implement it. In May, we announced the £30 million wildlife-rich habitat fund, and today we are providing an additional £37 million a year for the next three years for national parks and national landscapes.

This is a whole-of-government effort. This weekend, the Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office ratified the biodiversity beyond national jurisdiction agreement to create marine protected areas on the high seas, covering nearly two-thirds of the world’s oceans. Funded by the Department for Science, Innovation and Technology, the Advanced Research and Invention Agency is investing £81 million in its forecasting tipping points programme. The Ministry of Defence is developing climate security analysis and critical emerging technologies to support energy resilience for the UK and our Armed Forces. The Department for Education is investing £710 million out to 2030 to improve the condition of school and college buildings, reducing their emissions and bills, and increasing their resilience to climate change so that they last for decades to come.

I am delighted that in my constituency of Coventry East, Richard Lee Primary School and Potters Green Primary School are installing new solar panels. At Courthouse Green Primary School, I opened a sensory garden built by the pupils’ eco team to bring nature closer to children.

This week, I am visiting the Great North Bog to see successful peatland restoration in action, and later in the week I will celebrate the 75th anniversary of the first four national parks—a legacy of the great 1945 Labour Government. Tomorrow, we launch a competition for young people to join our new youth climate and nature panel. These young people will offer their expert insight to government as we deliver for climate and nature action through outreach.

From introducing wild beavers to planting three new national forests and creating nine new river walks, this Labour Government are bringing nature closer to people. We will all benefit from a more resilient, more prosperous and greener country. As my right honourable friend the Energy Secretary said in his Statement last year:

‘We have been at our best in the House when we have worked across parties on these issues’.—[Official Report, Commons, 14/7/25; col. 31.]

By preparing our country and our citizens for the climate and nature crises, we are showing leadership internationally. This Government are acting now to protect the world in which we live, which we pass on to future generations. I commend this Statement to the House”.

[Lord Moynihan (Con)]

My Lords, I declare my interests as the chair of Amey, the chair of Acteon and the chair of Buckthorn Partners, which are all involved, in different ways, with energy transition both in the UK and around the world. I am grateful to the Minister for answering questions on the Statement made in another place yesterday. There the Defra Minister read the Statement, and the exchanges focused on her responsibility. Today it is the turn of the Minister for DESNZ in this House, so I will concentrate my questions on the aspects of the Statement that focus on the Starmer Government’s record on meeting the objectives set out in the Statement—or, more precisely, the consequences of the tenure of the Secretary of State, Ed Miliband, who is rumoured to be heading to the Treasury at the end of the week.

We all recognise the importance of protecting our climate and restoring nature. The key question is whether the Government have been capable of making progress on both. The Statement notes the introduction of carbon budget 7 and praises it, despite it being regretted in your Lordships’ House. The Government claim to be

“working in partnership with local communities, businesses, conservationists and farmers”.

The Climate Change Committee suggested a 35% reduction in meat and dairy consumption by 2050, a 50% reduction in the number of cattle and sheep, a doubling of tree planting rates by 2030 and a doubling of peatland restoration by 2040. Does the Minister agree with those representing the farmers that they will be forced to uproot their entire business models within a single generation?

Similarly, the Statement informs us that the Government will

“protect and conserve 30% of our land and seas for nature by 2030”.

Yet last week, the Government approved One Earth solar farm, a week after approving Peartree Hill and Dean Moor solar farms. One Earth will cover 3,900 acres and will have a capacity of 740 megawatts. Half the farm will be on best and most versatile—BMV—land. Can the Minister explain how that enhances our natural environment? Does he agree with the Secretary of State, who recently overruled his own planning inspectors to approve this, Britain’s second-largest solar farm, despite their recommendations to refuse the application over concerns about environmental damage and the loss of productive farmland, which this Statement is meant to protect? It is estimated that the site’s 660 hectares could produce around 5,300 tonnes of wheat a year. Does the Minister not agree that the Government are getting the balance wrong? Britain needs affordable, reliable, clean power, but covering productive farmland with vast solar developments while ignoring practical alternatives is not the answer. Ministers should be pursuing an energy strategy that strengthens our energy security without undermining our farmers.

However, I understand that there is some good news coming from the Statement. Will the Minister confirm that Andy Burnham is going to accept the long-running campaign from this side of the House to approve the Jackdaw gas field and will be going to Aberdeen during the recess with this welcome news? Let us hope that this is the beginning of the damascene conversion of Ed Miliband, especially if he is to move to the Treasury, although somehow I doubt it. Given the decision to approve Jackdaw this summer, does the Minister now agree that North Sea gas is four times cleaner in production than imported LNG and that UK energy security is strengthened by reducing reliance on imported gas? Does he agree that this would be a first step to protecting and indeed increasing oil and gas jobs, would grow tax revenues, would secure energy transition and, vitally in the context of this Statement, would reduce the carbon emissions our reliance on gas generates?

When the Secretary of State states that the North Sea is a mature oil and gas province, we agree with him. The primary source rocks were deposited about 150 million years ago, and with the right tax allowance, regulatory and decommissioning regimes, as in Norway, we could be producing a similar 4 million barrels of oil by the time the first new-build nuclear comes into generation in the late 2030s—and that is optimistic, given the Government’s unacceptable delay in enacting the Fingleton recommendations. Will the Minister confirm that the Burnham Government will understand that what we are talking about is global warming and that the UK is not detached from the globe? As such, does he agree that we should count all emissions in all the supply chains that deliver solar panels and offshore wind to the UK if we are to be honest with the public and not just virtue signalling to a world that is not listening but looking with incredulity at the Government’s deindustrialisation, with the cost of electricity to our industrial base being the highest in the OECD and four times higher than in the States?

The Under-Secretary of State for Defra noted during the Q&A exchanges following the Statement that a school in her constituency, Richard Lee Primary School, is installing new solar panels. Is the Minister aware that this school sources its solar panels from JA Solar? The company has a “very high” exposure—the highest rating—to the Xinjiang province in China, and the accusations of Uyghur slave labour in that province are well known to your Lordships’ House. Does he agree that our solar panels are neither homegrown nor clean? The component parts come from China and rely heavily on vast coal-fired factories daily belching out CO₂ into the atmosphere. Does he agree that the total carbon footprint of a finished Chinese panel averages around 490 kilograms of CO₂ equivalent per module, involving extreme furnace temperatures, adding to global warming at an alarming rate, and putting high levels of CO₂ into the atmosphere for polysilicon, ingot and wafer production? Then we have imported Chinese offshore wind farms, where Chinese white asbestos ends up in wind turbines, and imported brake pads and hoist components are sourced from third-party suppliers in China, where the material is not prohibited, and are now installed in service lifts that transport our technicians up turbine towers in the North Sea.

Does the Minister agree with me that all these essential steps in the supply chain must be taken into account when considering CO₂ emissions globally? Offshore wind turbines rely on powerful permanent magnets with neodymium, praseodymium and dysprosium—the supply of the latter being almost exclusively controlled by China. Add the copper and cobalt from the Democratic Republic of the Congo, where child labour and high CO₂ emissions mining take place, and pupils, children and teachers at the Richard Lee Primary School might not be so impressed.

Does the Minister not agree that if we were to transport all these vital elements of this massively misnamed “clean” homegrown supply chain, we could have an acreage close to size of the Isle of Wight with CO₂-belching factories and illegal working practices? How would parents, teachers and children at the Richard Lee Primary School regard that? The state of the climate and nature is under threat but, sadly, the Government’s energy response in this Statement is lamentable.

[Earl Russell (LD)]

My Lords, we welcome this Statement. The science is absolutely certain that human-induced climate change is beyond doubt. What has changed is how fast the impacts are arriving on our very own doorsteps. This summer’s heatwaves in May and June caused as many as 2,700 excess deaths; transport systems were strained; over a thousand schools closed; and the London Ambulance Service endured its busiest ever day.

We are on our third heatwave of 2026, and 2026 is the first year the UK has reached 35 degrees in May, June and July consecutively. Excessive heat is putting a strain on every individual citizen, on our economy, on our schools and on our health systems. Europe is now confirmed as the fastest-warming continent on Earth, warming at more than twice the global average.

This Government have been genuinely good on the energy transition, approving renewable projects to power the equivalent of more than 19 million homes. But nature has been the poor relation. Not a single new site of special scientific interest has been designated in England since 2023, and our tree-planting rate remains less than half the annual target. Labour’s messaging on nature has been muddled, its green mission too often undermined from within. Climate and nature are not separate; they are codependent. A Government strong on one and weak on the other will ultimately fail at both.

Our climate is changing more quickly than our policies. The Climate Change Committee’s fourth independent assessment of UK climate risk was stark: on adaption, not a single delivery pathway was rated good. Inaction cannot continue. Three of our five worst harvests on record have occurred since 2020; our food security is threatened. The Green Alliance has today written to Ministers to warn:

“The UK was built for a climate that no longer exists”,


and emergency action is needed. We must do far more, more quickly, on adaption. It is the vulnerable, the elderly, the sick, the poor and the workers who will suffer the most.

These matters are hard when we co-operate, and they become almost impossible when we do not. So, I say with real regret that the Conservative Party’s ever-continuing retreat from reality, rejecting the 2050 net-zero target and now reportedly barring prospective candidates who continue to support it, is a betrayal of its own history and the consensus that this country requires.

To those who say the UK emits only 1% of global emissions so why bother: every major economy could say the same. To those who say net zero is impossible, I ask: what is possible instead? British leadership works only if Britain leads.

The wildfire risks this summer are at extreme levels, endangering lives and devastating habitats, yet the Government’s wildfire strategy is still not ready and we remain completely reliant on commercial aircraft to fight fires. We have had one mega wildfire already last year, and we are not prepared for the next. That must change before next year’s El Niño impacts are felt.

On tipping points, will the Minister say what more the Government will do to strengthen monitoring of the AMOC system? The Government’s nature security assessment warns that every critical ecosystem is on a pathway to collapse. If that is true, as I believe it is, the public and this House deserve to see the full assessment, not merely a summary. I ask the Minister to commit to its publication in full. The 30by30 on Land: Delivery Plan, published yesterday, is welcome but insufficient. It leans too heavily on farmers and land managers volunteering, with no statutory backstop and no guarantee that voluntary schemes will deliver at the scale required.

Labour must stop doing things to people and start doing things with them. Give communities real opportunities to protect nature, launch a national campaign and provide an emergency briefing, because misinformation is filling the gap left by government silence. Fear alone will not sustain the public throughout this crisis. We must offer hope and invest in the young people who will live the longest with the consequences of what we decide.

Finally, our climate and nature laws are out of date. Can the Minister say whether the Government will finally match strong words on climate with equally strong action for nature?

[The Minister of State, Department for Energy Security and Net Zero (Lord Whitehead) (Lab)]

I thank noble Lords for their valuable contributions in responding to this Statement made yesterday in the other place. As noble Lords know, the Statement was about climate and nature, and particularly the extent to which—as the noble Baroness, Lady Jones of Moulsecoomb, repeatedly reminds us—you cannot disentangle one from the other. Climate change drives nature loss and nature loss drives climate change. If you tackle one but not the other, you will not succeed in tackling the first thing. Making sure that our environment is liveable—that it is a thriving environment for the purposes of both nature extension and recovery—is completely wound up with the actions we take against climate change in general. The Statement set out what actions the Government are taking on that clear link.

Indeed, in the most recent spending round, the Government put aside unprecedented sums for nature development, recovery and restitution. For example, altogether they put forward over £7 billion at the spending review, including £5.9 billion for environmental farming schemes. ELMS began to take place under the previous Government and have been very successful in developing sustainable and low-carbon farming practices and in making sure that farming is about not just production but enhancing and sustaining that production for the future through changes in farming practices. In addition, £816 million has been put aside for tree-planting, with the planting of three large national forests under way, and £85 million pounds for peatland restoration. Those are practical things that tackle some of the key issues around nature degradation in this country. I suggest that the Government are matching their words with a substantial amount of investment in making sure that nature can live and survive in the right way in the future.

I anticipated that the noble Lord, Lord Moynihan, might concentrate rather more on particular energy and climate change issues. Those areas are very much tied to the balance between nature and climate change. What you absolutely need for a thriving background for nature is clean air, clean energy and clean environmental circumstances under which that energy is produced, as well as an environment that allows nature to thrive. I suggest that solar power, for example, absolutely offers those things, so I do not recognise the noble Lord’s characterisation of the apparently inherent dirtiness of solar panels. The carbon payback of a solar panel is estimated to be just 1.05 years. I agree with the noble Lord that, where a solar panel is made under circumstances in which the production arrangements are a little, shall we say, browner than they are in Europe, the payback will be marginally greater, but it is still only 1.18 years. So I do not recognise the characterisation of solar put forward by the noble Lord. It is an integral part of bringing energy and nature together in how we produce clean energy and clean air at the same time.

The noble Lord, Lord Moynihan, asked whether, in advance of the new Government being in place, I will predict a number of things they are about to do—which of course I will not do. However, I remind the noble Lord that the Jackdaw field is not a field that has not been explored but a field on which Ministers are presently deciding whether to proceed. I should not pre-empt that decision process, but he can be assured that the decision process is under way.

My final point on the noble Lord’s points about this area is that the production of clean energy and low carbon is not about deindustrialisation. As he will know, the Government have recently invested something like £61 billion and crowded in more than £100 billion of clean, green, low-carbon investment in the process. It is actually value added as much as it is investment. It is reindustrialising the country, albeit on a different level of carbon output, in a way that we can see before us in the British-based requirements for a lot of offshore wind, nuclear and various other such things. That means that a lot of this activity is taking place as industrial processes in the UK and is creating green, low-carbon jobs to replace those brown, high-carbon jobs as a result.

The noble Earl, Lord Russell, rightly talks about what is quite evident around us outside this Chamber. This Chamber, mercifully, is reasonably cooled, but outside we are experiencing the hottest year in history, as we will undoubtedly break last year’s records if we go on as we are. We are in an absolute emergency as far as adaptation is concerned. We cannot just think about mitigation for the future. I agree that there is a long way to go in getting that adaptation right for the future, but the Government are on the case. We need to look, for example, at the record sums that have been put in place for flood protection and flood relief and the work that the Government are doing to ensure that building regulations and various other such things are climate change-proof rather than lagging behind—as much of our society is at the moment. I agree that there is a long way to go and I am sure that we will debate how that process is going in the near future. I thank him for his general support for the measures that the Government are taking on climate change and nature and look forward to his continued support in future.

16:21

[Baroness McIntosh of Pickering (Con)]

My Lords, I thank the Minister for the Statement and for giving us the opportunity to raise issues in this regard. I associate myself with the comments made from the Front Bench. Will the Minister reply to the question about taking productive land out of production? The wheat harvest is expected to be devastated this year because of the lack of rain and drought conditions. North Yorkshire is being covered by BES, these big battery energy storage and solar farm projects, which are highly flammable, highly combustible and highly dangerous. How can he square that with nature and environmental benefits? They are diametrically opposed.

[Lord Whitehead (Lab)]

I did indeed not provide a complete answer to the thought put forward by the noble Lord, Lord Moynihan, on farming. He concentrated mainly on energy and climate change, which is what I responded to particularly. As the noble Baroness will know, we have recently produced the farming road map, a comprehensive road map informed substantially by farmers in the first instance on how we can develop more sustainable farming. Contrary to what the noble Lord says, that does not involve, for example, removing a lot of livestock from farming practices. It involves more sustainable practices in general.

I am sure the noble Lord will agree that the agriculture and land use sector needs to make sure that its emissions go down substantially, as it is one of the two sectors that have flatlined on emissions in recent years. The question is how you do it, rather than simply saying that there are things you must do which are detrimental to the interests of farming. I have already mentioned what is happening with the ELMS arrangements. There are all sorts of other things associated with that, such as low-methane feedstuffs for cattle, which are getting a lot of traction and interest in farming circles. These can reduce emissions substantially without having to cull any livestock or causing people to change their eating patterns or farmers to do things other than farm in a more sustainable way. That is the key to what we are trying to do on farming. I hope the noble Lord and the noble Baroness will support it.

[Baroness Jones of Moulsecoomb (GP)]

My Lords, I thank the Minister for his kind words earlier about my contributions—I think they were kind words. I also welcome the Statement from the Minister in the other place, because it was a good Statement. The spending plans sound great, but it is not only about how much you spend but about how you spend it. I often have doubts that Labour really understands that the environment and nature are integral to everything that comes through here, as again and again we see legislation that barely mentions climate change. We are at a point when we have heatwaves, people are dying, “Boris buses” are unbearable and workplaces are too hot to work. Yet this Labour Government have not put climate change into the Sporting Events Bill, the civil aviation Bill or almost any other Bill. Would the Minister suggest to the Government that I can set up some seminars with climatologists so that they understand the importance of putting climate change into all legislation?

[Lord Whitehead (Lab)]

Among other things, the actions that the Government have taken—for example, with the Energising Britain plan—are making sure that the question of climate change is not just an issue for one or two areas of government but one that all areas of government have to contribute to. Those different departments will be judged very substantially on their contributions. As this Government have shown already, there is a real sense of joint working, for example in how the National Health Service and the Ministry of Defence are decarbonising and in how various departments are working together to make sure that that overall goal is achieved. I cannot say that I could guarantee a large attendance at seminars that the noble Baroness might put on for that purpose, but she is very welcome to do so. I would certainly come along to a seminar if she wanted to set one up. The point underlining what she says is that nature is essential to the whole process. As I have said, if we neglect one element against the other in our climate change actions, we will not succeed in either.

[Baroness Ritchie of Downpatrick (Lab)]

My Lords, I congratulate my noble friend the Minister on the very welcome Statement on how the Government will deal with the interlinked issues of climate change and nature, because there is no doubt that both are interlinked and one drives the other. We have already seen examples of nature loss in our wider countryside. Reference has been made to reports issued quite recently that more than 2,700 people may have died in the May and June heatwaves this year. What further steps will our Government take to adapt UK buildings to the impact of climate change, including energy efficiency measures through the use of sustainable timber and modular buildings?

[Lord Whitehead (Lab)]

My noble friend is absolutely right to draw attention to what is sadly likely to be a large number of deaths directly attributable to the recent heatwave we have had in this country. Those deaths can quite possibly be attributed to the lack of readiness that we have in our building fabric and our homes for the consequences of climate change and what will happen with temperatures in future. I hope she can take some comfort from the fact that the Government are actively reviewing how we make sure that building standards are fully compliant with climate change resilience for the future. If we build our buildings so that they can undertake those future climate shocks rather than be victims of them, we will have done a good deed for the future.

[Lord Lilley (Con)]

My Lords, the Statement in another place said that reducing emissions would lower bills. This country has reduced emissions by more than any other country, yet our bills are now higher than any other OECD country, nearly all of which rely on gas like us. Can the Minister explain this? If he is going to say that, in future, renewables will be cheaper than fossil fuels, then why do they need subsidies, and, if they need subsidies, how can he say that they are basically cheaper?

[Lord Whitehead (Lab)]

The noble Lord is substantially but not entirely correct about OECD prices; however, he is not entirely correct that other OECD countries are reliant on gas to the extent that we are in this country. A very substantial driver of electricity prices is the volatile price of gas, as he will know, and the reliance that we still have in this country on gas as a market-maker for electricity very substantially leads to those high prices. Therefore, on the idea of getting off that wheel we are on, of volatile gas prices leading to volatile electricity prices and to high energy prices, it is quite right that we resolve that by making sure that our energy arrangements are as low carbon—and, hence, not gas based—as they can be.

[Baroness Miller of Chilthorne Domer (LD)]

My Lords, I welcome the Statement, but does the Minister agree that marine areas are very important both in terms of climate change, as a carbon sink, and in terms of biodiversity? Does he therefore agree that it is an urgent issue for the Government to make the decision to end bottom trawling in marine protected areas? It destroys vast areas of kelp beds and sea grass, both of which absorb carbon, and it is very destructive.

[Lord Whitehead (Lab)]

Yes, the noble Baroness is quite right about bottom trawling, how destructive it is and how it completely destroys the ecology of shallow to medium deep-sea areas as a result. It is very important that, among other things, those practices are not carried out in marine protected areas. She will know that the Government have a great record of developing marine protected areas around the UK’s coast and internationally in the Crown dependencies. Those will all be areas in which practices such as bottom trawling will not be tolerated.

[Baroness Hayman (CB)]

My Lords, I welcome the Statement, and I very much agree with the noble Earl, Lord Russell, on much of what he said about the issues that face us. We have some enormously difficult issues to face. We have seen some of the immediate ones in in our hospitals, schools and workplaces and in the death rates we have seen. I think the noble Lord, Lord Moynihan, agreed on the threat—to use his word—in terms of both climate and nature. We have immediate problems, and we have some very difficult problems—

[A noble Lord]

Question!

[Baroness Hayman (CB)]

I am going to ask a question in just a minute or two. We have some very difficult decisions to make on issues such as the North Sea, employment, how we get the new skills in, how we get the modular reactors in, what the pace of change is and how we make the transition.

[A noble Lord]

Question!

[Baroness Hayman (CB)]

My question to the Minister is this: does he share my concern that, instead of pooling our joint knowledge and energy into solving those problems when faced with a global crisis, we seem to be creating a more and more polarised and unproductive debate on all these issues?

[Lord Whitehead (Lab)]

I certainly agree with the noble Baroness on the extent to which we will make far greater progress by acting in consensus and agreement together, working out how we do things jointly, than by having an often very sterile debate about whether particular things work particularly well or otherwise. As far as I am concerned, we remain in a climate emergency and in circumstances where, as I have said, we have to consider urgent adaptation at the same time as urgent mitigation. Those are very difficult things to do, and I for one am proud that the Government have not resiled from that difficult debate, particularly on issues such as mineral fuels, but have instead tried to move forward on a broad basis of support. I reflect on the fact that, when I was in the House of Commons, we had a high degree of consensus on climate change; now, we do not, and that is a sorry state of affairs. We need to get back to that as soon as possible in order that we make the progress that we all know is absolutely necessary in the end.

[Lord Barber of Chittlehampton (Lab)]

My Lords, I had the privilege of chairing the Devon land use pilot a few years ago. We learned that people think in silos but the solutions are in combinations. On Exmoor, you have water challenges and energy challenges, and challenges relating to tourism, mental health, exercise, housing, transport, wind energy and biodiversity. We have introduced white-tailed sea eagles and pine martens on Exmoor, and you can see the change happening. The real risk in this debate is that it is not sophisticated enough and falls into a set of false dichotomies, which will frustrate us—

[A noble Lord]

Question!

[Lord Barber of Chittlehampton (Lab)]

My question to the Minister is: in taking through the agenda set out in the Statement, will the Government think in the sophisticated way I have described about broad areas of land as our population grows and the challenges of every acre of land become greater and greater? I have not even mentioned food and farming, which set up the pilot that I chaired. These are important and difficult issues, and we will not get there by simply debating false dichotomies.

[Lord Whitehead (Lab)]

My noble friend sets the question for us all: how can we work across all the different sectors of government to get to our goal? The goal is not that action on climate change is a last-ditch attempt to try to produce a less miserable outcome for the future by mitigating, by a small amount, what is happening with global warming; it is finding a way to bring about a much better life for everybody in the context of the farming and industrial environments in which we live and the enjoyment of our personal and private lives. Joint action on adaptation and mitigation is a method of bringing about that better society. It is the most important thing we need to do to bring about a society that is not only bearable in the future but is instead a big improvement on what we have at the moment.

[Lord Redwood (Con)]

Why cut back and close jobs at home, shutting down oil and gas, food production and our factories when it increases world CO₂? This is self-harm on a crazy scale. Why do the Government want to lose jobs and investment?

[Lord Whitehead (Lab)]

I am not sure I recognise much of the noble Lord’s intervention. As I have said, it is not the case that the Government are bent on a process of deindustrialisation and losing jobs. Jobs are transferring from the high-carbon economy to the low- carbon economy, and one of the duties of government, which this Government are carrying out, is to make sure there are good jobs in both the low-carbon and high-carbon economies, and that skills are transferred from the high-carbon economy to inform the low-carbon economy. That is exactly what is happening at the moment, so I really do not recognise the assertions the noble Lord makes about the future of society. Quite the opposite is taking place.

[Baroness Coffey (Con)]

My Lords, 10 of the 48 designated areas have still not produced their local nature recovery strategies. When will the Government issue directions to those councils and give them a deadline to do it by? Will there be a modest amount of money to help those councils that are clearly struggling?

[Lord Whitehead (Lab)]

I do not know the answer to the question the noble Baroness has put to me. I am happy to write to her. I know that many councils are working hard on this. It is a question of looking at the outliers rather than at people who have taken this issue seriously at a local level and are getting on with the plans that they should be getting on with as far as future environmental concerns go.

Taxation (Energy and Vehicles) Bill

2nd reading & Committee negatived & 3rd reading
Tuesday 14th July 2026 Lords Chamber

Second Reading (and remaining stages)

16:42

Moved by

[Lord Livermore]

That the Bill be now read a second time.

[The Financial Secretary to the Treasury (Lord Livermore) (Lab)]

My Lords, it is a pleasure to open the Second Reading debate on the Taxation (Energy and Vehicles) Bill. The measures contained in the Bill will support businesses across the UK as they deal with the immediate economic costs associated with the ongoing conflict in the Middle East. We did not start this conflict and we did not join it, but it is impacting our economy, including by putting pressure on energy markets and disrupting supply chains.

Despite these pressures, the latest economic data shows that the Government’s economic plan is working. Inflation last month held steady. Britain’s economy was the fastest growing in the G7 for the first quarter of this year. Borrowing is forecast to fall in every year of this Parliament and wages are continuing to rise.

However, as the Chancellor has said repeatedly, we must continue to be responsive to a changing world and responsible in the national interest. That is why we have taken action to support businesses and families, including by reducing VAT on summer activities from 20% to 5% and extending the 5p fuel duty cut until the end of the year, saving the average motorist £120 since last year. We have committed more than £50 million to help those struggling with the cost of heating oil. To support hauliers and farmers, we have cut red diesel by more than one-third until the end of this year. To help reduce costs for energy-intensive firms, we have expanded the British industry competitiveness scheme to more than 10,000 manufacturers. We are also providing targeted support to the chemicals and ceramics industries, protecting thousands of jobs and putting businesses on a secure footing for the long term.

The measures contained in this Bill go further to protect consumers and help firms deal with rising prices. It covers three areas: the energy generator levy, mileage rates and vehicle excise duty for heavy goods vehicles.

On the first measure, the electricity generator levy, the price of energy has risen since the war in Iran began, benefiting generators whose costs bear no relation to the price of gas. The Government’s objective is to ensure that those who benefit from these increased prices and volatility pay their fair share. That is why, in our first Budget, we extended and increased the energy profits levy. Last year, the Chancellor announced a new permanent windfall tax regime on oil and gas.

In April this year, we went further still by announcing an increase to the rate of the electricity generator levy and extending it beyond its original sunset date of 2028. The electricity generator levy recovers excess revenues made by generators that do not use gas when electricity prices are over a long-term average. To ensure that it does not disincentivise investment, any new investment since 22 November 2023 is exempt from the levy. The increase in the main rate of the levy from 45% to 55% is legislated for in this Bill. The extension will be legislated for separately. The Government will set out the fiscal impact of this increase at the Budget in the autumn, with the costing certified by the OBR in the usual way.

Raising the rate will help break the link between electricity and gas prices. Even though the UK is generating more electricity from sources such as nuclear and renewables, international gas prices still set the price of our electricity. This means that, when global gas prices spike, so do bills here in the UK.

By breaking the link between gas and electricity prices, we can help to insulate consumers from the volatility of future crises. The rise in the electricity generator levy will contribute to this by encouraging participation in the wholesale contracts for difference scheme. Currently, under a separate scheme known as contracts for difference, some electricity suppliers are guaranteed a stable, fixed price for the electricity that they produce. The new wholesale contracts for difference scheme will offer certain existing eligible generators that are not already signed up to contracts for difference the option to bid for a fixed price for the electricity that they generate.

Increasing the rate of the energy generator levy will therefore increase the appeal of a fixed rate under the new wholesale contracts for difference scheme, in turn helping to protect consumers from volatile gas-linked electricity prices. The Department for Energy Security and Net Zero will come forward later this year with a consultation on the wholesale contracts for difference scheme. The design of the post-2028 energy generator levy will be considered alongside this consultation.

The second measure contained in the Bill relates to mileage rates. As fuel prices have risen, so has the cost of filling up a car or van for those who drive for work. Despite this, mileage rates—the amount that workers are reimbursed for every mile they drive—have not changed since 2011. This has created a significant gap between the amount it costs to run and maintain a vehicle and the amount that workers are reimbursed for.

In recognition of these pressures, the Chancellor has announced the largest ever increase to mileage rates and the first uprating in 15 years. As a result, mileage rates have now increased from 45p to 55p for the first 10,000 miles. Beyond 10,000 miles, the rate will remain at 25p. This change will benefit employees using their own vehicle for work and those who are self-employed and use simplified expenses rates.

The increase came into effect on 6 April and the legislation before us gives statutory effect to this change. Overall, the increased rate will benefit around 2 million employees and 1 million self-employed individuals, saving over £120 a year for a worker doing 6,000 business miles.

Although employers are not required to reimburse at the new rates set out, if employees are reimbursed below the tax-free rate they can claim mileage allowance tax relief directly from HMRC. More widely, in March, the Chancellor announced a review of mileage rates as a whole. This review is ongoing and will inform the Budget this autumn.

The third measure in the Bill concerns vehicle excise duty on heavy goods vehicles. The road haulage sector plays a vital role transporting goods across the UK, but haulage firms are disproportionally exposed to higher fuel costs. That is why we are providing additional targeted support for the sector through the Bill, with a 12-month holiday from vehicle excise duty for the majority of heavy goods vehicles.

Eligible vehicles renewing their VED in this period will pay a reduced annual rate of £1. This will save a typical HGV £600, and those with higher liability will, in some cases, save more than £900, on top of savings from fuel duty. It will benefit around 46,000 UK-based road freight firms. Taken together with other freezes to fuel duty since the general election, the average HGV has saved over £2,000 compared with plans set out by the previous Government.

This Government have the right economic plan to deliver secure and resilient growth in a changing world, but as we have seen, including over recent days, the war in Iran continues to create uncertainty and volatility in the global economy, and therefore higher costs for businesses here in Britain. The Government have responded by providing immediate support to help with those additional costs, including through the measures contained in the Bill.

These measures will ensure that electricity generators that benefit from increased prices pay their fair share. They will support around 2 million employees and 1 million self-employed people who need to drive for work. They will deliver targeted help to the road haulage sector, ensuring that HGVs remain on the road to deliver food and other products to communities right across the country.

The Bill shows that, in the face of global pressures, the Government will continue to be responsive to a changing world and responsible in the national interest. I beg to move.

16:49

[Baroness Neville-Rolfe (Con)]

My Lords, this Bill is presented by the Government as a series of targeted measures designed to address a specific issue: the war in the Middle East. I thank the Minister for his full explanation. However, the truth is that what we are discussing is a series of sticking-plaster measures designed to curb some of the worst excesses of what can be described only as an economy seriously in trouble.

The current Government—and, indeed, the one that is to come under the leadership of Andy Burnham—face a deeply serious situation. Last week, the Office for Budget Responsibility warned in its Fiscal Risks and Sustainability report that, without action, public debt is set to move on to an unsustainable upward path in the near future.

A key finding is that early action to head off difficult fiscal outcomes is much less costly than late action. This is partly due to the sheer scale of our national debt. Last year the Government borrowed £129 billion, 80% of which was spent on debt interest in an increasingly jumpy bond market. The OBR estimates that an additional £28 billion a year will be needed to meet the Government’s critical pledge to spend 3.5% of GDP on defence. At the same time, spending on the state pension and on health is projected to rise sharply in the next few years —one of the reasons why I called for a cap on expenditure on pensions as a percentage of GDP in my independent review of the state pension age as long ago as 2022 and why I deplore the failure to hold a full House of Lords debate on the 10-year plan for the NHS.

The Lords Economic Affairs Committee said much the same about the unsustainability of debt years ago in its report National Debt: It’s Time for Tough Decisions. The then chair, my noble and far-sighted friend Lord Bridges of Headley, was quoted at the time as saying that

“our national debt risks developing on an unsustainable path”.

Moreover, we are now spending more on welfare, £334 billion, than we collect in income tax, £331 billion. The new Prime Minister and Chancellor of the Exchequer face the choice of either significant tax rises or deep spending restraint if we are to stop debt spiralling further out of control. Yet the OBR has also made clear that tax rises cannot simply be treated as a limitless answer. Continually increasing taxes risks creating ever greater economic distortions, with the Laffer curve biting into receipts—for example, if the top rate of income tax goes up. Wealth taxes raise less than expected, as we know from overseas experience, and they certainly damage competitiveness. Further stealth taxes on earnings risk weakening work incentives and drag more people out of the labour market.

The key to squaring the circle, as I have discussed with the Minister on many occasions, is growth, particularly per capita growth or higher productivity. EU growth has been sluggish. Yet the Government want to get closer to the EU and agree to a package of changes that will certainly cost hundreds of millions a year, given the difficulties of negotiating with the EU, with no certainty that it will improve our economy to the extent hoped. I am also concerned about the impact on our legally binding obligations under CPTPP and our agreements with the US, particularly on vehicles, which I will come to later, and on pharma—agreements that are vital to UK growth. What is the nature of the legal advice that the Government are relying on in saying that they will continue to deliver such international obligations once a revised TCA is agreed?

The Government’s assault on business—rises in national insurance, business rates, and dividend and capital taxes, and the Employment Rights Act—is already having exactly the effect on business that we forecast, with employment squeezed and a crash in economic optimism and enterprise. A report this week from accountants BDO showed that business activity dropped sharply last month after a brief rebound earlier this year ran out of steam. The truth is that there is a deeply serious situation facing Mr Burnham, and we cannot divorce our discussions today from this backdrop.

That brings me on to today’s Bill. Increasing mileage payments to 55p for the first 10,000 business miles is a measure we support. It is right that workers who use their own vehicles for work, including carers, should not be left to absorb rising motoring costs. I know that the announcement was the early fruit of an ongoing review, as the Minister explained, but can he tell us about the logic behind the difference in treatment for hard-working carers and others who drive more than 10,000 miles a year?

I turn to the HGV excise duty holiday. HGV duty had been frozen since 2014 until Labour came into office. While reducing it to £1 for a year will provide some welcome relief to the sector, it does not solve the problem, and Ministers should not overstate the impact. More than 95% of road haulage firms are small businesses operating on tight margins. The Government say the measure will save around £600 for a typical lorry and £900 for the largest vehicles, yet, to put it into context, filling a single HGV at peak prices can cost more than £1,000. This does not offset the wider pressures that the Government have imposed through higher business rates, transport taxes and fuel duty, with duty and VAT receipts of course rising whenever petrol prices spike. If the Government are serious about supporting businesses in this country, and particularly small businesses, they must consider this policy as one of a series of changes they must make to create a tax and economic environment that backs business, especially small business, rather than penalising it.

I turn now to the electricity generator levy. This was introduced under the last Government as a temporary windfall tax and a short-term response to exceptional circumstances. It was due to end in 2028. However, we now see the Government proposing to increase the rate from 45% to 55% and to extend it beyond 2028 with no end date. The case put forward by the Government is that the increased rates will support the decoupling of gas prices by incentivising generators into voluntary wholesale contracts for difference. However, while the new higher levy applies from today, those new contracts are yet to be seen. I believe the proposed strike price is not known. The likelihood of generators accepting them is therefore unknown and in question, and the value for money for taxpayers is yet to be proven.

Moreover, the HMRC impact note for this Bill contains no figures for the Exchequer impact. We should have that, ideally now or at least during the consultations that the Minister referred to. Rather than acting to lower energy costs by taking sensible steps to increase the supply of energy, such as utilising our resources in the North Sea and moving forward with Jackdaw and Rosebank, the Government seem to be using tax as a long-term lever to alter the incentives faced by generators.

We introduced a short-term, emergency measure with a clear sunset date. Sunsetting is a responsible approach to temporary taxation and short-term regulation, and I think it can be very useful. It helps to avoid the accumulation of too much regulation, and I know the Minister worries about unjustified accumulation because it can have an adverse effect on productivity. Sunsetting has the merit of allowing periodic parliamentary scrutiny and of encouraging officials to think creatively about other routes to a desired end. Instead, the Government appear to be moving to a long-term, final answer when the relevant contracts for difference parameters are unknown and untested.

Before the Minister asks, as he sometimes does, what we would do, the Official Opposition have been clear that we would cut bills for businesses and consumers through our cheaper energy plan. We would take VAT off energy bills, axe the carbon tax and legacy subsidies, and again use our resources in the North Sea as the Norwegians are doing. Tax cannot and should not be the long-term solution to the problem of affordable energy.

At this juncture I might remind the Minister of the OBR’s warning. It also agrees that tax cannot be the solution to all this. As we can see on page 81 of its report, there is a significant fiscal cost to the commitment to reduce carbon emissions to net zero by 2050 due to the loss of revenues linked to such emissions. This is particularly true of fuel duty, with three-quarters of the decline in revenue due to the transition to electric vehicles. This is a good example of the difficulties the Government face in relying so heavily on taxation to finance spending.

This Bill contains measures that in isolation are not without merit, but they must be seen for what they are: limited interventions against a backdrop of rising costs, weakening confidence and increasingly strained public finances. Temporary relief has its place but is no substitute for a serious growth strategy, a competitive tax system, disciplined public spending and an energy policy that brings costs down by increasing supply rather than by reaching for higher taxes. That is the test by which this Bill should be judged.

16:59

[Lord Redwood (Con)]

My Lords, I fully support my noble friend Lady Neville-Rolfe in her general statement about what needs to be done and in her specific criticisms and support for measures in this Bill. It is right that the best way out of the financial hole the Government find themselves in again is by growth. That is a cross-party idea on which we all agree.

Unfortunately, this Government have one main hope, which is that a closer relationship with the EU and taking more EU laws into our system will give them extra growth, whereas all the evidence of the past shows the opposite. Our growth rate halved when we were in the EEC compared with 20 years before we joined it, because of the damage that laws and extra taxes did to our economy after we signed up to first the customs union and then the complete single market. If we look at the leaks and possibilities around the reset, it is practically all cost and no benefit—it is Britain giving in and becoming a rule taker. The rules will be more restrictive on some of our industries that were beginning to benefit from not having to take on all the extra rules that the EU has been legislating. There will be a considerable financial bill with the extra costs of Erasmus, the administrative levies, maybe a solidarity levy and the loss of £6 billion of fish over a 12-year period. I am afraid the Government will not find growth there.

We are today focusing on this set of three limited measures. Like my noble friend, I think two of them are modestly beneficial. It seems perfectly reasonable to increase the mileage allowances given the way that costs have gone over recent years. The previous Government had not done it, and therefore it is perfectly welcome. It is also helpful to a haulage industry in great distress—because volumes are not ideal and because wage, tax and, above all, energy costs have gone up—to be given some relief, though the Government have chosen a rather modest form of relief in this VED reduction.

I have two criticisms. First, I am not sure that a year is the right period. I do not think we can guarantee that, miraculously, in a year’s time, other costs will reduce and they will not need this help any more. It would have been wiser to keep it open-ended to see what happens, particularly to energy costs. It is also concentrated on the heavier, bigger end of the commercial fleet. There are a lot of other businesses, particularly small businesses, struggling with the cost of smaller vehicles where there is no help offered. That is a pity, and it would be good if the Government looked again at the full range of businesses and the question of duration, because it may be that this judgment, while helpful, does not go far enough and is not over the right time period.

The biggest item, which I object to quite strongly, is the generator levy. It is quite true, as the Minister pointed out, that this was first introduced by the previous Government. I liked it no more then than I like it now; I made critical remarks to Ministers and tried to get them not to do it. If you are going to impose a windfall tax, it should be a genuine windfall tax geared to a level of price or profit that you have decided to designate as windfall. What has happened is that the last Government and now this one have built this windfall tax into all their Budgets as a regular feature, regardless of what the regional price of oil and gas turns out to be in the months or years ahead. It would be much more convincing as a windfall measure if it were geared to a price target and/or a profit target, came in and was fiercer when there was genuine windfall profit and dropped out as soon as there was not. The Minister will know, observing world markets, that with the continuing uncertainty created by the Ukraine war and the war in the Middle East, we are seeing pretty big volatile swings, particularly in oil prices. That will make a huge difference to the profitability of the businesses being taxed through windfall taxes. I would like the Government to think again about the whole principle of windfall taxation. If they want a windfall tax, it should be targeted and very clearly based on genuine windfall profits.

I have one further worry about the Government’s strategy over energy, which is illustrated by the tinkering measures in this legislation. They have gone in favour of very dear energy, with very high carbon taxes, emissions trading taxes and general impositions—fuel duties and all the rest of it. They say that they have net-zero reasons for this, but I think they also have revenue-raising reasons. They see it as one of the easiest ways forward without violating the central manifesto pledges. Now they realise, correctly, that they are overdoing it. With all the tax, the cost of energy is extreme. This country has a particularly virulent case of it, which is making us uncompetitive and losing us jobs and business, and therefore other tax revenues. So now the Government are in the business of finding ways of parcelling out modest subsidies or rebates on this excessive taxation in the hope that they will see them through and enable them to keep some business going.

I fear that the Government should come to the conclusion that they are not giving enough back to enough businesses and people. If Ministers look out there in the marketplace, they will see jobs being cancelled or lost, vacancies not becoming available, turnover not growing and profits turning into losses. There are factory closures coming through in all the high energy-using areas that we have talked about before, and the closure of oil and gas is having knock-on effects for refining and petrochemicals. We are seeing an industrial collapse mainly led and generated by excessively expensive energy. Offering a few bits back will not solve the problem.

I am glad the Government have now expanded the number of businesses that will get some kind of energy rebate to 10,000, but that is by no means all the businesses out there that are suffering badly from dear energy. They are not offering enough back because they are taking lumps out. They also wish to make it worse by joining the even more expensive EU carbon trading and emissions trading schemes, and introducing the CBAM to catch anybody who dares import higher energy-using products. I ask them please to think again. I want them to succeed in creating more jobs, promoting growth and getting investment and incomes up. This will do the opposite; dear energy is a killer.

17:07

[Lord Sikka (Lab)]

My Lords, I will confine my comments to Clause 1, which will increase the rate of the electricity generator levy from 45% to 55%. I fully support this increase and wish it had been higher.

Despite various initiatives mentioned by the Minister, Ofgem’s marginal pricing system remains fundamentally flawed. It ultimately determines consumer prices and, in the process, showers profits on companies generating electricity. The Ofgem cap is not based on average cost or a weighted average cost of all the inputs, or indeed on any notion of actual cost. One of Ofgem’s objectives is to ensure profit for each supplier at each stage—at generation, transmission, distribution and retail. This means that the Ofgem cap is set at the most expensive price or cost per unit, otherwise the marginal producer—the most expensive producer—cannot make a profit. This is the reverse of what happens in competitive markets, where the most expensive producer is driven out of business.

Ofgem’s pricing formula is a boon for companies generating electricity from oil, nuclear, renewables, solar, wind, hydro and other forms of inputs, because they are paid the price of electricity produced from gas, which is usually the most expensive input. The Bill does not reform Ofgem’s pricing formula. It does not fully decouple the price of gas-produced electricity from the rest. Instead, it takes a little more in excess profits via the levy. Even with a 55% levy, electricity generators will still be able to keep 45% of the excess profits manufactured by a flawed Ofgem formula. They have already kept billions in excess profits. What is the excuse for letting them keep still more?

The Government’s rationale is that the revenues resulting from this Bill will help to subsidise some businesses and households. But it will not help all households and all businesses and it does not provide long-term relief from profiteering by energy companies. A study by Unite reported that, since the pandemic, electricity and gas supply companies have increased their profit margins by 363%, and electricity generation companies have increased their profit margins by 198%. But successive Governments and Ofgem have made no attempt to reduce the profit margins of electricity generators. I hope the Minister will comment on this.

Can he also explain why Ofgem’s marginal pricing system has not been abandoned and why the price of gas-produced electricity has not been fully decoupled from the rest? Can he explain how much excess profit has been facilitated by Ofgem’s pricing formula and what proportion has been or will be recovered by the electricity generator levy?

It is worth noting that returns to energy investors are much higher because of flawed UK tax laws. I will provide some background before the detail. The background statistics are that 80% of UK offshore wind generation is foreign owned. The largest onshore wind farm in Wales is owned by a Swedish entity, EDF is 100% owned from France, E.ON is based in Germany and Scottish Power is owned by a Spanish multinational. The shareholders of their UK operations, mostly based abroad, receive billions in dividends without deduction of tax at source. In other words, they pay no tax whatever on those dividends. This results in huge loss of tax revenues that could help the Government to increase support for energy customers. Countries such as the US, Australia and Sweden deduct a withholding tax at source on dividends paid to foreign investors. They make a distinction between investors resident in tax- treaty countries, EU countries and non-co-operative tax havens. Can the Minister explain why the Government do not do the same and why they are content to forgo billions in tax revenues by not having a withholding tax?

I am also concerned about the lack of good energy infrastructure. Since privatisation, National Grid has paid £28 billion in dividends, plus millions more in share buybacks, but we do not actually have a good energy infrastructure. This is similar to the woes of the water industry. This week, it has been reported that Britain’s biggest community solar project has been forced to shut for the duration of its first summer by the Government’s energy system operator to avoid overloading the local grid with renewable energy. During periods of high wind, the Government pay companies up to £180,000 an hour to switch off wind turbines. At the same time, gas plants are paid extra to produce more electricity to balance the system and meet demand. For the period September 2021 to April 2025, the cost of balancing the electricity grid came to £11.8 billion and it is expected to hit £8 billion a year by 2030. Can the Minister explain why, after 36 years of privatisation, National Grid and other energy companies are not penalised for failing to provide a good and reliable electricity transmission and storage system? I look forward to hearing the Minister’s reply.

17:15

[Lord Fuller (Con)]

My Lords, my contribution is in two parts. Briefly, it is about time that the mileage rates went up to 55p. It reflects the obvious truth that the cost of getting about has become more expensive. These real costs must be covered, so I welcome this measure, in so far as it goes, but observe that it would have been much better had the rates been indexed for future years so as to avoid these cliff-edge effects. I also welcome the support for our hard-working lorry drivers. I know from personal experience, when I used to run trucks myself, how hard it is to make a living from road transport. In fact, we paid £1 million of tax per year on 40 vehicles before paying a single penny in corporation tax. The taxman has the first pull on the road.

I turn to the electricity generator levy. This is just another line in taxes, fees, charges and levies that have taken the aggregate burden of taxation to new highs, and which press down on our economy and squeeze the dynamism from it. Labour thinks it is going to tax the generators, but, as we all know, these levies work through, and are borne by, the consumer, so the Bill is adding another layer to the cost of living.

Last week, the lights nearly went out. For the third time this summer, NESO broke the glass to plead for generators to supply more electricity—any electricity, at any price. NESO has never had to ask for a margin in the summer before. On Friday last week, the Times reported that Britain was “close to blackouts”, and that the scale of the crisis “was hidden”. Let us shine a light on that. The Times reported that staff at NESO allege that, for “multiple periods” on 23 June,

“the grid fell outside safe operating limits … At the time the grid was using all possible supplies of power to meet demand, meaning that if any of these had failed it would have triggered an automatic system shutdown causing power cuts across the country”.

There have been other cases since.

The Government’s impact assessment of the Bill says it is

“not expected to have any significant macroeconomic impacts”.

All the boxes where the fiscal assessments would normally be written are empty. GOV.UK tells us that the

“Exchequer Secretary to the Treasury, has read this … information and … given the available evidence”

concludes that

“it represents a reasonable view of the likely costs, benefits and impacts of the measure”.

As Britain sweltered, it turned out that 420 of our critical cool-chain food warehouses, which store half our nation’s food, could barely keep their contents cool enough. In Spain, when the lights went out, people on life-support machines died. Last week, if it were not for the kindness of strangers in France, the lights would have gone out. If we meet France in the World Cup in five days’ time, who knows what will happen? Is this the impact the Exchequer Secretary had in mind?

Labour has brought us a grid that is demonstrably more fragile, wholly less reliable and significantly more expensive. It has brought our manufacturing economy to its knees with the world’s highest electricity prices, and this measure will make them more expensive still. We might have expected a margin call in January, when short day lengths and low winds combined with high demand for heating can cause a shock. That is expected, planned for and avoided. However, we do not expect that in the summer, when we are told that solar panels will make us more energy secure.

This measure will have significant unintended consequences beyond jacking up prices. Quite simply, it will make the cost of generating electricity more expensive. That will harm the investment case for building new power stations, so we will become even more reliant on the kindness of strangers. The reason we have high prices is that supply is constrained. We have reduced the competitive tension in the market with an overfocus on renewables. The truth is that this measure will harm the generating fleet replacement of our power stations as they wear out. The hard truth is that, when the person in the NESO control room presses the button, we need energy generators to supply electricity. There is nothing wrong with having power stations ticking over that are available to leap into action when, if the price is high enough, the call to action is given. That is how the market works. In these moments, given a choice between having the lights go out or paying through the nose, we need to pay up and look big. However, when we are in that hole and need these people to jump to attention, increasing the levy from 45% to 55% is biting the hand that feeds us at the very moment we are in greatest peril.

This generator levy reduces the incentive for companies to participate in the break-glass market unless we accept that the wholesale price is driven higher still. I can hardly believe what I am about to say, because I agree with the noble Lord, Lord Sikka, that the way to fix the energy market is not to have even more levies. It needs reform, because crowd-pleasing price caps and rent caps such as this will never work. We need reform of the energy market to break the link with gas, but this is not the way to do it.

Disincentivising the replacement of our power stations is going to lead to something worse and wholly more sinister. There are special types of power station that must be spread throughout the grid for it to function properly. These power stations provide grid frequency stabilisation and ensure that power matches electricity supply with the right frequency, tightly controlled around 50 hertz. In fact, keeping within 1% of that 50 hertz figure is a legal obligation for NESO, otherwise we all get contagious blackouts and equipment damage, so these inertial power stations have special value, value that must be paid for and that is perversely bought within the scope of this measure.

We have a structural risk on our grid in that there are only two of these special power stations north of the River Humber. Both are scheduled for closure and none for replacement. With more levies, there are fewer incentives to build their replacements, so the Bill is laying the structural framework for the entirety of the electricity grid in our nation, which extends to Ireland, but especially in the north of England and Scotland, to fail, by disincentivising the replacement of the special power stations that maintain the frequency and protect our economy.

Perhaps the Minister should have a word with the Exchequer Secretary to the Treasury, in the few days he remains in post, to explain that there are, after all, plenty of consequences to the Bill. In the meantime, this is where Labour’s ignorant energy fundamentalism has brought us. It is not that the lights normally go out under Labour; it is that this Government are legislating to ensure that they do.

17:22

[Earl Russell (LD)]

My Lords, we on these Benches broadly support this Bill. It contains three sensible if modest measures responding to the real pressures households and business face because of the ongoing conflict in the Middle East, and we will not oppose them. Our wish is for the Government to do more to protect the public and the economy from the impacts of this continuing conflict, and to see that these measures are monitored, reviewed and reported on.

I note that the fragile ceasefire, which many had hoped would bring stability to the region, has now completely broken down again. We have now had three days of American attacks on Iran; Iran has struck numerous tankers in the strait; and Trump is now talking of imposing a toll on all ships exiting the strait. The cost of oil has shot up again overnight, so this conflict is far from over, and its consequences for the UK, in terms of energy prices, fuel costs and the cost of living, will continue to be felt for some considerable time. I seek reassurance from the Minister that today’s measures must not and will not be the limit of the Government’s ambitions. They are welcome but they are minor in scale.

This Bill does little to bring down the underlying cost of energy, particularly electricity, which remains stubbornly and unreasonably high. In brief, the Bill’s three measures are an increase in the electricity generator levy from 45% to 55%, targeted at exceptional returns when wholesale prices spike; an increase in the approved mileage allowance rate from 45p to 55p per mile for the first 10,000 miles, backdated to the start of this year; and a 12-month vehicle excise duty, or VED, holiday for most heavy goods vehicles renewing their licence between 1 July 2026 and 30 June 2027, reducing their liability to a nominal £1.

On the mileage rate, I echo the point made by my honourable friend the Member for St Albans in the other place that this increase is long overdue, and it will particularly benefit those who work in the care sector. What steps will the Government take to ensure that care workers are made aware of it?

On the vehicle excise duty, hauliers have understandably welcomed the relief, and we support it. Given that the conflict’s impacts represent ongoing costs beyond the 12 months, why did the Government not consider giving themselves the power in this legislation to extend the holiday for a further year without the need to bring back further primary legislation? What confidence do the Government have that this relief will be passed through to consumers rather than absorbed elsewhere in the supply chain? The public would rightly be concerned if haulage costs continued to rise. What monitoring is planned? And will this be reported at least by the Autumn Budget, or is there an option to do that sooner?

On the electricity generator levy, we have long argued for exactly this kind of decoupling of electricity prices from volatile gas prices that this increase is said to encourage, and we support that objective—although we do not feel that this measure alone is capable of doing that. Can the Minister assure the House that this levy increase will not undermine those ambitions?

The levy increase is in effect the stick to the carrot of longer-term contracts, and the interaction between these two policies is quite a complex matter. How will the Government keep the overall objective under further scrutiny? A higher rate is only a proxy for the real goal of moving legacy generators off spot price exposure and on to newer fixed-term contracts for difference.

I would be grateful if the Minister could set out how progress on the actual migration to CfDs will be monitored and reported. Without that information, it is quite difficult for Parliament to make a determination on how this wider policy objective has been achieved. More broadly, will the Minister confirm that, should the conflict continue, the Government will bring forward further measures as needed and keep both Houses updated?

We support this Bill, but it needs to sit alongside a much wider set of proposals that we believe are required—indeed, many across the House have strayed beyond the measures in the Bill into broader areas. My party has called for a three-month, extendable emergency transport package to keep Britain moving, an immediate 10p cut in fuel duty, a cap on bus fares at £1, a 10% cut in rail fares and a reduction in VAT on public electricity charging. We have also set out a permanent essential energy guarantee, giving every household a discount on its energy use, with vulnerable and larger households receiving more. And we continue to press for the wider structural reforms that would genuinely bring down bills for good, such as an energy security bank offering low-interest loans for home energy improvements and reversing cuts to insulation programmes so that we can halve energy bills within a decade.

Can we expect serious and detailed plans to come in the energy independence Bill to make sure that the cost of our energy is reduced—particularly the cost of electricity, which, as I know the noble Lord is aware, we need to bring down so that we can get people on to EVs and heat pumps? The cost of electricity remains too high, the crisis in the Middle East is not resolved, and much remains to be done. Should the crisis continue and deepen, we stand ready to co-operate with Ministers and government to protect our citizens and our economy from the worst of its impacts.

17:29

[Lord Altrincham (Con)]

My Lords, I thank all noble Lords who have spoken in this debate and the Minister for his usual courtesy in hosting it and for his explanation of the rather undefined windfall tax that my noble friend talked about. In particular, I note the lively contributions of my noble friend Lord Fuller and the noble Lord, Lord Sikka, who both touched on the fraught areas of contracts for difference and high wind—perhaps the Minister could comment on that.

As we have discussed, the Bill contains some small and mainly useful welcome measures. The Government’s recognition that more must be done to support small businesses is also a step in the right direction. However, the difficulty we see is that, while such measures may have a place as emergency, short-term relief, as the previous Government recognised, they cannot form the basis of a sustainable, long-term economic strategy.

More widely, noble Lords will be aware that the interim report of the Timms review of disability benefits spending was published last week, and it showed that spending is forecast by the Department for Work and Pensions to rise to more than £41 billion by 2031 on that benefit alone. As my noble friend and other noble Lords have made clear, the Office for Budget Responsibility has warned that taxes will have to rise or spending will have to be cut if we are to avoid an unsustainable path for debt. The tax rises that this Government have already imposed are themselves becoming unsustainable: they are penalising businesses, tourists, publicans, workers and those who want to come to this country to generate wealth, investment and employment.

A more sensible approach would be to take steps to increase domestic energy supply from the North Sea, to support growth and to ensure that any tax reliefs are matched by credible reductions in spending. The Government’s net-zero approach has weakened our domestic energy industry and left us increasingly dependent on global supplies, including from countries that continue to support Russian oil. In the latest round of sanctions, the Government left open a loophole for Russian oil that is refined into diesel and jet fuel in third countries. Indeed, we are now in the extraordinary position of relying on adversaries, and on global supply chains shaped by them, to meet demand that we could and should meet through domestic energy production. That is bad for our economy and has led to a degree of industrial collapse, as noted by my noble friend Lord Redwood. It is bad for our energy security and our standing in the world.

What we need from this Government is a serious plan to address the underlying problem. Spending must be brought under control—and quickly—if we are to keep public finances within the bounds of sustainability. Welfare would seem an obvious place to start, but any new Government will need the political courage, discipline and authority to deliver reform at the scale required. The wider economic challenge facing the Government will become only more serious if this is the approach that the new Administration, under the incoming Prime Minister, take to the economy, energy security and fiscal policy.

17:32

[Lord Livermore (Lab)]

My Lords, it is a pleasure to close this Second Reading debate on the Taxation (Energy and Vehicles) Bill. I am very grateful to the select group of noble Lords for their contributions and questions.

The measures contained in the Bill will support businesses across the UK as they deal with the immediate economic costs associated with the ongoing conflict in the Middle East. We did not start this conflict and we did not join it, but it is impacting our economy, including by putting pressure on energy markets and disrupting supply chains. That is why, as the Chancellor has said repeatedly, we must continue to be responsive to a changing world and responsible in the national interest.

The noble Baroness, Lady Neville-Rolfe, once again unfortunately sought to talk down Britain’s economy, yet the latest economic data shows that inflation in the UK held steady while it rose in other comparable countries. The noble Baroness and the noble Lord, Lord Redwood, spoke about economic growth, but they did not mention that Britain’s economy was the fastest growing in the G7 for the first quarter of this year. The noble Baroness also spoke about debt borrowing being forecast to fall in every year of this Parliament.

The measures contained in the Bill cover three areas: the electricity generator levy, mileage rates and the vehicle excise duty for heavy goods vehicles. The noble Baroness seemed keen to talk about almost anything other than the measures contained in the Bill, but when she did focus on them, she said that they were just short-term measures, a point also made by the noble Earl, Lord Russell. I disagree; the measures contained in the Bill will provide important immediate support to families and businesses as they deal with the consequences of the war in the Middle East, including the largest ever uprating to mileage rates and a significant reduction in the vehicle excise duty for haulage firms. The increase to the electricity generator levy also forms part of a wider long-term strategy to delink gas from electricity prices, helping to shield consumers from the impact of volatile prices. However, as I set out in my opening speech, the measures form just one part of the wider support we are providing to households and businesses, and we stand ready to go further where necessary.

The noble Baroness also asked about North Sea oil and gas. She knows that I agree with her that North Sea oil and gas production is an important and valuable resource and its workforce is a vital asset to our country. That is why we are harnessing our domestic supply by managing existing fields for their entire lifetimes, including by allowing tie-backs for those fields to ensure that they remain viable.

The first measure in the Bill concerns the electricity generator levy. The price of energy has risen since the war in Iran began, benefiting generators whose costs bear no relation to the price of gas. The Government’s objective is to ensure that those who benefit from these increased prices and volatility pay their fair share. That is why we are delivering an increase to the rate of the electricity generator levy from 45% to 55% and extending it beyond its original sunset date of 2028. Raising the rate will ensure that a greater percentage of exceptional generator revenues is made available to support businesses and households, and it will help break the link between electricity and gas prices by encouraging participation in the new wholesale contracts for difference mechanism.

The noble Baroness asked about the end date. The Government plan to extend the electricity generator levy beyond 2028 to encourage participation in the new contracts for difference mechanism and therefore provide more certainty to firms by offering a fixed price for the electricity they produce. We will work closely with industry to design the post-2028 electricity generator levy regime. DESNZ is planning to publish a consultation on the new contracts for difference mechanism later this year. The design of the electricity generator levy will be considered alongside this consultation.

The noble Lord, Lord Redwood, criticised the Government’s energy policy overall. My noble friend Lord Whitehead set that out, in probably greater detail than I can, in answer to the noble Lord’s question in the previous debate today. As the noble Lord knows, in this country we are particularly exposed to volatile gas prices, not least because the previous Government failed to invest in renewables. We need to invest in an economy that is as low carbon and based as little on gas as possible. By delinking from gas, a key part of the measures contained in the Bill, we can help to separate the price of electricity from the volatile price of gas internationally.

The noble Lord, Lord Fuller, said that we would increase the cost of electricity, but I believe that helping to delink from gas will do the exact opposite. The noble Lord also said that these measures would disincentivise future investment. They clearly will not do that, because the electricity generator levy has strong protections for new investment after 2023, which is exempt from the levy. The electricity generator levy is levied only on legacy renewable generators who stand to make extraordinary profits when high gas prices set the wholesale price without any commensurate increase in costs.

The noble Baroness, Lady Neville-Rolfe, asked about the wholesale contracts for difference scheme. Businesses have welcomed the announcement of the scheme and the certainty that these contracts will provide them with for years to come. The chief executive of the CBI said:

“If implemented correctly, voluntary contracts for difference could reduce the impact of gas on retail electricity prices and ensure the benefits of clean power can be realised across the economy”.


It is right that we now work closely with businesses on the detail, which is why they will have the opportunity to respond to the consultation that DESNZ is planning to run later this year.

My noble friend Lord Sikka asked a series of questions, which I will look at in greater detail. I will write to him, if I am able to do so.

The second measure contained in the Bill relates to mileage rates. I am grateful to the noble Lords, Lord Redwood, Lord Fuller and Lord Altrincham, the noble Earl, Lord Russell, and the noble Baroness, Lady Neville-Rolfe, for their support for this measure. As fuel prices have risen so has the cost of filling up the car or van for those who drive to work. Despite that, mileage rates have not changed since 2011. In recognition of these pressures, the Chancellor has announced the largest ever increase to mileage rates and the first uprating in 15 years.

The noble Baroness asked how the Government determined these uprated rates. In determining them, the Government considered the need to respond to the effect of the war in the Middle East on fuel costs after a prolonged period with no change, while balancing support for individuals with overall fiscal responsibility. She asked about the 25p rate. Our objective has been to focus support where costs are highest. The vast majority of drivers travel fewer than 10,000 miles a year. The 25p rate above 10,000 miles reflects the fact that the marginal cost of driving falls as mileage increases, with fixed costs such as insurance, servicing and depreciation covered by the higher 55p rate. Petrol and diesel motorists, including those who use their own vehicle for work, will also benefit from the extension of the 5p fuel duty cut to the end of this year.

The noble Lord, Lord Fuller, mentioned indexation. The decision the Government have taken on mileage rates is a targeted response to current cost pressures. The review announced by the Chancellor in March will consider the rate beyond 2026-27. Annual indexation is not currently the Government’s policy. The Government have already committed to a review of these rates and will set that out at the Budget.

The noble Earl, Lord Russell, asked about communicating to care workers. As he may know, the trade union UNISON has warmly welcomed this measure. I believe that we will communicate actively to its members.

The third measure contained in the Bill is the vehicle excise duty on heavy goods vehicles. The road haulage sector plays a vital role in transporting goods across the UK, but haulage firms are disproportionately exposed to higher fuel costs. That is why we are providing additional targeted support for the sector through the Bill, with a 12-month holiday from vehicle exercise duty for the majority of heavy goods vehicles. The noble Earl, Lord Russell, also asked about the power to extend this measure further, beyond one year. That would be perfectly possible in future Finance Bills and would not require any additional primary legislation.

The noble Lord, Lord Redwood, asked about smaller vehicles, not just HGVs, being included in this. Van drivers, for example, will benefit from the decision we have taken to extend the 5p fuel duty cut to the end of this year. Those who use their own vehicle for work will also benefit from the mileage rates increase in the Bill; that includes the 163,000 van drivers who are currently estimated to be claiming simplified expenses. It is right, though, that the Government balance direct support for firms with overall fiscal responsibility. Extending these measures to vans would cost an estimated £1 billion to £1.5 billion a year, but we will continue to keep this issue under review.

The noble Baroness, Lady Neville-Rolfe, asked about the impact of other taxes. Typical HGVs will save £600, while HGVs with higher vehicle emissions will save £912. In total, the decision taken since the general election to freeze fuel duty will save the average HGV over £2,000, compared with the previous Government’s plans.

This Government have the right economic plan to deliver secure and resilient growth in a changing world. The war in Iran continues to create uncertainty and volatility in the global economy and, therefore, higher costs for businesses here in Britain. The Government have responded by providing immediate support to help with these additional costs, including through the measures contained in the Bill. The Bill shows that, in the face of global pressures, the Government will continue to be responsive to a changing world and responsible in the national interest.

Bill read a second time. Committee negatived. Standing Order 44 having been dispensed with, the Bill was read a third time and passed.

Cyber Security and Resilience (Network and Information Systems) Bill

2nd reading
Tuesday 14th July 2026 Lords Chamber

Second Reading

17:43

Moved by

[Baroness Lloyd of Effra]

That the Bill be now read a second time.

Northern Ireland, Scottish and Welsh legislative consent sought. Relevant document: 3rd Report from the Constitution Committee

[The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State, Department for Science, Innovation and Technology (Baroness Lloyd of Effra) (Lab)]

My Lords, we are a proudly online nation, embracing interconnectivity in all walks of life. Cloud-based working, the rise of software as a service, the advent of artificial intelligence and more have rocketed the UK forward. They have enabled us to work faster, more efficiently and with more flexibility than ever before.

However, with these advancements come risks. As the technology powering our modern economy has leapt forward, so too have the tools that our adversaries use to extort, disrupt and surveil. Last year, more than 600,000 UK businesses were subject to cyber attacks. This is not only holding businesses back; it is undermining our security. These are criminals and hostile state actors seeking to disrupt the very foundations of our country.

The UK is now the most targeted country in Europe for cyber attacks. It is the duty of this Government to take bold action. We have been clear that all businesses must protect themselves from cyber attacks, but this does not mean regulating every single business. They know their customers and their suppliers, and they are best placed to protect themselves, using the free tools that we have provided.

I commend those who have already signed our Cyber Resilience Pledge, and urge more to do so, committing to take the three simple steps recommended in it: making cyber a board-level responsibility and following the cyber governance code of practice; signing up to the National Cyber Security Centre’s early warning service; and taking a risk-based approach to requiring Cyber Essentials across supply chains. This is our government certification scheme to help organisations improve their cyber resilience. Cyber Essentials works. Organisations with it are 92% less likely to claim on their cyber insurance than those without it. Taking these steps can make a huge difference.

However, where the risks are so great that public safety, the economy or our national security is threatened, it is right that we regulate. The Network and Information Systems—NIS—Regulations 2018 are the UK’s only cross-sector cyber legislation. They apply to operators of essential services in the energy, health, transport, drinking water and digital infrastructure sectors, as well as some digital service providers. The NIS regulations are designed to protect the security and resilience of our most essential services, to keep lights on, to ensure that taps keep running and to protect our NHS. We regulate only where we must, which is why the scope of the NIS regulations is precise. They are a targeted security intervention and the best tool in our arsenal to protect our most essential services. However, the regulations have fallen out of date. If we do not act, the essential services on which we all depend will remain under threat.

That is why we have introduced the Bill. The Cyber Security and Resilience (Network and Information Systems) Bill is a vital opportunity to improve the UK’s defences. In fact, it is the first Bill in British history to have “cyber” in its title. It will update the NIS regulations for the modern age and ensure that the Government can maintain their effectiveness and respond to imminent national security threats.

The objectives behind the Bill are threefold. First, it will safeguard the services on which our people rely most, making our essential and digital services more secure. Secondly, it will deliver a step change in our national security, improving our defences against the cyber attacks that threaten this country. Thirdly, it will better protect our economy. The UK will be a safer and more attractive place for businesses to establish themselves, thrive and grow.

The Bill will achieve these objectives through proportionate and timely measures, which I will speak to in turn. First, the Bill brings more sectors into scope of the NIS regulations. As our economy becomes more interconnected, so do the routes that cyber criminals exploit. For example, data centres in the UK have become critical to nearly all our economic activity and public services. From NHS patient records to financial systems, these vast digital depots are a key part of the modern world. That is why data centres meeting the Bill’s thresholds will be regulated as essential services, ensuring that they take steps to secure their networks.

The Bill also brings large load controllers under regulation. These are organisations that manage significant electricity flows to or from smart appliances. They must be safeguarded to secure our electrical grid and protect consumers using such appliances.

We are also bringing large and medium managed service providers—MSPs—into scope of the NIS regulations. These are organisations offering ongoing services, such as remote IT support or cyber security threat management, to customers. MSPs have deep access into their customers’ systems. As more and more organisations rely on them, MSPs become an increasingly attractive entry point for disruption.

Noble Lords will remember last April’s cyber attack on M&S. It involved a managed service provider being socially engineered, with attackers being able to gain access and compromise systems. We need to close this gap. But these regulations must be proportionate and targeted. Large and medium MSPs comprise fewer than one in 10 of the MSPs active in the UK but account for around 97.6% of the UK’s MSP revenue, so small and micro MSPs will be exempt from this measure. By targeting regulation where the risk and reach are greatest, we will protect almost all MSP customers without burdening small businesses.

In limited circumstances, small and micro-businesses supply critical goods or services to the essential and digital services on which we rely. The Bill therefore enables businesses, including smaller companies, supplying critical goods or services to be designated as “critical suppliers”. This is designed to combat the cyber risks stemming from increasingly complex supply chains.

Members may be aware of the 2024 attack on Synnovis, a pathology provider to some NHS trusts. Criminals thousands of miles away deployed ransomware and made Synnovis’s files unusable, delaying 11,000 appointments. This demonstrates the ripple effect that a compromised supply chain can have on the services at the ends. Duties that critical suppliers will be subject to will be set out in secondary legislation.

I turn to our 12 NIS regulators, whose sectoral expertise is critical to protecting our essential and digital services. These regulators are often operating with one hand tied behind their backs. They do not have the information, resources or levers necessary to properly fulfil their duties. For instance, organisations need only tell their regulator about an incident once it has already caused significant disruption. Under the Bill, they will have to report more types of breaches, to their regulator and the NCSC, within 24 hours and provide a full report within 72 hours. This includes incidents such as pre-positioning and ransomware, where an incident may not cause immediate damage but poses a real threat to the UK economy or society.

This will not only enable the NCSC to support those affected more quickly and warn others but allow the Government to better understand the threat landscape. Furthermore, the Bill requires digital and managed service providers and data centres to inform their customers about reportable incidents that are likely to adversely affect them. This way, customers can take appropriate steps to protect themselves.

However, effective reporting must be matched by consistency. Our 12 regulators cover all NIS sectors and the UK’s four nations. We must utilise their sectoral expertise but ensure that the rules are applied consistently. We cannot allow any sector to become an easy target. This Bill enables government to designate a single set of strategic priorities, as well as objectives tied to them, that regulators must seek to achieve. This will complement the security and resilience requirements, to come in secondary legislation, setting clear, consistent expectations and putting good practice on a firmer footing.

The Secretary of State will be required to consult the regulators on a draft of the statement before designating it. In addition, the Bill gives regulators new powers to recover their full regulatory costs from the organisations that they oversee. This includes enforcement costs, ensuring that this is not conducted to the detriment of a regulator’s books. Regulators must consult on how these fees will be calculated and publish a yearly statement to show how these funds were used.

The Bill also raises the maximum penalty enforceable for regulatory breaches while simplifying the penalty bands for easier, more consistent application. Regulators must consider all circumstances of a case before setting a penalty. This is not designed to punish companies but to incentivise their compliance. The ideal scenario is no penalties at all.

We are also fixing legacy issues concerning information sharing, so regulators can better understand what can and cannot be shared and with whom. All information shared must meet a specified purpose or require permission to be shared and be relevant and proportionate to the purpose for which it is shared. This Bill unties our regulators’ hands, giving them the information, resources and powers that they need to hold the line. That is what effective regulation should look like.

Finally, the Bill contains some important measures to enable future resilience, ensuring that the NIS regulations remain effective into the future. This Bill introduces a targeted, essential set of delegated powers to enable the NIS regulations to keep pace with the ever-changing cyber landscape. These include powers by which the Government can bring new services or sectors into scope of the regulations, so long as they meet the Bill’s strict criteria, or make regulations to further mitigate the risks from security and operational compromises. In the majority of cases, these delegated powers will be subject to consultation and the affirmative procedure will apply. Today’s threats were unimaginable in 2018, so we must not legislate as though today’s threats will stand still. These are carefully targeted, and it would be remiss not to take this opportunity to provide for careful, proportionate delegated powers. In almost all cases of these powers, the Government must consult on any changes. Parliament will still have the final say over legislation made under these powers. Our delegated powers memorandum contains greater detail.

In exceptional cases, even secondary legislation is too slow. Right now, if our intelligence community becomes aware of a NIS incident that threatens our national security, the Government have no emergency power within the NIS regulations to protect our people. This Bill provides powers for the Secretary of State to direct regulators and regulated entities where national security is threatened. This could entail instructing a sector to follow new guidance in response to a crisis or requiring an organisation to take technical steps to remove an intruder from a network. These are essential last-resort levers. The Bill has strong safeguards to ensure that they are used accordingly and only where strictly necessary for national security.

This Bill is about protecting the foundations of a modern economy. Growth cannot flourish where essential services are vulnerable, where businesses are exposed to disruption and where hostile actors can exploit weaknesses. We are not choosing between security and growth; we are recognising that one depends on the other. This will help secure the services that our people rely on, give businesses the confidence to invest and grow and strengthen our national security in an increasingly dangerous world. I beg to move.

17:55

[The Earl of Effingham (Con)]

My Lords, I thank the Minister for introducing the Bill before your Lordships’ House this afternoon. His Majesty’s loyal Opposition support the objective which lies behind this legislation. The cyber threat facing the UK is growing incrementally, both in scale and in sophistication. From hostile states to organised crime, from ransomware attacks on our public services to increasingly complex attacks on critical national infrastructure, the need to strengthen our national resilience is indisputable.

Many noble Lords will be familiar with a number of reforms contained within this Bill, predominantly because they originate from the review of the Network and Information Systems Regulations undertaken by the previous Conservative Government following the consultation that was launched in 2022. It should not be a surprise that we welcome measures to improve consistency across the various regulators responsible for enforcing the existing regime. However, support for the objectives of a Bill should never prevent your Lordships’ House from asking whether the legislation is sufficient and proportionate.

Most importantly, noble Lords would be right to constructively challenge whether this legislation forms part of a coherent strategy. That should be a central question. We are being asked to scrutinise and revise one of the fastest-moving areas of public policy without the Government having first published the cyber strategy within which these measures are intended to sit. Ministers have described this Bill as merely one component of a wider programme to strengthen Britain’s cyber resilience, so it is entirely fair and reasonable to ask, “Where exactly is that programme? Where is the strategy? Where is the explanation of how these powers fit within the Government’s broader approach to protecting our digital economy and our critical national infrastructure?”

Only last Thursday, we heard an Oral Question on the impact of AI in vaccine technology. It is obvious to all that AI is, regrettably, also transforming how cyber attacks are conducted, increasing both their scale and their sophistication. Hostile states have become more aggressive. Organised crime has become more capable. The boundary between economic security and national security has become ever more blurred. Yet little of that ever-shifting landscape appears to find expression within the Bill itself. In fact, artificial intelligence does not appear to feature in the legislation. Quantum cracking does not feature. Weaponised disinformation does not feature. The wider question of how government intends to respond to AI-enabled cyber threats remains unanswered. Nor does the Bill address the long-standing concerns surrounding the Computer Misuse Act, despite repeated calls from the industry for reforms that better reflect modern cyber security practice and remove the legal uncertainty facing legitimate cyber security researchers.

Legislation in this field is unlikely to come before Parliament every year. That places a particular responsibility on noble Lords now to ensure that what is enacted today remains relevant, as much as it realistically can be, tomorrow.

The Government have shown an enthusiasm for regulation across a number of sectors. Sometimes regulation is necessary; sometimes it is unavoidable; but good regulation should always be proportionate. This is especially true when it comes to firms that are already navigating an increasingly complex regulatory environment and face ever more costly obligations under the Government’s direct and indirect taxing of small businesses. The Bill introduces new obligations, new reporting requirements and new compliance duties for organisations operating in sectors that are undoubtedly important to our national resilience.

It may be the case that some of this regulation is justified. However, it also raises many questions for the Opposition, the most pressing of which is: what assessment have the Government made of the cumulative regulatory burden these measures will impose on businesses? Many organisations are already subject to reporting requirements under data protection legislation, sector-specific regulation and forthcoming proposals concerning ransomware reporting. If these various obligations are not properly aligned, businesses risk finding themselves complying with multiple reporting regimes for what is in reality the same cyber incident. This would not strengthen resilience but rather create additional bureaucracy during a time of crisis.

Nowhere is this of greater concern than for small and medium-sized enterprises. Large multinational organisations generally possess dedicated legal and compliance teams and cyber specialists capable of navigating increasingly complex regulatory requirements. Smaller businesses simply do not have the resources to do that, and often these businesses are the very scale-ups and high-growth companies upon which our future economic prosperity and unicorn status depends.

Everyone wants economic growth—none more so than His Majesty’s loyal Opposition—but if the Government want growth, they must ensure that cyber regulation does not become yet another barrier to enterprise and innovation. Will the Minister therefore confirm to your Lordships’ House that the overwhelming majority of SMEs will remain outside the scope of these new regulatory requirements? By what benchmark will an SME be defined in the legislation? Will the Minister please explain what support, alongside the new obligations, the Government intend to provide for those smaller organisations that may ultimately fall within the regime? Resilience cannot simply be legislated into existence; it requires expertise and resources.

The Bill grants significant new responsibilities to regulators operating across a wide range of sectors. For these provisions to operate successfully, the legislation assumes that such regulators possess both operational capacity and the expertise necessary to exercise those responsibilities effectively. Will the Minister outline how these assumptions have been stress-tested?

Finally, the Bill confers important national security powers on the Secretary of State. Although these powers may well prove necessary, they also reinforce the importance of transparency. The exercise of national security powers should be informed by clear principles and robust accountability, particularly where they concern hostile foreign actors seeking to undermine our critical infrastructure. Will the Minister inform the House what mechanisms are going to be in place to ensure such accountability?

His Majesty’s loyal Opposition do not dispute that the cyber threat facing our country is real; nor do we dispute that the Network and Information Systems Regulations require updating. Indeed, much of the work underpinning this Bill was initiated by the previous Conservative Government. But surely we need a strategic framework instead of having to ask: why these sectors, why these thresholds and why these powers, and how does this legislation fit alongside artificial intelligence, ransomware policy, national resilience and wider cyber reform? These are not unreasonable questions. They are precisely the questions that a responsible analysis of a slew of updated proposals require, and we ask the Government to provide the strategic context which accompanies the Bill before us.

18:05

[Baroness Northover (LD)]

My Lords, I too thank the noble Baroness for introducing the Bill. From these Benches we welcome the Bill, but we feel that in a number of ways it does not go far enough. Hostile state actors, organised crime and others are increasingly targeting our systems at every level with potentially catastrophic effects, as previous speakers have said. Attacks on our energy networks, water supplies, transport systems, financial infrastructure and digital services are becoming more frequent. It is clearly vital that organisations that deliver essential services have high standards of cyber security and that they should report serious incidents promptly and transparently. We also recognise that the coverage of those who need to report in this way should be widened. However, is the Bill ambitious enough?

I serve on the House of Lords Select Committee on National Resilience—there is at least one other speaker in the debate who also serves on that Select Committee—and I will draw here from some of the evidence that has been submitted to us. We were, of course, part of the EU arrangements until Brexit, and this is yet another area we needed to address after that. That resulted in the 2018 regulations, which this Bill seeks to update. The post-Brexit arrangements seem to have complicated putting in place clear primary legislation. The Minister in the Commons noted that Brussels is pressing ahead with its own updates “while we lag behind”. He stated that this

“procedural quirk has left essential UK services more exposed, which perhaps tells us something about why the UK has such appalling figures compared with some of our EU counterparts, as hackers and cyber criminals exploit gaps in our dated laws”.—[Official Report, Commons, 6/1/26; col. 179.]

We do indeed have the worst record in Europe for such attacks. I would argue, from submissions we received to our Select Committee, that it makes most sense for us to be aligned with the EU regulations. It has been put to us that this would mean that organisations do not need to answer to two sets of regulations in Europe. It is clear that this would assist us anyway, given that the EU regulations cover a wider range of areas, which it makes little sense to overlook as the Government appear to be doing. As it was put to us by ISC2,

“the government may have missed an opportunity to have the same taxonomy of CNI across jurisdictions. For example, the EU’s NIS2 directive on cybersecurity includes manufacturing, public administration and food production … These sectors are critical for the UK’s national and economic resilience. Under the proposed regime manufacturers operating across the UK and the EU, when victim of a cybersecurity incident in the UK, will be mandated to report”

this to EU authorities but not to the UK.

One of the submissions notes that the Bill is narrow in scope:

“large parts of the economy, including organisations that are economically significant due to their scale, interconnectedness or role in supply chains, will remain outside this regulatory perimeter. The Government’s approach to … these unregulated sectors relies primarily on voluntary governance mechanisms, including its new Cyber Governance Code of Practice”—

although we have seen that yet. The submission argues:

“Without stronger incentives, measurement and accountability, there is a risk that this … will not deliver consistent or meaningful improvements”.


It warns:

“This creates a disconnect between the regulated NIS economy and the wider, unregulated economy, despite risks flowing directly between them”.


We know the wide, deep and prolonged effect of cyber attacks on M&S, JLR and Synnovis, yet JLR and M&S will be out of the scope of the Bill, as the Commons Minister himself noted. Surely, we need to take a whole-of-economy approach. We should surely include the public sector, and economically significant sectors such as retail and manufacturing.

In evidence to our Select Committee, UK Defence First also argued that the potential loss of control of satellite communications is a “severe” national risk and that the Bill should

“explicitly treat space assets as critical national infrastructure”.

Could the Minister comment?

DSIT has estimated that significant cyber attacks on businesses cost the UK almost £15 billion in 2024. The National Cyber Security Centre reported that nationally significant cyber incidents had more than doubled in a year. As ISC2 says:

“It is no longer a question of if an organisation will be attacked, but when”.


ISACA, a global professional association focused on this area, emphasises:

“Digital service providers, particularly cloud infrastructure, also represent a growing concentration of systemic risk. The financial sector is increasingly reliant on a small number of cloud providers, creating potential single points of failure across critical services. For example, evidence presented to the Treasury Committee highlighted that 73% of UK cloud services are provided by just three providers”.


ISACA also warns:

“Cyber risk is inherently systemic, meaning disruption is rarely confined to a single organisation or sector, but is increasingly transmitted through supply chains, shared infrastructure and third-party dependencies”,


which the Minister made reference to. According to the cyber security breaches survey, only 7% of UK businesses have formally reviewed the potential cyber security risk presented by their wider supply chain.

In addition, it is reported that many SMEs may perceive that they are too small to be a target, yet government research has found that 50% of UK SMEs faced some kind of cyber breach or attack in 2025. It is also reported that, for small businesses, a cyber incident can be existential: roughly 60% of SMEs that fall victim to a cyber attack go out of business in six months. It is all very well, as the noble Earl just indicated, being outside regulation here if our SMEs simply go to the wall as a result of inadequate preparation and protection.

Evidence to our Select Committee suggests that skills shortages are a key challenge for companies, especially SMEs and those in the public sector. Is that why the Government have not included them here? That leaves our economy wide open; that is surely not the right answer. Cyber education, training, apprenticeships and investment in skills must accompany regulatory reforms, and the regulators themselves will need to be properly resourced so that they can deal with their new responsibilities. We know that public bodies have often found themselves dependent on ageing digital systems, with the risks from that.

We also need to recognise the need for the highest level of leadership in this area in companies and other organisations. It cannot simply be left to IT departments: cyber security must now be a major consideration at board level. We also need leadership from the Government, working with allies on intelligence sharing, common standards, co-ordinated responses to hostile activity, and co-operation on investigation. We know we face increasing attacks from rogue states: it is spoken of now as being low-level warfare, and we have seen the effect in many other countries as democracies are under attack.

In conclusion, although we welcome the Bill, we are seriously concerned about its limitations. A start would be to align with the EU, which already recognises that a whole-of-economy approach is the right one. I look forward to the Minister’s response.

18:15

[Lord Birt (CB)]

My Lords, the Government’s own cyber survey reports that 43% of UK businesses experienced a cyber attack last year, costing the UK economy an estimated £15 billion. Here are just a few examples of those many attacks: a deepfake video call cost Arup £20 million; Marks & Spencer was attacked in Easter last year, losing an estimated £300 million, with operations fully restored only three months later; and, most impactful of all so far, Jaguar Land Rover suffered an attack, had to halt production for around five weeks, was unable fully to restore its supply chains for four months and lost around £500 million. Moreover, the Government had to step in and guarantee a loan of £1.5 billion to stabilise JLR’s extensive supply chain. Yet our economy is barely touched by the Bill, as the noble Baroness, Lady Northover, just identified.

I think that a lot of people, untutored, have a mental model of a technology platform as something you might offload off the back of an HGV; in reality, any technology platform, even in a medium-sized business, can be a highly complex network composed of hundreds of providers, any component of which can present a vulnerability. Just two examples among very many are the widespread reliance by providers on free-to-use but vulnerable open-source software maintained by volunteers, and the external software providers bolted on to a technology platform offering a myriad of services —for example, payroll, finance, logistics, e-commerce or customer relationship management.

There is a possible vulnerability in every part of this complex network of providers, with many doors to pry open. Once one door is opened by a bad actor—a fraudster, a foreign power, a hacktivist or a ransom gang—there is the potential to explore and disable much or all of the system. Entry can be through a clever phishing email, perhaps AI-personalised with stolen data, or through application, network and infrastructure vendors failing to close down vulnerabilities immediately they are identified.

Here is a frightening example: a Chinese entity was able to penetrate a large number of services provided by Microsoft to the US Government. As a result, the mailboxes of the Secretary of Commerce and the US ambassador to China, among many, were read. In a coruscating report, the Cyber Safety Review Board, the US government agency that investigated the breach, concluded that

“Microsoft’s security culture was inadequate”

and that the incident resulted from

“the cascade of Microsoft’s avoidable errors”.

We need to act now, to protect our wider economy as well as our public sector institutions.

I am not a technologist, but for three decades I have had to deal constantly with digital technologies and technologists from a position of authority in many large organisations in the public and private sectors, at national, European and global level. I have discussed the Bill extensively with technology and cyber experts who I know and respect, and it has become perfectly clear to me that the Bill as constructed does not begin to match the threats that we in the UK face, which will only grow.

For instance, AI will increasingly empower malign reconnaissance, enabling attacks that probe, diagnose and bypass defences. At some point, quantum computing, with its awesome power, will fatally undermine our current approach to encryption. This is a highly demanding and ever-changing environment, and it is, frankly, preposterous to suppose that the 12 existing sector-specific regulators of our national infrastructure can acquire and constantly update the knowledge effectively to regulate cyber resilience.

I conclude emphatically that we need a single, focused, dedicated and expert regulator, which I suggest we call the office for cyber resilience—OCR—to span both the public and private sectors, including organisations and, vitally, those who supply them with the technologies they use. For clarity, the OCR should also regulate the national infrastructure providers.

First, I propose that the OCR should regulate platform and software providers to ensure that they sell and vouchsafe secure products up front and update them immediately when vulnerabilities become apparent. That does not happen at the moment. The Office for Product Safety and Standards does that in the UK for consumer goods and the Vehicle Certification Agency does it for cars. Why should there not be protection for our vital technology?

Secondly, companies and institutions of a significant size are currently required under statute to face an annual external audit, the purpose of which is to maintain high standards in financial reporting and corporate governance, under a code set by the FRC—Financial Reporting Council. We should extend the remit of that audit, under the auspices of the OCR, to report on the audited organisations’ and their suppliers’ management of cyber security and thus bring company boards clearly into play.

Thirdly and finally, we need to professionalise the skills of the cyber and IT community, which are highly variable. Every profession of which I am aware that can have a significantly adverse impact on individuals or society faces a hierarchy of qualification before a professional can operate at different levels—whether physician, lawyer, chartered accountant, architect or airline pilot.

How far across the economy would the OCR’s remit reach? It would extend precisely to the same extent as the obligation to have a statutory audit; that is, to companies with an annual turnover of about £15 million that have in excess of 50 employees. I have a perhaps surprising statistic for the noble Earl, Lord Effingham: that would mean only 2% of UK companies. But those companies represent around 70% to 80% of the UK economy.

To conclude, we simply must be bolder. We must take the opportunity that the Bill presents better to enable every kind of organisation in the UK to withstand the ever-growing and deeply disruptive threat of cyber attack.

18:24

[Lord Arbuthnot of Edrom (Con)]

My Lords, what a pleasure it is to follow such an interesting and constructive speech. I hope the noble Lord will take full part in Committee on the Bill. I declare my interest as chairman of the advisory panel of the technology company Thales UK. I thank the Minister for the briefing that she gave noble Lords a couple of months back, which was extremely helpful.

The best legislation has a permeating principle that helps to explain the purpose of the new law and inspire obedience to and observance of the new law. The Joint Committee on the National Security Strategy held an evidence session yesterday on deterrence in an age of Russian aggression, in which one of the witnesses told us that the key thing that should be included in the Bill is that it should hold vendors of software accountable for the reliability and security of their product. That follows on from what the noble Lord, Lord Birt, just said. That, after all, is what we do with cars. When Ciaran Martin was the head of the NCSC, that was one of his overall aims.

However, that is not what this Bill does—it does not have a permeating principle. It is a bit of a muddle. Winston Churchill might have said that this pudding has no theme. My noble friend Lord Effingham asked about strategy, and he was absolutely right to do so.

The Bill draws in some sectors but not others, without any clear explanation of the difference between those that it includes and those that it excludes. In another place, the shadow Secretary of State for Science, Innovation and Technology, Julia Lopez, said that she supported the Bill but feared it might not work in practice. I too support the Bill but fear it might not work in principle.

We live in an age when everything is connected to everything else. Drawing dividing lines between, for example, the private sector, some of which is included and some of which is excluded, and the public sector, which is excluded, is perilous and leads to incomprehension of the law.

That set of unclear distinctions also ignores the effect of cascade. During lockdown, a health crisis turned into an education crisis, with exam results becoming an unexpected casualty of Covid. When everything is dependent on computers, and the public sector is dependent on the private sector, and vice versa, it is unwise for new legislation to specify rigid demarcations.

Those taking part in this debate have received many useful briefing notes, from the Association of British Insurers, correctly drawing attention to the great value in behavioural terms of insurance, which can have a real impact on resilience of all types as well as cyber resilience; from the News Media Association, about the real danger posed by bots, which now form 50% of all internet traffic, which is accelerating fast; and from Zurich, correctly identifying the huge role played by SMEs in the cyber security sector yet worrying about the ability of SMEs to bear the demands of regulation, not least in reporting incidents within 72 hours; and many more.

I know that the Government are committed to reforming the Computer Misuse Act in the coming national security Bill, as the noble Lord, Lord Clement-Jones, has been demanding for many a year now. CyberUp’s long-running campaign on this is far too long-running. While I am talking about cyber security professionals—because that is the point of amending the Computer Misuse Act: to give them proper protection—I cite the very helpful briefing from ISC2. It says that the Bill will dramatically increase the demand for cyber security professionals even though there is currently a significant shortage of them.

As I understand it, the number of cyber security positions in government that are currently vacant stands at 50% of the total. That is horrifying. Some 58% of UK organisations have a critical or significant skills need and 87% of teams have experienced at least one consequence due to skills needs. The members of ISC2 have said that the biggest impediment to them complying with cyber legislation and regulation is a shortage of skills, so what does this legislation do to increase those skills? Could we look at defining the meaning of a “skilled person” in the Bill?

The shortage of such skills is likely to be exacerbated by there being 12 different regulators—here again I rather echo what the noble Lord, Lord Birt, said. There is going to be a risk of duplication of regulation, even potentially of contradictory regulation. What is an organisation meant to do if one regulator requires that it does one thing but another regulator requires that it does not? Will the Government ensure that regulators adopt common forms of evidence for demonstrating compliance and common cyber security standards? How does the legislation take into account the fact that many organisations will be subject to foreign legislation as well? I agree, as on many other things, with what the noble Baroness, Lady Northover, said about encouraging alignment with the European Union. How are we learning from overseas experience?

This is a well-meaning but muddled attempt to deal with an exceptionally fast-moving, difficult problem. Governments always find it hard to keep up with the pace of technology, so is it right that we should re-examine this Bill only every five years? The Secretary of State should have to report to Parliament earlier than every five years. I know I sound a bit miserable, but I support the Bill. I really do. It could be better, and we will have a lot of work to do in Committee.

18:31

[Baroness Paul of Shepherd’s Bush (Lab)]

My Lords, the Government’s whole-of-society approach to national security rightly recognises that resilience is not delivered by the state alone; it is delivered through partnership between government, regulators, industry, communities and, crucially, the private sector. Cyber resilience is no exception. It requires every bit of the infrastructure to play its part: those who defend networks, those who regulate standards and those who help organisations recover when incidents occur.

I welcome the Bill and I note the broad support it has received from across the resilience sector as a good start. The Bill makes important progress in strengthening incident reporting, modernising the NIS framework and placing greater obligations on essential service providers, digital services and critical suppliers. I particularly welcome the inclusion of managed service providers within the regulatory regime. As other noble Lords have mentioned, more and more organisations rely on MSPs to help them keep pace with the changing nature of the threat and the ever-expanding tools required to remain secure. Without them, many businesses and parts of our critical national infrastructure would struggle to access the expertise they need to keep themselves safe. At the same time, MSPs can present a potential vulnerability because of the privileged access that they often hold to clients’ infrastructure. The Bill is right to recognise this, and I am pleased to see them brought into scope.

In welcoming the Bill, I must also point to what I think is a significant omission, on which I will focus my remarks. There is no mention of the insurance sector, nor any real mention of the part that the private sector can play. I raise this not as a criticism, because there is ample opportunity to put this right and to enhance the Bill’s ambition. The Bill already expands incident reporting and increases the volume and quality of cyber incident data available to regulators and public authorities. That is an excellent step forward, but if the purpose of the Bill is to improve our understanding of cyber risk and strengthen resilience across the economy then it is worth asking whether we should enable structured, anonymised incident data to be shared with the insurance sector and others who can use it.

The purpose of this data is to provide a clear picture of the threat, so it is important that we share it as widely as possible with those who can help protect us. I ask the Minister to consider this. It would be an extension to the Bill, not a departure from it. It would build on the reporting architecture that the Bill already creates, and it would do so in a way that supports the Government’s whole-of-society approach to resilience. The principle is simple: better data enables better modelling; better modelling enables better pricing and strengthens resilience; and better pricing increases access to cyber insurance and strengthens resilience across the entire economy.

Cyber insurance is already an important part of keeping businesses safe. We know that it enables us to transfer financial risk so that it is shared between businesses in the private sector rather than being borne by the taxpayer. I am sure we all agree that cyber incidents and the cost of recovery should, in most cases, fall on the organisations affected.

As noble Lords know, insurance remains one of the most effective and economically efficient ways of achieving this, but it does not just pay out after an incident; it changes our behaviour before one. To secure affordable premiums, organisations are required to adopt practical cyber hygiene measures, such as multifactor authentication, timely patching, network segmentation and robust incident planning. These requirements are not set in stone but change as the threat involves. Beyond legislation which will mandate a change in behaviour, there are very few other ways to incentivise the scale and pace of the behavioural change required to improve our resilience than insurance. We have locks on our doors, safety features in our cars and sprinklers in our buildings because insurance encouraged and rewarded these measures. It has the potential to play the same role in cyber resilience.

It is worth noting that Cyber Essentials, which the Minister mentioned in her opening remarks, is believed to be held by just 1% of businesses. Although the growth rate is increasing, it would take decades to get to the point where Cyber Essentials is going to provide us with the level of resilience that we need, so we need to do something different and we need to incentivise things differently.

As we also know, cyber insurance helps mitigate the moral hazard where organisations underinvest in security because they assume government or someone else will bear the consequences. The risk to our economy makes this unsustainable. Independent analysis commissioned by the Department for Science, Innovation and Technology, which sponsors this Bill, shows that cyber attacks impose almost £15 billion of economic harm on the United Kingdom every year. That is equivalent to one month’s NHS expenditure, almost the entire annual policing budget, 30 new hospitals or more than three decades of universal breakfast clubs for every primary school child. It is enough to wipe out an entire year’s profit for vast numbers of British businesses.

Yet only a small proportion of that national cyber risk is insured. Based on the department’s modelling data, together with that of the Association of British Insurers and Lloyd’s of London, it is estimated that the UK cyber insurance market currently covers approximately £700 billion of annual losses. In other words, less than 5% of the economic harm caused by cyber incidents is insured. Therefore, more than £14 billion of losses fall directly on businesses, public services and, in some circumstances, the taxpayer. We all know that Marks & Spencer had cyber insurance and reportedly made a claim of around £100 million following its cyber incident last year, whereas Jaguar Land Rover did not have any cyber insurance and, in the end, the Government had to step in and provide a loan. As the frequency and severity of cyber events increases, it is in our interest to increase insurance take-up.

The Bill strengthens reporting obligations. Named suppliers will be required to report significant incidents within 24 hours and to report fully within 72 hours. The Bill expands the definition of a reportable incident to include pre-positioning attacks, significant near misses and incidents likely to have societal impacts even where disruption has not occurred. It must be permissible for regulators to share this information across public authorities and with insurance companies to create a more coherent national understanding of cyber risk. If we accept that it is possible to share in some circumstances, it must be possible for us to consider that it could be shared in others.

Lloyd’s of London, the ABI and brokers including Marsh, Aon and Willis Towers Watson have warned that scarcity of reliable data is one of the principal constraints on market and product development, so why would we not want to facilitate improvement in cover? Market analysis suggests that there is potential for the global cyber insurance market to expand annually by 25%. If the UK were to capture even a modest share of that growth, our domestic cyber insurance market could expand from its current value of around £700 million to well over £2 billion in a few years. This would lead to more highly skilled jobs in London and would maintain London’s position as the world’s leading centre for specialist insurance.

The Bill sets us in the right direction, but we have an opportunity to ensure that insurance is properly recognised as part of the resilience community. I believe that enabling structured, timely, anonymised data to be shared with insurers would be a modest extension to the Bill but would have the capacity to deliver enormous change to the cyber resilience of our country. I hope that the Government will consider this as the Bill progresses through the House.

18:40

[Baroness Neville-Jones (Con)]

My Lords, I support this Bill. I rather agree with those who have spoken previously that it is not particularly ambitious in its aims, but, if successful, it will be a largely useful piece of legislation. It is modest in its aims but liable to be of service for a period.

What it does not do is look forward very much. The threat landscape is deteriorating. I will not describe it, as that has been done well by others, but the criminals, and indeed other state operators, are leaders in technology adoption. We can be sure that AI is going to be used against us, and so we must be in a position to exploit it ourselves.

One of the conclusions that I draw from the discussion so far is that we will somehow have to learn to both legislate and make policy faster than we are doing at the moment. This Bill has taken a long time to get through the Commons. I hope that it will not take so long to get through this House. I suspect that we are already behind the curve again.

We have to learn to be willing to experiment and to change course if it is not working. We can take many views on the subject of whether we should have sectoral regulation or a single regulator—there are arguments in both directions. At the moment, I am, on the whole, willing to try sectoral regulation, which brings with it potentially more flexibility, as well as more complexity. If it does not work, we will need to be prepared to say that it is not working and that we will do something different. Changes of gear, and willingness to change gear, are things that we will have to come to terms with. When it is the case that we have not got it quite right, we will need to be prepared to say so.

The thrust of the Bill is certainly in the right direction. I will focus on some of the more detailed points in the drafting where I think we need to try to accomplish some improvements. There is quite a lot of looseness in the drafting, which needs tightening up. For example, terms such as “managed service provider” and “critical supplier”, as well as the wide definition of the notion of “incident”, all need greater precision. We need to avoid situations where words such as “incident” become a way in which companies that have no particular involvement get tangled up in regulation. If part of a company provides managed services, we need to know, and the company needs to know, whether the whole company is caught by the Bill or whether it is simply that part that provides managed services.

There is plenty of implementation detail on which we will need to have a closer fix. I am willing to give the Government the power to fill in the detail and update the law through secondary legislation, as it seems to me that we cannot always have primary legislation doing everything. However, we will need a duty to consult written into the Bill for it to be a safe proposition. One thing I would like to ask the Minister is about the timetable for secondary legislation. Will the Government be willing to consult when it comes to putting that through? That will be a very substantial part of the Bill.

I want to make a couple of comments about the effects of the scope of the Bill. First of all, with the exception of service providers, who are classed as “critical suppliers”, and data centres, the Bill, as other people have remarked, is exclusively concerned with the public sector. As the Government Minister and indeed others have pointed out, some of the biggest losses have occurred in the private sector. I do not need to describe these, as they have been described already.

The Government may argue that they properly seek not to regulate the private sector. I certainly have considerable sympathy with that, but it is not satisfactory from the point of view of the taxpayer that the Government had to bail out with public finance Jaguar Land Rover. Under current conditions, I do not think that that breach, which was expensive, is likely to be the last one with sizeable financial effect.

The Government have recognised the problem and are encouraging private sector companies to make a pledge to improve the management of cyber security at board level. I am all in favour of that: improve reporting in the corporate code and increase activity by the audit committee, whose members, if properly equipped with cyber expertise, will make a valuable contribution. That is part of the way that we must move forward. Having said all that, private sector security self-help, while essential, is not sufficient. So what should we do?

The Government correctly tell us that their first duty is the defence and security of the nation. Cyber security strategy—which I know something about, having been involved in it—was founded on the proposition that the protection of the economy involved active partnership between public and private sectors. The NCSC does a vital job in increasing understanding about the threat and giving advice and guidance on countering it, but it could do an even more important and larger job. It was intended at the outset to be more public-facing than is currently the case. It has, to some extent, retreated from its previous public start. I would like to see the NCSC re-emerge from the shadows with more threat analysis, advice and guidance, and its funding increased to do this.

This would be particularly helpful to SMEs. We have all been worried about their access to expertise and considered that the cost to them of security, which is not insignificant, should be somehow alleviated. They are valuable to us. Small companies provide very important parts of larger systems. If the NCSC were to be a much more active security partner to the corporate world, there would be a strong case for financial support from the private sector to it, to make this much more of a joint enterprise.

I urge the Government to put their intelligence capabilities to greater effect in supporting the private sector to raise its level of security. I do not think this is beyond us. We ought to try to do something where there is much closer co-operation between public and private sectors. The banking world, though different, gives us some pointers on the way in which that could be done.

Secondly, within the public sector, the scope of the Bill is puzzlingly selective, as other speakers have touched on. There is palpable anxiety among the general public about the security of One Login and accessing government services safely. This is a moment when the Government could increase confidence. However, not all government services are covered. To take an example, DWP has in its possession detailed personal—not to say intimate—information about its clients and beneficiaries. Surely it should be a candidate for coverage, but it is not. What are the criteria that govern whether a public sector service is covered or not? On the face of it, I do not think selectivity looks wise. The Government have chosen—

[Baroness in Waiting/Government Whip (Baroness Ramsey of Wall Heath) (Lab)]

I gently remind the noble Baroness that there is an eight minute advisory Back-Bench speaking time.

[Baroness Neville-Jones (Con)]

I will conclude. The Bill recognises the need for regulatory co-operation, and it is certainly going to be very important if it is made to work. I also agree with those who think that we should align with things such as NIS2 to reduce the potential conflict between us and other international regulators.

My last thought is that we need to ensure that another definitional issue in the Bill, the level of security

“appropriate to the risk posed”,

is pinned down. There is a great deal in the Bill that we will want to talk about in Committee so that those implicated know exactly where their limits lie.

18:51

[Baroness Alexander of Cleveden (Lab)]

My Lords, this is proving a fascinating and valuable debate, recognising the Bill’s many strengths, what could be tweaked, and what perhaps is missing as we look ahead. To begin with the strengths, we heard from the noble Earl, Lord Effingham, that the Bill builds on the work of the previous Government and commands cross-party support. We have just heard from the noble Baroness, Lady Neville-Jones, that national security is the first obligation of government. This is unarguably an important step in protecting the nation against cyber criminals, hacktivists and hostile states. It will quite simply make the UK a better place to live, work and do business in.

We have heard already from the noble Lord, Lord Birt, about the economic impact of cyber attacks and from my noble friend the Minister about the 11,000 NHS appointments that are lost to cyber attacks. It therefore seems very timely that we have this Bill, which will cover more essential services, improve regulatory effectiveness, and speed up responses to cyber threats. It is clearly desirable that we have a stronger board level responsibility around cyber. It must be right that data centres are now included in the Bill, helping maintain the UK’s position as a global destination for secure data hosting and for innovation. The focus on high-impact firms means that small companies will not be unduly burdened.

As my noble friend the Minister made clear, this is part of a wider national security effort that includes a cyber action plan for the public sector, a forthcoming cyber action plan for business, the Cyber Essentials certification scheme, and free cyber security support from the NCSC. All these measures will help contribute to our cyber security. The 24-hour incident reporting system will mean that regulated entities have to notify customers impacted by incidents. The tougher penalties for breaches will modernise enforcement and, I hope, improve the uptake of cyber insurance in the way that my noble friend Lady Paul has indicated is so vital. We have to hope that, together, this will mean that cutting corners will no longer be cheaper than doing the right thing. Nevertheless, given the speed at which new cyber threats are emerging, the Bill tries to strike a reasonable balance between maintaining parliamentary oversight and ensuring that the Government can act quickly, as required.

I turn to the question of tweaks. Many of them have been touched on so I will not dwell further on them. We heard from the noble Lord, Lord Arbuthnot, about the importance of the workforce and the increasing demand for cyber security skills. Will the proposed codes of practice include a framework for workforce development and training?

The second tweak, as many noble Lords have touched on, is to the Bill’s scope. I have some sympathy with the noble Baroness, Lady Northover, about the case for closer alignment with EU regulations when we have British companies operating and complying with EU legislation in the areas that are covered. I also think that a broader scope would drive the sort of behavioural change that my noble friend Lady Paul cited. I note that the Minister already said that secondary legislation is available to expand the scope. I look forward to her comments on why we do not have a broader scope now, given the groundswell already in this debate, perhaps to include public administration, in particular local government, given the scale and sensitivity of data and the essential nature of public services.

The third tweak is something else that has been widely noted already: the risks associated with having 12 regulators. I appreciate that the Government’s intent is minimising regulatory upheaval. There is a balance to be struck. The noble Lord, Lord Birt, approached the issue of risk from the desire and need to ensure expertise. I will look at it through the lens of the risk of duplication. At lunchtime today, I spoke at a NED event hosted by a US law firm that counts among its clients a major cloud provider, insurance companies, professional services firms and a board effectiveness practice that works with both public and private sector organisations. The strong consensus in the room was that a common cyber security standard across all regulators, upon which appropriate sector-specific requirements could be layered, merits consideration. This approach is in the spirit of the Government’s amendments, tabled in the other place, to streamline reporting and avoid unnecessary complexity. I hope that issue is given further consideration.

In my few remaining minutes, I will touch on what is not in the Bill. As others have noted, technology is advancing faster than government frameworks can keep pace with it. The Bill was published last year, just as it became clear that AI was tipping the advantage to attackers. Attackers need to succeed only once, while defenders potentially need to patch millions of users. There is currently no technology to automate patching at the pace required. The Bill needs to say more on the role of integrating AI tools into cyber defences. The Bill arguably has an AI-shaped hole in it, although I am encouraged that the incoming Prime Minister has signalled a fresh look at AI regulation. Even Sam Altman, faced with a capricious President, has come round, writing in the FT that

“citizens and their elected representatives must make the rules”.

We have also seen the Five Eyes intelligence partnership warning in a very rare joint communiqué last month that the West’s adversaries were within months of developing cyber attacks that could overwhelm the defences of Governments and companies and noting that frontier AI models will fundamentally transform cyber capabilities. All this is now with us, so raising our defensive capability in the face of this rising AI functionality will be essential. Our spy chiefs are asking western companies to use AI models to strengthen their defences.

I fully appreciate that the Government are completely across this threat landscape. The question is: how do we collectively legislate or regulate in such a threat landscape? Some suggestions that we can consider in Committee are, first, that advanced AI providers could perhaps be designated as covered entities under the Bill. Secondly, since the impact of AI in the cyber field is increasingly systemic rather than sector specific, perhaps we need common AI cyber security guidance supporting all regulators in this fast-moving landscape as they then layer on the needs of their sector. Thirdly, perhaps there should be an AI field in the mandatory incident reporting regime. Finally, we should perhaps think about an AI oversight framework giving the NCSC more teeth and the AISI a more co-ordinating role.

In conclusion, as widely recognised, the Bill will support our economy and our people and make the country safer. It is part of a package. It is a crucial building block rather than the final destination. I strongly commend it to the Chamber.

19:00

[Baroness Kidron (CB)]

My Lords, there is a risk of agreement breaking out at this juncture. I too very much welcome the cyber security Bill and agree with others who have raised the omissions. There is nothing for the private sector and nothing on local authorities. It focuses on the size of service provider rather than risk and, in doing so, fails to learn from the battles during the Online Safety Act which established beyond doubt that the size of the company does not equate to the risk it poses in any system. There is also no mandate for executive responsibilities, as in NIS2 in Europe. All these things feel like critical omissions but, above all, there is nothing on AI, as we have just heard. That is where I will focus my remarks.

In February, Darktrace, a cyber security firm based in Cambridge, surveyed cyber security professionals; 73% of them reported that AI-powered threats are already significantly impacting their organisations. Nine out of 10 said they needed major upgrades to their defences. Only weeks ago, the US Government instructed Anthropic to withdraw two frontier models, going from zero regulation of AI to a 100% ban within 90 minutes. This was on the understanding that it posed a national security threat, with capabilities that experts anticipate will be mirrored by other frontier models, including Chinese ones, within months. It seems extraordinarily ill advised, therefore, that AI is not front and centre of the Bill. Clearly, this is a decision rather than an omission so, when she responds, can the Minister explain why, given the scale of the cyber security threat presented by AI, the Government have chosen not to identify it and tackle it explicitly in the Bill?

The absence of AI from the Bill also means the absence of the AI Security Institute. AISI is recognised globally as world leading, yet since this Government came to power its name has been changed from “Safety” to “Security” institute. We have heard repeatedly from insiders that they have been instructed not to upset the Americans. Most recently, a decision was made to fold its societal resilience team—which dealt with things including psychological harms, child safety, environmental harms, synthetic media abuse and faults with using AI for hiring, police and credit scoring—in favour of the existential threat agenda, which frontier companies prefer to discuss because industry prefers to talk about the harms of the future rather than the ones that are here right now.

I sit on the Joint Committee on the National Security Strategy and simply cannot overstate the repeated cries from security experts for society-wide resilience and a broader definition of security, including information integrity and digital sovereignty. They understand that threats to security are structural and multifaceted and need constant oversight. Can the Minister say why we are not using this Bill to strengthen and empower AISI as an independent statutory body to ensure the safety and security of the nation and to provide a constant source of wisdom and expertise over AI across all domains, with a statutory remit that allows it to investigate the full spectrum of unsafe security risks and mandatory rules for AI safety training and reporting of security incidents directly to it?

It is easy to dismiss these issues as outside the cyber security remit, but that is not the case. I was at a conference about agentic AI last week where medical researchers showed that, in 51% of cases where a person should go to hospital, AI told them not to. This has profound consequences for the health of a nation. More chilling still, the same experts pointed out that, as AI becomes integrated with health records and prescribing systems, a malign actor or hostile state could in one fell swoop manipulate the online prescriptions of an entire nation.

Similarly, in my conversations with specialist police they have said that they are extremely worried about the way digital services are fuelling an ever-growing pipeline of extremists. Recent research by the Center for Countering Digital Hate shows that eight out of 10 chatbots are willing to plan a school shooting or an attack on a synagogue. In 2025, for the first time, automated traffic overtook human traffic online, much of it concealing its identity, leaving operators unable to distinguish benign automation from hostile traffic. This enables the mass harvesting of data used to facilitate a future cyber attack at scale. As non-human traffic climbs, our exposure to cyber attacks grows with it.

At best, the Bill is unclear how these sorts of harms impact our security and adds to the mishmash of provisions and the powers taken by the Secretary of State in several previous Bills. At worst, these issues are not covered at all. The Minister in the other place said that the Bill is “technology agnostic”. Can the Minister explain what that means in practice? AI is not simply another risk to be regulated; it changes the nature, speed and scale of cyber attacks themselves.

Two weeks ago, I and several other noble Lords received a briefing from the Institute for AI Policy and Strategy and the Centre for Long-Term Resilience. They are at the forefront of tracing emerging technologies and threats and have set out a clear strategy built around four ideas: delay, defend, detect and disrupt. They have practical proposals under each heading to improve the Bill, giving us greater oversight and transparency and narrowing and neutralising the spectrum of risk. But as it stands, the Secretary of State, as she has done on so many occasions, has taken powers herself rather than offering Parliament a coherent plan of action.

In short, the greatest omission from the Bill is that it focuses primarily on what a limited set of companies and service providers should do and too little on the resilience of the wider digital system. Over the last two years, we have seen the way in which dependencies on US tech have muted our ability to protect children and creatives and made our NHS, government data and our economy vulnerable. A truly secure cyber policy is a sovereign one which gives the Government control over key chokeholds in the system and oversight over critical infrastructure while encouraging a far greater range of providers. It is one that retains valuable data in the UK, prioritises UK tech companies and deliberately works alongside other middle powers by building relationships in which we are a rule-maker rather than a rule-taker. That, to my mind, is the real opportunity presented by this Bill. It is an opportunity yet to be realised.

19:08

[Baroness Bennett of Manor Castle (GP)]

My Lords, it is a great pleasure to follow the noble Baroness, Lady Kidron. I will come back to her points about digital sovereignty. I also thank the Minister for introducing this Bill.

I have been reflecting back. I am approaching my eighth year in your Lordships’ House, and we have come a long way. About seven years ago, I was standing behind the Bar and a Member of your Lordships’ House who shall remain nameless sidled up to me and said: “They’re talking about catfishing. I gather that doesn’t mean being beside a river with a rod”. I said, “No, you’re right. Well done, well worked out”. We have come a long way. But, of course, the world has changed an enormous amount in those eight years and the message from all corners of your Lordships’ House today is that the Government are not keeping up. Your Lordships’ House will have to do its best to keep up for them and push the Government in those ways.

In her introduction, the Minister talked about data centres being a key part of the modern world. Their security is very reliant on water and energy supplies, just as all our security is being impacted by their consumption of those supplies. Something we have not really talked about yet, but need to think about a lot, is that we tend to think about these information systems and networks as being up in the cloud, but of course they are very much physically down to earth and dependent on all our natural physical systems. That cannot be forgotten.

I will focus mostly on two areas of concern that are missing or inadequately covered in this Bill in terms of our network and information systems. In Trafalgar Square at this moment, there is literally a Trojan horse—a reminder, in mythological form, to beware of Greeks bearing gifts, at least if they have just been besieging your city. I put it to the Government that this is a parallel that they should be considering: beware of Silicon Valley tech bros bearing shiny undeliverable promises, with large lobbying budgets and frighteningly undemocratic values, and that bear allegiance to a state with doubtful levels of democracy and consistency. I also want to respond directly to the noble Lord, Lord Birt, who spoke about the risks of volunteer-run, open-source software. Of course, it is very possible to question which is the greater risk: a Silicon Valley tech bro or a whole lot of people who are trying to work for the common good. We might debate that as we go along.

As the noble Baroness, Lady Kidron, identified, we are talking about digital sovereignty. I draw the attention of your Lordships’ House to an amendment tabled by my honourable friend Siân Berry in the other place, which was not debated there, calling for the Government to have a digital sovereignty strategy. It proposed that the Government should have and maintain such a strategy and

“set out the Government’s assessment of the risks to … network and information systems arising from … dependence on hardware, software, or digital services that may be subject to foreign interference”

of the kind that the noble Baroness, Lady Kidron, referred to, in terms of AI systems;

“extra-territorial legal requirements that may be imposed on non-domiciled suppliers;”

and

“vulnerabilities, undue control, or supply-chain dependency on foreign states or entities”.

I am sure everyone in your Lordships’ House knows what I am talking about, but I will pick one example as a case study: the company whose place in our society, and the values of its founders, owners and leaders, are a great cause for concern in Parliament and with the public. I am talking, of course, about Palantir. Last month, the Science, Innovation and Technology Committee warned that

“it’s not the only company capable of providing the ‘middleware’ required by public bodies”.

The committee also identified Microsoft and Amazon Web Services. Let us focus on this: you do not even need the fingers of one hand to count the absolutely central suppliers here. The committee said such dependencies were putting us

“‘at the mercy’ of foreign actors”,

and it very explicitly called for the Government to exercise the 2027 break clause in the NHS Federated Data Platform contract—ideally to develop an in-house replacement. That is one sovereign issue.

A second sovereign issue faces towards a more obvious international danger that the Government will not, I hope, deny. As debated in the other place, this is the need for critical safeguard in this field for an anti-transnational repression amendment. I happen to know that the noble Lord, Lord Alton of Liverpool, who cannot be with us today unfortunately, intends to table an amendment as we progress this legislation. At the moment, this Bill creates a dangerous loophole. It permits the sharing of highly sensitive network and information systems data with overseas authorities, without checking whether those authorities operate within a system that guarantees legal standards and human rights. There needs to be a rule that says, “Let’s check and think before we share”.

It is important to say that this would not be an actor-specific measure; it would be a universal principle-based safeguard that would apply to any regime, anywhere in the world, that rejects the rule of law. It would require the Secretary of State to actively consult subject matter experts and civil society groups to identify compromised jurisdictions. We have to be realistic about the state of the world now. Authoritarian states have a long and troubling track record of using international structures, such as Interpol notices for example, to mask political persecution under the guise of criminal justice.

I should declare at this point that, until recently, I was co-chair of the All-Party Parliamentary Group on Hong Kong, and I will focus briefly on the issue of China. UN special rapporteurs have pointed out the issues there. We cannot assume that so-called safe third countries will protect dissidents. Countries such as Spain have authorised extraditions to China, Cyprus has accepted individual “assurances”, and countries such as Hungary and Serbia are deepening judicial co-operation with Beijing. The UK has suspended its formal treaty with Hong Kong, but recent proposed changes to the Extradition Act 2003 open the door to case-by-case ad hoc arrangements. NIS data includes IP addresses, digital fingerprints and user-level logs, so the concern is not just about extradition but that this would allow authoritarian states to identify dissidents in the UK. We know that transnational repression against dissidents has been a great and growing to diaspora communities and human rights defenders.

This Bill needs a lot of work, as many people have said. There is really foundational work here that needs to be done.

19:17

[Lord Forbes of Newcastle (Lab)]

My Lords, the Bill sits squarely within the wider national security and preparedness agenda to which this House has repeatedly returned in recent months since the publication of the strategic defence review. We have spoken often about the interlocking nature of modern threats: geopolitical instability, climate shocks, pressure on critical infra- structure and the growing complexity of our digital systems. The Bill is therefore not a narrow technical measure; it is a national security Bill, and it deserves to be treated as such.

Every essential service in the United Kingdom, whether that be our energy grids, water systems, transport networks, hospitals or financial services, now depends on digital infrastructure. The boundary between physical and digital security has dissolved. A cyber attack on a hospital is not an IT problem; it is a threat to life. A breach in a water company’s control systems is not a data incident; it is a public health emergency. A compromise in a major data centre or managed service provider can cascade and cause chaos across the economy in minutes.

In recent years, we have seen how ransomware attacks have disrupted patient care or student learning, how supply-chain vulnerabilities have exposed critical national infrastructure, and how hostile actors—some criminal, some state-linked—have sought to test the resilience of our systems to destruction. The economic costs run into billions. The strategic cost is greater still: weakened confidence, reduced competitiveness and a nation continually forced into reactive crisis management rather than forward-looking preparedness. Resilience is not a cost; it is a foundation stone of our national strength. And the Bill is a necessary step in strengthening that foundation.

The existing Network and Information Systems Regulations, introduced in 2018, were an important milestone, but the digital ecosystem has changed beyond recognition in the years since. Cloud computing, large-scale data centres, outsourced managed services and complex supply chains now underpin almost every aspect of our national life. The regulatory perimeters and safeguards put in place almost a decade ago have not kept pace with the reality of modern risks.

The Bill addresses that gap. It expands the scope of regulation to include data centres, managed service providers and critical suppliers. Crucially, it recognises that vulnerabilities often sit not in the front-line operators but in the third-party services on which they depend. It strengthens incident reporting by ensuring that regulators receive timely, accurate information and that customers are informed when their services or data may be affected. It introduces statutory codes of practice, giving clarity to industry and consistency to regulators, and provides modern enforcement and cost-recovery powers, enabling regulators to act decisively when standards are not met.

Crucially, the Bill requires the Secretary of State to publish a statement of strategic priorities for cyber resilience. This is a significant and very welcome development. It aligns regulators, industry and public services around a shared national mission. It ensures that our approach to cyber resilience is not fragmented or reactive but coherent, strategic, and future-focused.

The Bill is not simply about technology; it is about people. Cyber incidents disrupt lives through cancelled hospital appointments, delayed trains, compromised personal data, businesses being unable to trade and local authorities unable to deliver essential services. The public rightly expect that the systems they rely on every day are secure. The Bill helps us to continue to meet those expectations. It also fits squarely within the broader preparedness agenda that many of us in your Lordships’ House have championed since the gracious Speech. We have argued consistently for a whole-system approach to resilience: one recognising that national security considerations are not confined to the worlds of defence or intelligence, but include the stability of our infrastructure, the integrity of our supply chains and the confidence of our citizens. Cyber resilience is now as fundamental as physical resilience. The two cannot be separated.

We have also emphasised the importance of place-based resilience. Local authorities, NHS trusts, utility companies and regional industries all depend on secure digital systems. A cyber incident in one part of the country can have national consequences. Strengthening digital resilience strengthens local resilience, and vice versa.

We also continue to make the economic case. Secure systems underpin investment, innovation and job creation. They are essential to the competitiveness of our industries and the stability of our financial markets. In a world where digital infrastructure is as critical as roads or railways, cyber resilience is now an economic imperative. Cyber resilience is, and must be, a shared responsibility. Government, regulators, industry, public services and communities all have a role to play. The Bill strengthens the framework within which that shared responsibility can be exercised, so it is timely and necessary, but it is not sufficient.

Legislation alone cannot deliver the resilient digital nation we need to become. We must understand the current limitations of our sovereign digital capabilities and take urgent steps to address this major vulnerability. We must invest in skills, innovation and the capacity of regulators. We must support industry to meet higher standards, and foster a culture of preparedness: one that anticipates risk rather than waiting for crisis.

I end with a brief reference to the motto of my home city of Newcastle upon Tyne. I am not a Latin speaker, so I apologise if my pronunciation offends any of your Lordships who are. “Fortiter defendit triumphans”—triumphing by brave defence—emblazoned across our city’s crest, celebrates the victories it won in the 1600s against marauding invaders. It symbolises the city’s ability to withstand such assaults through its collective spirit of preparedness and fortitude. The lesson I believe we can draw from the history of Newcastle for this modern age is that by strengthening the digital sinews that hold our country together, we strengthen the country itself. In the very act of doing so, we cast a defensive shadow against those who seek to do us harm and, ultimately, we reduce the risk of attack in the first place. The Bill is an important step in that direction, and I am pleased to support it today in your Lordships’ House.

19:25

[Baroness Ludford (LD)]

My Lords, I see that I have gone down on the speakers’ list as “B Ludford—first half”, presumably in the expectation that I will make the second half of my speech later. I am only kidding.

I knew that I would learn a lot in this debate and I have not been disappointed. I am no expert on cyber issues and I am speaking only because, first, it is an interesting as well as vital topic; secondly, because my noble friend Lord Clement-Jones is very persuasive; and, thirdly, because the Bill has prompted me to revisit my memory of being the victim of a cyber attack 13 years ago.

As an MEP I was involved in drafting the general data protection regulation—GDPR. I see the noble Lord, Lord Moraes, nodding in collective memory. I had sought to take a balanced approach, safeguarding personal data while not totally hampering digital services by overloading them with red tape. This middle way did not please a group of extremist hacktivists, who labelled me an agent of big tech and launched a denial of service attack against my MEP website. It was successfully defended by the small firm which hosted my website—and those of some Lib Dem MPs, including a coalition Minister or two—and it kept all the logs for me, as I wanted to notify the police. I could not find anyone in the Met to speak to so, since I was in touch with Europol and its British director at the time, his chief of staff kindly spoke to old Met colleagues and got an inspector to ring me. This chap was not only uninterested but cross that I had got rank pulled on him, and he did not deign to pursue any inquiry.

I relate that anecdote to illustrate, first, that cyber resilience is a whole-of-society concern which needs to bring in all of us non-experts but, secondly, that the exclusion from the Bill of public sector services is a worrying hole. Politicians and political parties as well as the police, local authorities and others are rather key players in the cyber security ecosphere. I hope that we will explore at further stages the Government’s rationale for exclusions.

At Second Reading in the other place, the Minister for Digital Government and Data, Ian Murray, agreed that cyber security

“is very much an economic growth issue … as we can see from the impact it has on our economy”.—[Official Report, Commons, 6/1/26; col. 171.]

Both Mr Murray and his DSIT colleague Kanishka Narayan cited the £15 billion a year cost of cyber attacks to UK businesses. But in response to calls to include sectors such as retail and manufacturing, as well as small and medium-sized companies, Minister Narayan claimed:

“Introducing blanket coverage for whole new sectors would create extensive regulatory burdens for more of our economy, stifling economic growth”.—[Official Report, Commons, 6/1/26; col. 226.]


So, on the one hand, the Government acknowledge the devasting cost to the economy of cyber security breaches of both public and private operators but, on the other hand, say that including them in the Bill would damage the economy. There is absolutely no logic to this.

The sorely needed intent to boost the pipeline of professionals is of course welcome. But another thing the Government could do on training is to protect the practice of ethical hacking, as part of the testing of networks, so that this workforce is as prepared as it possibly can be to combat weaknesses in cyber protection. Is this going to happen via reform and updating of the Computer Misuse Act 1990?

The effort needs to encompass not only professionals but all of us non-techies, even oldies such as me, given that the most common password in this country is apparently “password”. Much lip service is paid to addressing digital exclusion but there are huge numbers of people—a lot, but not all, of them old—who have not received any training and are still left out. How do the Government plan to extend whole-of-society awareness of cyber safety to everyone living in this country and not regard it just as a limited legislative exercise? While doing that, the Government could surely not avoid the issue of cyber-enabled fraud, a multi-billion-pound epidemic in which criminals often compromise individual customers as a route into wider systems. I do not think that is covered at all in the Bill.

The Government’s response to demands for the Bill to place responsibilities on boards and senior executives has been as feeble as their muddle on the economic impact. Minister Narayan told the other place that last year the Government wrote to chief executives “requesting”—requesting—

“that they make cyber-security a board-level responsibility”.—[Official Report, Commons, 6/1/26; col. 228.]

That in my opinion is pathetic. With the consequences of neglect so clear, a request is simply not good enough. The Government should make cyber security a legal requirement on bosses, which would boost accountability. Alongside that, they could slim the Bill’s administrative load by clarifying responsibilities, definitions and thresholds, having a single unified reporting portal rather than 12 regulators, avoiding overreporting, which would simply make the wood invisible for the trees, and including a duty, not just an option, to consult on secondary legislation—among many other streamlining measures.

Leaving the strategic priorities statement to the Government to draw up is a huge chunk of delegation. This Bill is really a bit of a mess: a combination of lots of executive power and lots of amending of the 2018 NIS regulations. It might have been better to write a whole, clean, comprehensive new Bill.

We can no longer channel EU law into our jurisdiction because the European Communities Act was abolished, but, in an era of alignment—indeed, dynamic alignment —the disparities between the Government’s choices in the Bill and the EU’s proposed NIS 3 directive are puzzling, as my noble friend Lady Northover and others pointed out. Both to lighten the regulatory load on UK companies working across Europe and to facilitate co-operation with the EU, it would make sense to have greater similarity between this Bill and the EU’s imminent new directive.

The Bill is much more limited than the draft directive in its sectoral coverage and regulatory design: for instance, keeping different categories of regulated entities when the EU is bringing them all together, and then distinguishing purely between “essential” and “important”. I am all for regulation being proportionate and flexible when that works—I and some other British MEPs sought with some success to bring that into the GDPR—but can the Minister be explicit about why the Government have diverged rather decisively from the EU model, and indeed left so much detail to executive discretion?

When it comes to the desired digital sovereignty, to avoid in future the servitude to US tech and the US Government that the Mythos episode demonstrated, would it not make more sense to work more closely with the EU so that British companies can help contribute to and benefit from a European market in digital commercial opportunities?

I look forward to working with colleagues on these Benches and across the House to improve this rather unambitious Bill.

19:33

[Lord Vaizey of Didcot (Con)]

My Lords, it is a pleasure to take part in this debate at Second Reading. I am taking part not because I was once hacked but because I was very briefly the Cyber Security Minister—which is almost as surprising as learning that I was once the Minister of Fashion.

Several themes have emerged during this very interesting debate and I always find it interesting to debate a Bill on technology, because the process of legislation is so ponderous and takes so long while digital technology moves so fast. I think there is a recurring theme, of course, that everything is digital. The other thing I always find odd when we debate legislation such as this is how we seem to continue to work in silos. AI has been mentioned so many times and it so important, but I recognise the need for legislation to provide the Government with a framework, just as the Online Safety Act has provided the Government with a framework on which we can move forward on online safety. I am less concerned about executive action and endless consultation; I want the Government to have the powers to move quickly in this important area.

As an opening remark, I will say something perhaps counterintuitive, which is that cyber security as well as being a threat is also a great opportunity. It is very important for us not to lose sight of the fact that the UK is one of the leading countries in the world for cyber security expertise. We have a cluster of great companies built around GCHQ. We must not lose sight as we debate these important issues of the fact that we have world-leading expertise that can contribute to the growth in our economy. When we talk about the defence investment plan, for example, it is important to talk about the huge opportunities we have to create great defence tech companies. Nor should we lose sight of the opportunity to create great British cyber security companies, which goes to the whole debate about potential sovereignty and giving us our own capability.

Let me begin by echoing a number of speeches about how important it is to work in lockstep with our EU partners. It is a piece of irony that this legislation emerges in effect from a European directive that we were beginning to debate when I was the Cyber Security Minister. In fact, the legislation is necessary because we can no longer transpose European legislation directly into British legislation. The noble Baroness, Lady Ludford, mentioned the GDPR, and it is a fact that Brussels can often take the lead in regulation such as this, and that big multinational companies tend to look at the biggest regulatory space in order to adhere to it. So it is important that we are mindful of how Brussels plans to proceed in this area, even if we find areas where we can be more flexible.

People have talked about our bad record in the UK on cyber security on account of cyber security attacks. I suspect that that is because we remain, I think, the most digital nation in the EU, and the English language as well provides us, weirdly, with some kind of vulnerability. But we are at the forefront of cyber security attacks, and it is important that we have the legislation and the bodies capable of responding to them.

Several themes have emerged. When I was the Cyber Security Minister, we began preparations for the National Cyber Security Centre: I thought that was incredibly important. I used to have a mantra that business in particular needed one front door that it could walk through to get the advice and expertise it needed to draw on to protect itself. We have talked constantly in this debate about 12 regulators, and I echo the calls to provide a uniform platform that can read across all the regulators, and they can add on top of that any sector- specific needs they meet.

I also recognise the calls from many noble Lords to say that this is perhaps an artificially constrained Bill, focusing on only a few vital sectors that are important to protect, instead of, as it were, seeing the whole picture and understanding, as many noble Lords have said, that cyber security pervades everywhere. There are so many ways in which we should look to protect ourselves in this age, one of which, of course, is in not losing sight of the hardware. The Minister spoke about software as a service. It is very important to remember that many of our public service providers, for example, still rely on ageing infrastructure, which provides huge vulnerabilities to cyber security attacks. I wonder whether the Government have a strategy to update much of the hardware that is still being used.

I was also interested in the remarks made about how vendors of software should be accountable. That is a very important avenue to explore: perhaps we could introduce kitemarks and audits of software providers to ensure that they are providing cyber-secure software that is as robust as it can be—again, as the noble Baroness said, we can count on the fingers of one hand the main providers of the software that is used in a vast number of businesses—and that they also work with us, as it were, to be on the front line.

It is interesting that this issue has become one of sovereignty. I am fascinated by the debate on the use of Palantir, for example. Personally, I have no problem working with Palantir. I think it provides a vital service, and I hope that the Government will be cautious in listening to the siren calls of people who say “Don’t work with these companies” simply because they disagree with the slightly bizarre views of some of their chief executives. Nevertheless, it perhaps calls for the Government to have a consistent story on this.

One thought that occurred to me during this debate was what has happened to the debate about encryption? This is a dog that no longer seems to be barking. In the last few years, we have had a vigorous debate on potential backdoors to encryption and security services being given, as it were, cyber keys to access encrypted services such as WhatsApp and Signal, and we saw a big pushback from the tech industry on how that would create big cyber vulnerabilities. I wonder whether the Government have come to a settled view on that.

Returning to the theme of the opportunities for the economy, the need to invest in cyber skills in our workforce is absolutely vital. We need to create a cyber workforce and a cyber defence force that work to protect the country, as well as giving companies the kind of skills base they need to make themselves secure. I echo the call from the noble Baroness, Lady Ludford, about boards. I was astonished to read in the House of Lords Library briefing that the number of board members with a responsibility for cyber has apparently fallen. I do not know if that is true, but I wonder whether it is possible to work with business bodies such as the IoD and the CBI to make it a strong corporate governance recommendation that every board should have somebody with a responsibility for cyber.

As I said at the beginning, this is a partnership: it is business, as much as government, that will protect us from cyber. For example, there has been reference to the insurance industry. One of the best ways we can ensure that companies invest in cyber security is to make it mandatory for them to get cyber insurance—which you cannot get unless you put cyber-secure measures in place—and to employ law firms to protect themselves from liability and to put in place important cyber measures.

I have not had a chance to support the noble Lord, Lord Clement-Jones, in his 50-year call for ethical hackers to be allowed to hack. I also echo the earlier call to hear the Minister’s views on the rise of bots and their impact on cyber security.

19:42

[Baroness Gill (Lab)]

My Lords, too often we hear in the news that our local hospital cannot access patient records, or that the transport network in our cities has stalled, or, as I experienced last year, that the power has gone on and off for over a month as the local electricity grid is affected by cyber attacks. A decade ago, some of this would have sounded like the plot of a Hollywood movie. Today, it is a weekly briefing on the desk of our cyber security data centres.

Our world has fundamentally changed. We are no longer just fighting off rogue teenagers or opportunistic hackers looking for a quick payout. The UK is currently navigating a highly sophisticated and aggressive digital battlefield. Malign actors are often directed, tolerated or unleashed by hostile nation states such as Russia, Iran and China, which are actively infiltrating key UK assets. They are mapping our infrastructure, stealing government credentials and probing our defences. That is why I welcome the introduction of the cyber security and resilience Bill. It is a critical and long-overdue overhaul of our national baseline defence. It marks the moment that the UK stops playing catch-up with hostile states and starts to dictate the terms of its own digital safety.

To understand why the Bill matters, we have to look at how our digital ecosystem functions. Hostile actors do not just knock on the front door; they look for the weakest link in the supply chain. Look at what happened in September 2025, with the devastating cyber attack on Jaguar Land Rover. Russian-linked hackers deployed sophisticated ransomware that completely paralysed JLR’s IT networks and forced a total shutdown of production lines across major UK plants for weeks, which had a major impact on the workforce in my old West Midlands constituency. The disruption that cascaded down into the automotive supply chain affected thousands of component manufacturers, mostly SMEs, with many workers in the region facing lay-offs. It had a major impact on the regional economy. Likewise, the attack did not just hurt the brand; it cost the British economy an estimated £1.9 billion, directly denting our national GDP. This was not just a corporate crime; it was an act of economic sabotage.

The threat extends far beyond manufacturing. Just weeks later, a massive cyber incident crippled electronic check-in and baggage systems at Heathrow Airport and across Europe. Was Heathrow’s central system breached directly? No. The attackers targeted a third-party vendor, Collins Aerospace, and scrambled the shared MUSE software that multiple airlines rely on. The result was chaos at terminals, hundreds of disrupted flights, and over 1.5 million passenger records being compromised. This new legislation fundamentally expands our defensive perimeter to address this exact vulnerability. For the first time, it brings data centres, managed service providers and supply chain partners directly into the regulatory spotlight, establishing a framework to name designated critical suppliers. The Bill recognises a hard truth: our infrastructure is only as secure as the third-party software we plug into it

Because of these aggressive state threats, a wider net is useless without sharper teeth. The Bill introduces two massive shifts in how organisations must run: rapid transparency and genuine board-level accountability. Under the new rules, if a covered organisation suffers a significant incident, or even a near miss capable of causing harm, it must file a notification within 24 hours, followed by a full report within 72 hours. In a cyber crisis, time is our most valuable currency. When assets such as Heathrow or JLR go down, an early warning allows the National Cyber Security Centre and regulators to contain the digital contagion before it spreads.

There are real consequences of negligence. For too long, cyber security has been treated by some boards as a minor IT issue, tucked away obscurely in finance or some other department. I am very pleased that the Bill changes this calculation. Companies that do not comply face financial penalties of up to £17 million, or 4% of their worldwide turnover. This will force executives to realise that robust cyber security is a core fiduciary duty. If you do not protect your network, you are jeopardising your entire business.

Crucially, this legislation is built to outpace our adversaries. Nation states use criminal proxies because they are fast, scalable and disguise geopolitical motives. Static laws become obsolete within months. The Bill grants the Government agile powers to update regulations swiftly through secondary legislation. This means that, as new state-sponsored threats emerge—whether through weaponised artificial intelligence or quantum decryption —the UK can adapt its defences instantly, without waiting years for a new Act of Parliament. The Bill also mandates companies immediately to notify their own customers if a breach puts those customers at risk.

To conclude, let us be entirely clear that the Bill is demanding. It will require an unprecedented level of capital investment and profound cultural change in every boardroom in this country, though I urge the Minister to consider undue burden on the SME sector, while recognising that it can sometimes be the weakest link. But we cannot ignore the reality of implementation. Cultural change does not happen purely through good will; it happens when the risk of non-compliance becomes completely indefensible. I ask my noble friend the Minister a fundamental question. While the target of the Bill is correct, the level of commercial investment and cultural transformation needed to meet these 24-hour deadlines is staggering. Beyond the immense financial stick, what mechanisms, support and enforcement frameworks will the Minister use to ensure this legislation drives genuine resilience, rather than just defensive corporate box-ticking? How will she guarantee that this heavy stick builds a shield?

19:51

[Lord Ravensdale (CB)]

My Lords, I declare my interest as a chief engineer working for AtkinsRéalis and I support the Bill. Given the threats that we are facing, strengthening the cyber security of the UK is vital. I think that the flexible, risk-based approach taken within the Bill is the right one.

Noble Lords have made many of the broader points already, so I will focus on a few narrower points. My remarks are really centred around the impact on economic growth and the need for proportionate regulation, because this legislation supports growth through, first, increasing our cyber resilience. The noble Baroness, Lady Northover, gave the example of the £15 billion cost of cyber attacks in 2024: that is a significant fraction of our GDP, around 0.5%.

I am also glad that the noble Lord, Lord Vaizey, brought up our world-leading cyber industry: the Bill represents a great opportunity for one of our key industries. However, there are threats to that growth agenda within the Bill, particularly through how larger corporates and SMEs will be affected, and we need to tread extremely carefully here. Business already has to deal with much burdensome regulation, as the noble Earl, Lord Effingham, set out. As ever in legislation, we need to think about those unintended consequences. To this end, there are three points I want to make.

Looking at some of the detail of the Bill, my first point is around supply chains. Clause 12 rightly brings in the concept of “critical suppliers” and ensures that supply chains are within the scope of the regulations. However, given the ambiguity of the criteria for designation, there is a risk that a significant number of SMEs could be affected, perhaps unintentionally, by this legislation, so I would be grateful if the Minister would set out what steps the Government are taking to ensure that the “critical supplier” designation is restricted to suppliers posing genuine systemic risks to the UK economy. Terms such as “potential to cause disruption”, which is the wording used in the Bill, are qualitative, and there are no hard quantitative thresholds in the Bill. The risk, of course, is that a significant number of SMEs could be bought within scope, stifling those businesses with unnecessary regulation. We need to ensure that is proportionate.

Secondly, going through the Bill and continuing on this theme, we come to Clause 15, on reporting. To expand on what the Minister set out at the start, Clause 15 expands the definition of “a reportable incident” to include those capable of having

“an adverse effect on … network and information systems”.

The risk is that this could lead to overreporting, as even a minor phishing email could be deemed to be capable of having “an adverse effect”, and then we could perhaps see overreporting overwhelming systems and bringing the risk that genuine threats could get through. So, I would also be grateful if the Minister could tell us how the Government will ensure that the “capable of having an adverse effect” threshold does not lead to overreporting of low-level incidents.

Thirdly, we have heard a lot of talk about AI in this debate, and perhaps a little less about quantum. I want to bring up quantum as a specific aspect, as the noble Lord, Lord Birt, referred to. I appreciate that there is a difficult balance here. This is a framework Bill, and it is perhaps not appropriate to set out specific technologies or technology impacts in it. However, the threat of quantum computers using algorithms like Shor’s algorithm to crack current public key crypto, such as RSA, enabling “harvest now, decrypt later” attacks on sensitive data, is something that will come, sooner or later, and quantum computing is evolving astonishingly quickly. The Parliamentary Office of Science and Technology, POST, where I am vice-chair of the board, has set out around a 10-year timescale for when a quantum computer will be able to break conventional encryption, and that aligns with the National Cyber Security Centre, which has already set out that organisations must complete migration to post-quantum crypto by 2035. I would be grateful for the Minister’s thoughts on how this could perhaps be strengthened within the Bill. For example, could there be something in the statement of strategic priorities in Clause 25 to help to join together the regulators in terms of the focus that is required on quantum cryptography? I would be very grateful for the Minister’s thoughts on that key area too.

In general, as I said, I support the Bill and I look forward to working with the Minister and her team as we move towards Committee.

19:56

[Baroness Harding of Winscombe (Con)]

My Lords, earlier today, the noble Viscount, Lord Colville, and I were saying that we were both quite late down this list and feared that everything would already have been said. That appears to be the case, but, fear not, I will still use my eight minutes.

I support the Bill and I agree with many noble Lords that we also need a much more comprehensive cyber security strategy. Like others, I have some specific suggestions for this specific Bill. My unique contribution, if it is unique, is not that I am an engineer and tech expert, as the noble Lord clearly is. I think that, in health terms, I would be described as an expert by lived experience, in that I suspect I am the only noble Lord today, probably the only noble Lord on the roster, who has actually been a CEO faced with a cyber attack. I have been that CEO whose company has been targeted by a gang of hackers, trying to work out how to navigate the crisis. I have had to go out and communicate to regulators, to customers, to shareholders.

[Lord Vaizey of Didcot (Con)]

To Ministers.

[Baroness Harding of Winscombe (Con)]

To Ministers, indeed—to my noble friend himself. In those days, the National Cyber Security Centre did not exist—I am obviously referring to my time as chief executive at TalkTalk. Instead, we were directed to the Metropolitan Police’s hostage negotiation team. They were lovely but unfortunately had no tech experience at all. In fact, we did no better ourselves. The security expert who came to brief the TalkTalk board had just come from Mexico, where he had been trying to get a bank manager back who had been kidnapped.

That was only 11 years ago. At TalkTalk, we took the view that communicating was the only way to help our customers and therefore the only way to save the company, and I stand by that decision now, but not everyone takes that view. I was accused at the time of being hopelessly naive for going out, within 24 and 48 hours, on to the airwaves and saying, “My customers have been attacked and, no, I don’t know exactly what has happened”. That is the timetable in this legislation. Most CEOs I talk to say, first, “God, I’m glad I wasn’t in that situation. That’s my nightmare”. Secondly, they are surprised when I say that, actually, I would communicate earlier if I was in that situation again and not later. Cyber attacks are a modern-day taboo in the business world. Business leaders are terrified of admitting that they have been attacked, and I am afraid that that means that mandating reporting is essential, because, 11 years after I was in that situation, I do not think that that has changed. I think that unless we make it mandatory to report, people will not do it.

I was surprised at the time, in 2015, that had Sainsbury’s or Tesco been hacked, I would not have had to tell anybody—I had just come from Sainsbury’s in my previous job. It is really depressing, 11 years later, to see that retail is still excluded. I cannot quite understand why water is “essential” but food is not. I think that Covid taught us that our food retail supply chain is an essential service, and those who work in it are essential workers.

Managed service providers are in, but generative AI is out. Only a decade ago, that might have been OK, but it is not now. In the other place, the Minister said there are powers in the Bill so that we can get it right in the future. Well, we need to get it right now, and we also need the powers to try to keep up. I am not against giving Ministers the power to keep this live, but that is not an excuse for not being up to date today. As other noble Lords have said, it looks, sadly, as though the EU has got this more right than we have. We should be humble enough to admit that, rather than be afraid and insist on doing the wrong thing.

The other area I have some lived experience in, which, again, has been mentioned by other noble Lords, is the challenge of 12 NIS regulators and the lack of join-up. When the TalkTalk hack happened, we immediately stood up a series of workstreams—the obvious things such as trying to work out what had happened. That is the biggest problem with a cyber attack—you genuinely do not know whether you have been attacked by a nation state or kids in a bedroom. You somehow hope it might be the former, but more often than not it turns out to be the latter. So you have to know what has happened and you have to start communicating before you know what has happened. That is two workstreams. You have to work out how to get your systems back up again. That is another workstream. Even 11 years ago, without any of these additional regulators, we had to have a “communicating with regulators” workstream.

Now, spare a thought for the poor managed service providers. They are companies that serve transport, telecoms, energy and the NHS. I think they might have a full house. If you were a managed service provider that was the victim of an attack, you would probably have to deal with all 12 regulators. Those of us who have been here for a while know that if you give 12 different public sector bodies the ability to define terms, they will define them in 12 different ways and have 12 different forms. That will stop you, in the first day or the first week of a cyber attack, doing the things that you should be doing to try to protect your customers. As an expert through lived experience, I plead with the Minister: join-up is essential. It should not be optional. We all know it is hard to do. If you do not sort it out in the Bill, it will not happen. Please do not make that join-up a forum.

I can take myself back to October 2015 and imagine having to communicate with—as much as I love it—the DCRF. If we had had to convene a meeting of 12 regulators in the heat of the crisis to work out what to do, that would not have helped anybody. So we need either a single regulator, as the noble Lord, Lord Birt, so eloquently set out, or a lead regulator, as I know the Government are looking at in a number of other areas, to try to reduce the burden of regulation. I very much support what my noble friend Lord Effingham said: regulation does look like it is necessary here but we need to be careful that we are not just layering burden upon burden, and doing it 12 times most definitely is.

I feel I have said nothing original at all but have said it possibly from a unique perspective. I am rare among former chief executives who have experienced a cyber attack in that I am willing to talk about it, which is exactly why this legislation is important. But I very much hope that, as with so many tech issues, the Minister will hear that we agree more than we disagree and that we could work together to improve the Bill, as this House is often quite good at doing.

20:04

[Lord Taylor of Warwick (Non-Afl)]

My Lords, I thank the Minister for introducing this important Bill. Cyber security is clearly vital to the protection and prosperity of our nation. But if we fail to plan, we plan to fail, and this Bill is at the heart of the Government’s cyber security plan.

I was born and raised in a part of the world that many think of as paradise, bliss, utopia. It is called Birmingham, just off the M6 by the gasworks. I can see there is some accord in the Chamber—or maybe it should go to VAR. I was a district councillor in that region. One of the largest employers there is Jaguar Land Rover. This giant motor vehicle manufacturer is the head of a supply chain of over 4,000 companies. JLR was the victim, as we all know, of a cyber attack last year and was bailed out by this Government to the tune of a £1.5 billion loan guarantee. The Government believed they had no choice because if they had let JLR fall, thousands of workers would have lost their jobs. I have some sympathy with that rationale, but it did set a dangerous precedent. It is also worth noting, surely, that the company had not completed taking out an insurance policy against cyber attacks.

So the first point I want to make to the Minister is that there is no mention in the Bill of the role of the insurance industry. Surely the issue of essential and compulsory cyber insurance needs to be looked at; otherwise, we will have another situation where we have to bail out another huge company.

The retail chain Marks & Spencer lost 99% of its profits due to a ransomware attack which disrupted services and stole customer data last year. Harrods and the Co-op also experienced cyber breaches over recent months. Surely, then, there is a glaring weakness in the Bill in that it will have no impact on private companies such as these. Can the Minister explain why the scope of the Bill cannot be extended—not in the future but now—to include large private retailers, at least those over a certain defined size or turnover? I understand there is potential in the Bill for improving things in the future, but why not do it now?

One of the lessons of history is that we must learn lessons from history, and surely a vital lesson is to take into account the changes in the world around us. In the Bill, the Government recognise that the artificial intelligence revolution has increased the need for more effective cyber security. Yet there is still no UK AI regulation, no cyber strategy, no mention at all of quantum computing or encryption. These matters need to be discussed and looked at now, not some time in the future, when you consider how fast AI is progressing.

We also have a cyber security skills shortage, with 49% of UK companies admitting a lack of cyber foundational skills. As well as protecting the nation, in this AI age it is skills that will pay the bills and grow the economy. It is right that the Government have announced initiatives to attempt to fill vacancies in the cyber security industry, but there is no definition in the Bill of what is required to be a “skilled person” in this context. I just ask the question: why not? Why not look at it now?

We are living longer, and the demands on the public sector are growing, but there is a lack of focus in the Bill on the public sector, particularly the risk to NHS data. For example, Synnovis, which has been mentioned, is a company which provides pathology services to the NHS. A couple of years ago, a ransomware attack on Synnovis cost £32.7 million and resulted in delays to more than 11,000 appointments and even, allegedly, one death. Surely all companies, private and public, that hold personal data should demonstrate that they have effective defences against cyber attacks. I have tried to find out whether Synnovis or its suppliers would be covered by the Bill; there is some ambiguity over that, and that ambiguity at this stage is not helpful.

I welcome that the expanded scope of the Bill now includes data centres, managed service providers, electrical load controls and critical suppliers. But the Bill does not go far enough to protect the UK economy. The current structure of the Bill allows the Secretary of State, in principle, to expand the number of sectors in the scope of the regulations. But even to implement secondary legislation will require the Government to meet a number of conditions. The Minister has referred to emergency powers, but that is still a process rather than an event. Surely the principle of the Secretary of State reporting back to Parliament every five years is not good enough in this fast AI world that we are living in.

The Government also need to recognise that many companies operate across borders, including in the EU, where they have to comply with European directives on cyber security that do not apply in the UK. Over- regulation must not stifle innovation. With 12 regulators enforcing this Bill, there is a danger of regulatory duplication. This is especially so for organisations covered by more than one regulator. Where appropriate, the Government should seek to ensure that UK cyber security regulations align across each regulated sector and across borders with other jurisdictions such as the EU. For example, the Government could ensure that all regulators accept common forms of evidence demonstrating compliance.

There needs to be the adoption of a common baseline security standard, alongside ongoing evidence of security requirements across regulated sectors. This should also recognise that different sectors have their own particular needs: farming is different from fashion, which is different from football. The standard could be the National Cyber Security Centre’s cyber assessment framework. An example of co-ordinating regulators already exists in the Digital Regulation Cooperation Forum, which helps deliver a coherent approach to digital regulation.

Some 43% of all UK companies experienced a cyber breach in the past 12 months. The Department for Science, Innovation and Technology reports that cyber attacks cost the UK economy £14.7 billion a year, and the problem is increasing. For 10 years, I had the privilege of being vice-president of the British Board of Film Classification. Hollywood sometimes produces entertaining films that see the future; for example, Steven Spielberg’s movie “A.I.” was made 25 years ago—an incredible thought. There was a consistent theme in many of the more positive films that we regulated, in that good overcame evil. With a stronger version of this Bill, we can defeat the cyber monsters. In the more positive and hopeful movies we regulated, RoboCop prevailed over the Terminator and Luke Skywalker overcame Darth Vader.

20:12

[Baroness Berger (Lab)]

My Lords, I strongly welcome the intention of the Bill to strengthen the United Kingdom’s defences by updating our cyber security legislation as it applies to critical national infrastructure. That is good and overdue. As my noble friend Lady Gill pointed to, there is barely a week, if not a day, that passes without a significant business, hospital, local authority or supplier to government reporting a serious cyber incident. Every part of our infrastructure is vulnerable, and a legislative update to reflect that reality is one that this House should have absolutely no hesitation in supporting.

Noble Lords have already raised concerns about a number of things relating to what is or is not in the Bill, and things that perhaps need to be tweaked—how we should consider the economic impact of cyber attacks, as well as issues around insurance, reporting, workforce development and training, making AISI a statutory body and the lack of joined-up work across 12 different regulators. These are all concerns that I share.

I want to use the time I have available to add some details on the significant gap that has already been shared by others: the Bill currently makes no provision at all for artificial intelligence or, connected to that, for cyber sovereignty. This is not a hypothetical concern. Our allies have already grasped that, if their critical systems, their public services and their citizens’ data will depend increasingly on AI, relying entirely on foreign-built, foreign-hosted models is itself a national security question and diminishes those countries’ resilience. This is now the direction of travel right across Europe, and we should not assume that we can simply stand outside it.

The Netherlands has built GPT-NL, a sovereign open language model developed by a consortium led by the research institute TNO alongside SURF and the Netherlands Forensic Institute and funded by the Dutch Government. It exists explicitly so that Dutch public bodies are not routing sensitive data through services they do not control, governed by laws they did not write and using models they did not develop or test. Germany has gone further still with Soofi—Sovereign Open Source Foundation Models—a government-backed initiative bringing together German research institutions and industry to build an open foundation model of around 100 billion parameters intended to underpin domestic industry and to handle complex technical and analytical tasks. These are not vanity projects; they are deliberate decisions by Governments to secure and keep control of the systems their public services are increasingly relying on.

The strategic logic is plain. A handful of foreign providers now sit upstream of much of the world’s AI capability, and a dependency that concentrated is a single point of failure that no Government should accept for their critical national infrastructure. Sovereignty over the AI that runs our critical systems cannot be an optional extra; it should be treated as part of our national cyber security and national resilience decisions. The Bill as currently presented is entirely silent on that question.

I will raise two specific areas where this absence should concern your Lordships. The first is education infrastructure, specifically exams and marking, which are increasingly stored and processed online. I understand that awarding bodies in this country are already exploring AI-assisted marking. If AI becomes embedded in that process, the accuracy of a child’s marks will depend partly on how that AI model behaves, and yet it will sit outside the Bill’s jurisdiction. We are creating a critical dependency for the life chances of every child in this country, resting on a model we may neither own nor be able to scrutinise, with no corresponding legislative safeguard. We would have all the risk of a critical dependency with none of the legal guardrails that the Bill is designed to provide.

The second area is electoral services and the data held on the electoral register. I do not think I need to labour the point about why the integrity, security and sovereignty of electoral roll datasets matter. If AI systems come to play any role in how our electoral registers are compiled, verified or protected—we should assume that they will—we must be able to answer three questions: who controls the model, where does the data go, and what happens if that dependency is disrupted or compromised? A register we cannot fully account for is a register that we all cannot fully trust. The Bill should be equipping us to answer those questions.

None of these points is an argument against the Bill; they are an argument for finishing it. As many noble Lords have already alluded to, technology is moving faster than any Bill can be introduced. There are many stats on the speed of tech evolution; the one that consumes me the most is that the maximum length of tasks that AI models can successfully complete is now doubling roughly every four months. We owe it to the public to build in adaptability from the start, rather than returning to primary legislation each time the landscape shifts.

We have here in the United Kingdom one of the largest and richest bodies of public data anywhere in the world, not least from our NHS and our public service broadcasters. As the cost of building capable AI systems continues to fall, we have a genuine opportunity to harness that data ourselves; to help clinicians reach diagnoses faster; to ease the administrative burden that weighs so heavily on our public servants; and to build public services that reflect our own standards, accountability and values, rather than simply adopting whatever the market happens to offer.

Building this capability at home is also how we ensure that the guardrails and safety measures that we believe are necessary are actually built in to bolster the opportunity for full cyber security, rather than inheriting it from systems designed to other standards and other priorities without any concern for real safety and security. This is something for which I will continue to advocate and which, I believe, will supercharge the realisation of the aims of the Bill. I therefore welcome my noble friend the Minister’s reflections on whether AI and cyber sovereignty might yet find a place in this legislation.

I look forward to the rest of this debate and to playing my part in scrutinising and enhancing this legislation.

20:19

[Viscount Colville of Culross (CB)]

My Lords, I, too, welcome much of the Bill. It could not be more important in a world in which warfare is not just physical but digital. It is essential as part of our national security that our Government step in to protect us from such attacks.

Most noble Lords, I think, welcome the list of bodies to be regulated in Part 2. I am very glad that data centres, large load controllers and specified management services have been brought within the scope of the Bill. After all, the Government celebrated the huge investments of AWS and DC01UK in data centres. It is important that they are now covered by the Bill as an essential part of our national security.

There has obviously been an attempt to future-proof the Bill against the fast-changing world of tech. At the beginning of Part 3, Clause 24 gives the Secretary of State enormous and flexible powers to designate what is essential activity for the economy of the United Kingdom and the day-to-day functioning of society. This flexibility is then reinforced in Clause 43 in Part 4, which gives powers to issue directions to regulated persons and to decide what should be reported and to whom it should be reported.

My fear is that the Bill does not go far enough to address the present threats, let alone the future ones. Noble Lord after noble Lord has raised concerns about the failure to mention AI in the Bill at all. I, too, was at the terrifying meeting mentioned by my noble friend Lady Kidron, which was held earlier this month, by the Institute for AI Policy and Strategy and the Centre for Long-Term Resilience. They guided us through the world of software vulnerabilities and patches. In the arms race that is the search for software vulnerabilities, it is a fight between the attacker and the defender to find the flaw first. Even then, the rollout of patches to downstream defenders can be slow and leave them open to further attacks.

Having absorbed these concerns, we were then told about automated AI attacks, in which an automated AI agent can carry out all the steps of a cyber attack on its own as an autonomous operator. AI agents no longer need skilled labour to develop an attack—expertise can be rented from AI systems—and the attacks can vary in their approach and learn from each failure so that initial defences can be breached once again.

The AI Security Institute found that, between December 2005 and December 2006, a single hacker weaponised the Claude and GPT-4.1 systems to bypass safety guardrails and develop 400 attack scripts. The breach exposed the personal data of 195 million citizens in Mexico, including their tax and electoral registers. At the very least, if data centres can be added in at a later stage in the shaping of the Bill, frontier AI models operating in this country can and should be added in as well. They need to be protected from attack by foreign agents and rivals.

I am aware that, as Ministers have often said, regulation can be an obstacle to new start-ups. If that is the case, there needs to be a threshold on the size of the frontier AI models that would need to abide by the demands of the Bill. There also needs to be in the Bill a new clause in which AI frontier providers are designated as essential models.

The noble Baroness, Lady Harding, was right: I am going to repeat what other noble Lords have said. The Bill leaves lacunae over large sectors of the economy, which I am sure most noble Lords regard as essential services. The Bill must include critical manufacturing and retail, both of which suffered devastating cyber attacks in the past few months. Many noble Lords have mentioned the huge attack on Marks & Spencer. Noble Lords only have to imagine the effect on the country if there were successful attacks on one or two of our big supermarket chains. The result would throw the national food supply chain into crisis. Surely supermarkets, which provide much of our nation’s food and other services, need to be considered very carefully for coming within the scope of the Bill.

I understand that, unlike the finance, telecom and digital sectors, the manufacturing and retail sectors do not have a regulator. Nevertheless, Clause 24 allows for flexibility in this space, so I support the calls from the noble Lord, Lord Birt, and the noble Baroness, Lady Harding, for a cross-sectoral regulator. Perhaps the Government need to set up a second tier of essential service sectors that should be preparing to be brought within the scope of the Bill. In the longer term, it might be important to ensure that they are building the highest resilience to AI-powered cyber attacks.

This work must further strengthen resilience at board level. It cannot be left to AI departments to work out resilience on their own. I suggest that the Minister makes further changes to the UK Corporate Governance Code straightaway so that more responsibility for reporting incidents is taken at board level. The Minister is in a unique position to do this, being the Digital Economy Minister and having previously been in the DBT.

My other area of concern about the Bill is the importance of co-ordinating the reporting of cyber attacks, especially AI cyber attacks, to build cyber resilience. There should be an extensive list of sectors that are brought into scope, as the EU legislation has suggested. It is terrifying that so many of the automated AI attacks are what the industry calls “misalignments”, meaning that their outcome is not what the original design of the model had intended. Not only do they create outcomes that were not the original intention of the creators of the model but those creators do not even know that these misalignments have taken place.

I know that the Government have created the Cyber Resilience Pledge for our FTSE 350 companies, which means that they will sign up to the NCSC’s early cyber attack alerts and recommend a Cyber Essentials suppliers kit. The Government have put aside £90 million for resilience centres to give advice against attacks on SMEs. However, these all depend on voluntary responses by the affected companies. The Government need to mandate a reporting requirement so that effective defences can be rolled out across the economy.

I understand the flexibility on reporting given by Clause 43, but this country is confronted with the prospect of automated AI attacks. It is essential that the widest range of reporting of these attacks is included in the Bill. There must also be a mechanism for mandating the co-ordination of reporting these attacks. The Government must ensure that information about the attacks is brought together and that advice is co-ordinated on how to build a defence against those attacks. The information is crucial for AI frontier model companies to know that their agents are creating misalignments and for downstream companies affected by the attacks to build secure defences. The essential reporting on attacks needs to be brought together by the NCSC or the AISI. The Bill then must ensure that there is a cross-cutting regulator in the longer term.

The Bill recognises that we live in an ever more dangerous digital world. The introduction of autonomous AI into the digital world will affect us all and could do so to a disastrous degree. I call on the Government to ensure that AI is in the Bill, both in the sectors in scope and in the reporting requirements for these and other sectors. Failure to do so will open our country to attacks which will devastate our economy and our society for years to come.

20:27

[Lord Holmes of Richmond (Con)]

My Lords, it is a pleasure to take part in this Second Reading debate and to follow my friend, the noble Viscount, Lord Colville of Culross. Though he, by his own words, repeated some of the earlier points, he was the first speaker to say “lacunae”, for which I am particularly grateful; it sounds like a technology company. I declare my technology interests as set out in the register, as advisor variously to the Crown Estate and to Simmons & Simmons LLP.

As has been noted, this Bill is significant by having “cyber” in the title. This is long overdue, much needed and critical, as the Minister said, taking a cross-sector approach to cyber. Yet the first interesting point is that the Bill does not do that. Most notably, it is extraordinary that neither food nor space are included in the Bill. Similarly, it is said to take a cross-economy approach, yet it does not. However, it is worth mentioning the two sides of that economic coin and the huge economic growth potential from our cyber industries. I echo all the points that have been made about the need for skills and education, and to enable the cyber sector to grow and deliver that economic benefit.

Reporting has been mentioned widely throughout the debate. It is unfortunate if one finds themselves in a situation such as that of my noble friend Lady Harding, with multiple agencies to have to report to. Surely it would make sense to have a single reporting point for the speed, efficiency and effectiveness of that reporting system. Similarly, there is so much opacity around many of the definitions within the Bill. I pull out “significant impact” as one of them. What does this mean? If it stays as set out, the natural and understandable response from business is to go for the low-level mass reporting to avoid regulatory intervention. Does that enable the economy and the country to be better protected in this respect? I think not.

Similarly, the 24-hour and 72-hour reporting requirements feel oddly constructed around the artificial concept of a day set out in 24 hours. When one considers the real-time velocity of these attacks, it would seem logical that something way ahead of 24 hours would be advantageous at that stage and potentially something extending beyond 72 hours to do the second bit of the reporting process. What evidence is there to support this quite arbitrary 24 hours—or, as otherwise described, a day?

Security and resilience are the concepts most central to the Bill and will be the markers of its success or otherwise. For issues around proportionality and the ability to evolve and develop, does the current structure of the Bill really optimise this? MSPs have already rightly been mentioned. The burden for them is overbearing as currently set out. Surely it would make more sense to have a concept around what is reasonable for MSPs to oversee, what can legitimately be seen as within their control and how they can evidence that.

Understandably, the multiple regulator issue has been well discussed. It is critical, because how will we have co-ordination across all those organisations? A forum is certainly not the solution, as my noble friend Lady Harding rightly set out. A lead regulator, a single regulator or something around that has to be the way to go. I would argue that the NCSC should have the loudest voice in determining what is the best model and the best structure for doing that.

I was interested in the Minister’s introduction. She talked about the criticality of cross-sector consistency. I agree entirely, but in a debate on AI on 4 June in Grand Committee, she argued that consistency was not necessarily a central principle for the Government in the regulation of AI. I believe that a true cross-sector approach to cyber makes sense in this Bill. We can add to what is currently there and make that happen, but it is surely logical, and indeed a consistent approach to consistency, that we take that approach with AI. Can the Minister say why, if this argument is good for cyber, it is not good for AI—with a cross-sector approach, as will benefit this Bill, that is principles based and outcomes focused, with inputs understood?

I have another point on consistency. When the Minister sums up, can she set out the advantages that she sees in all the divergences that the Government have taken from the EU’s NIS2? I would be interested to hear the Government’s arguments for the advantages that they are seeking to bring from that.

My noble friend Lord Arbuthnot has rightly mentioned the CMA, and I know that my friend, the noble Lord, Lord Clement-Jones, will also mention this. It is right to mention it in this Bill, even though the national security Bill is said to be the vehicle through which this will come forward. It is right to give it a run around the track in the legislative process with this Bill, because we are talking about coverage currently holding our cyber professionals back because of a 1990 statute. To give some sense of what that means, in 1990 it had been only 24 years since England had won the World Cup. It is in urgent need of reform. We need to empower and enable our great cyber security professionals to do their job.

I have a quick point on DVS. I am not sure the Minister was involved when we did the Data (Use and Access) Act, but there was rightly a lot of discussion around DVS. In some ways, parts of this Bill are the other side of that coin. Currently we have a situation that is not addressed in the Data (Use and Access) Act or in this Bill: what happens to verification services when they have an attack where synthetic data is injected directly into the data stream, in effect bypassing the camera to get verification? How does this Bill address that issue? Do Clause 12, the potential regulations under Clause 30 or the guidance under Clause 36 address this? If not, what is the Minister’s view as to how we address that critical issue around synthetics?

The success of the Bill and of cyber in the UK will rest so heavily on the shoulders of our cyber security professionals, the women and men who do so much to keep our system—and, through that, us—safe. We owe them so much. Understandably, they often do this in the shadows, in dark rooms and in the Doughnut. We give them our sincere thanks, and we must demonstrate that thanks through the amendments we bring forward to make the Bill better.

20:36

[Lord Moraes (Lab)]

My Lords, it is a pleasure to follow the noble Lord, Lord Holmes. The noble Baroness, Lady Harding, has inspired me, as I am so low down the list—nearly at the end—not to do that thing of saying, “Everything has already been said, but not yet by everyone”, which I was thinking of while she was speaking. I will not do that; I am going to dump my very boring speech, inspired by the noble Baroness, Lady Ludford, who reminded me of what we used to do for a living. This contextualises exactly what the Government are trying to do.

My noble friend the Minister has a very tough job—I will explain a little why I think it is so difficult—but it is a job that we said we would do. We wanted to update the NIS regulation in 2018 and, as the noble Baroness, Lady Neville-Jones, said, to move fast and have some urgency. I know why she said that: I will come on to what the intelligence services are dealing with every single day, with hacking and what the Russians are doing. She knows that, as that is part of her DNA. We have to move fast, and we have to do something. That is exactly what the Government are doing. I want to try to contextualise what they are doing, why this is a national priority and how we can be as constructive as we can in building cyber security and cyber resilience.

A number of noble Lords, including the noble Baroness, Lady Harding, mentioned the EU network and information systems directive, which is very much the context of what we are doing. The noble Baroness, Lady Northover, spoke in some detail about our alignment with it and the noble Baroness, Lady Ludford, had some critical views about where we are in terms of our alignment. This really contextualises the complexity, as well as the urgency, of what we are doing here in the UK.

Noble Lords have said this because there are really only three global regulators doing this now—in the United States, the European Union and China—and they are diverging very badly. China does its own thing. In the United States, you may remember Mark Zuckerberg coming to the EU inquiry, going to Congress and saying, “Well, we need a GDPR, obviously”, but most of the legislation in the United States on cyber is in fact state led. The FTC looks at it, but it is really not national legislation. The EU is one of the few places, whether you like it or not, which has decided that it is a global regulator and that the cyber threat and cyber resilience are very much a global issue.

That does not take away from or dilute in any way some of the things that have been said, for example by the noble Lord, Lord Vaizey, about the United Kingdom’s special position as a country. We have the best intelligence services in the world, which is very relevant to this area. We have GCHQ and all that, and the technologists and companies close to this area, which are some of the best in the world. But the issue is with global regulation, and that is why it is so difficult.

The noble Baroness, Lady Ludford, made exactly the point that I was going to make, except I come to a different conclusion. She talked about the way that the two Ministers, Ian Murray and Kanishka Narayan, seem to be saying two different things. One is saying that we are taking a big hit and that real businesses and people are being hit by cyber breaches; whether or not it is 0.5% of our GDP, it is a big problem for the United Kingdom. Our other Minister said that we need the 12 regulators, to which the noble Lord, Lord Birt, referred, because they have the expertise, and that that is why it is so complicated and if we do anything else it is a huge burden on business. But I believe that both are true.

This is where the complexity of enacting good-quality cyber legislation happens. I know this because, as the noble Baroness, Lady Ludford, will testify, I chaired many of the GDPR legislative trilogues and the ePrivacy trilogues and I had to scrutinise many of the cyber conventions that are part of the EU treaties and body of law. I will cite the latest AI rapporteur—we now have another AI Act forthcoming in the EU because the older Act is out of date, the GDPR is out of data and the ePrivacy legislation is out of date. I said to the AI rapporteur, “You have the latest AI legislation”, and he said, “Yes, it’s a bit like you just jump off the cliff and build your wings on the way down”. Why somebody from Italy was quoting Ray Bradbury I do not know, but it is kind of correct. I know that the Minister has wings already—she has wings and she need not worry; she will be fine—but the point is that you have to move with such speed. The point that the noble Baroness, Lady Neville-Jones, made is that somehow you just have to move. The urgency is great.

The noble Lord, Lord Vaizey, who is not in his place, has inspired me to depart from my notes. He explained very eloquently, having been a Minister at that time, how complicated this is for our current Ministers in government. He talked about encryption and said that we knew that the companies—Microsoft, Facebook, which is now Meta, Reddit, Snap Inc, and all of them—wanted end-to-end encryption and did not want it weakened. Why? Because with strong end-to-end encryption, you deal with cyber threats. At the time, as noble Lords will remember, there were a lot of terrorism threats around, so most enforcement agencies were saying, “No, we need a backdoor to encryption”. That was the prevailing wisdom, and that argument won out. But the companies, in my view, were right. They were talking about the banking system, privacy and all the threats that we now have if we weaken encryption.

The noble Lord, Lord Vaizey, said that because the context here is that it is extremely complex to come up with good cyber security and resilience legislation. The noble Lord, Lord Birt, is so good with his communication that I almost think the OCR is a real thing. That is because he is who he is—he could persuade anyone. Of course, everyone is saying, “Let’s get rid of the 12”, but I caution about the complexity of dealing with cyber threats. I will give one last example about the daily threats we have from foreign actors—this is very different from the corporate threats, some of which come from within the United Kingdom and need a very different response, as we also saw in the European Union.

My time is up, but I just want to contextualise how tough this is going to be. Let us jump off the cliff, build the wings on the way down, get this done and do what we can in Committee, because this is a national priority. Is it perfect? Of course it is not. But we need to get moving, because the threats are very real.

20:45

[Lord Londesborough (CB)]

My Lords, it is getting late, and I am told that we are now competing with the Spain v France World Cup semi-final—the winner may well face England in the final—so I will try to be brief. I speak not as a cyber expert or technologist but as a former CEO of a tech-enabled mid-sized business. I want to bring some ground-level perspectives of these oft-mentioned SMEs, one of which I currently chair.

I welcome the Bill, but like many others, I have some concerns over its scope, its impact on those apparently outside the scope but who sit within critical infrastructure supply chains, the challenges of a horizontal piece of legislation being layered over multiple sectors and their regulators, and why, as so many people have asked, there is no specific strategy for AI. All of that has been covered, and I will not repeat those points. However, I want to question why central government and local authorities will remain out of scope. The National Audit Office’s report last year found serious slow-to-fix security flaws across 58 of the 72 government systems that were reviewed. The public sector badly needs binding legal requirements, not just a voluntary action plan.

As we have heard, the UK is already the most targeted country in Europe for cyber attacks, with more than 40% of UK businesses experiencing such attacks at a cost put at almost £15 billion annually. But those numbers are almost certainly an underestimate not just because they apply to 2024 but because a whole range of cyber incidents go unreported and therefore unmeasured, especially in the world of SMEs. In fact, 96% of UK businesses that suffered a cyber attack were SMEs, not because they are targeted but because they are easier to breach. If you factored in all the incidents and took into account all the costs, including the distraction from core business, the real cost this year might well be closer to £30 billion—roughly 1% of our GDP.

Let us face it: when this Bill is enacted, it will already be out of date. That is not an argument for delay, but it is an argument for shaping legislation to allow changes and add-ons down the line as the threats change without going through the long and arduous processes of legislating through both Houses of Parliament. I suggest that we are pragmatic and that we balance the need for parliamentary scrutiny and consultation with speed and agility.

I am going to finish by focusing on the mid-market and small businesses. The Bill tells us that high impact suppliers of any size could be designated as critical suppliers. That has raised quite a few question marks. Two-thirds of medium-sized UK businesses reported a cyber breach last year alone, yet only 15% of those businesses had formally reviewed the cyber risks that their immediate suppliers posed to them. This Bill will make mid-market players take compliance, incident reporting, risk assessments and audits more seriously. Those should no longer be seen as the sole responsibility of the IT department or the CTO but become a board- level issue that CEOs need to engage with. Currently, only 27% of UK businesses have board-level cyber accountability. That needs to change.

It is confession time. I was once one of those mid-market CEOs who took too little interest at board level in the risks to our company’s infrastructure and systems, delegating them to mid-management and our offshore partners and nearly paying the price when our online platform, which contained all our customer data and 20 years of content, came under attack and was very nearly successfully hacked. Lessons were quickly learned. Will the Minister say how the Government plan to address and resource the information, communication and training challenge that this Bill will present to mid-market players?

I raise the same question for those SMEs that will get dragged into supply chain compliance issues, whatever their size, but without the specialist resources needed. In the other place, the Liberal Democrats proposed what I thought was a very sensible amendment for the establishment of a cyber security support service to help SMEs comply with their regulatory duties. This was dismissed by the Minister, who said that very few SMEs would be in scope, but nobody has put a number to this and I think this misses the point. I fear that the Government underestimate this challenge, both for mid-market and small players.

If this information, resource, communication and education piece is not properly addressed, we will not just lose links in the supplier chain but reduce the level of competition. This will be bad for business and economic growth and, indeed, for trade with our European neighbours, who are way ahead of us in this area.

20:51

[Lord Ashcombe (Con)]

My Lords, my noble friend Lady Harding talked about speaking half way down the list, and the noble Lord, Lord Moraes, of being nearly at the end of the list. I am last, as your Lordships will be glad to hear.

I must declare my interest as an employee of Marsh Risk, an insurance brokerage company with a large cyber practice. Like many other noble Lords, I welcome the Government’s ambition to strengthen the UK’s cyber defences and, in doing so, to protect the continuity of the essential services on which the public depend.

The Bill’s direction of travel is right: widening the scope of the existing regulatory framework to reflect modern supply chains, strengthening oversight and improving the flow of information to regulators and the National Cyber Security Centre so that we can build a clearer national picture of threats and vulnerabilities. However, I will press the Minister on two areas where the Bill, as drafted, risks leaving practical gaps: first, the role of cyber insurance in building national resilience; and secondly, whether the proposed incident reporting timelines will, in practice, help resilience or inadvertently hinder it.

On insurance, my argument is straightforward. Regulation, technical standards and guidance are essential, but they are not, on their own, a resilience strategy. Resilience also means the ability to recover quickly: to fund remediation, to access specialist incident response capability at speed, and to keep vital services running while systems are rebuilt. My noble friend Lord Arbuthnot referred to cyber insurance. On its own it is not a silver bullet, but it is one of the few tools that can mobilise financial and operational support within hours. Time is of the essence to limit further damage, as we have seen in a number of recent incidents.

The noble Baroness, Lady Paul, discussed how insurance can incentivise behaviour. I very much agree with that and a lot of what she said. I will take the process a little further. In the cyber insurance market, the best policies do more than pay claims. They typically provide 24/7 emergency hotlines, pre-vetted panels of incident response firms, forensic expertise, legal and communications support, extortion specialists and business interruption expertise, all of which can be decisive in reducing harm, shortening outages and supporting faster restoration of services. Some insurers even pay loss or claims expenses directly to the party owed—for example, breach counsel and forensic vendors—saving their clients from having to pay large incident response costs out of pocket. For many small and medium-sized organisations, it is often the only affordable way to access that depth of capability. This support can potentially prevent the Government having to step in, as they had to offer to do in the Jaguar Land Rover incident.

Yet cyber insurance can play that stabilising role only if organisations are encouraged to take it up as part of a wider risk management approach. Indeed, my noble friend Lord Vaizey talked about it being mandatory. At the very least, we need to create greater awareness of the benefits that cyber insurance can bring to businesses. Personally, I tend to prefer a carrot rather than a stick approach.

My first question to the Minister is: what incentives are the Government considering to encourage greater uptake of cyber insurance, particularly among smaller operators and critical suppliers who may sit outside the largest corporate balance sheets but whose disruption can cascade through supply chains? Has she considered introducing a moratorium on insurance premium tax of, say, three years for companies that take out cyber policies for the first time, as a way to incentivise uptake? Incentives are not just about premiums. They are also about information and confidence, ensuring that organisations understand what insurance does and does not cover, encouraging consistent baseline controls so that insurers can price risk responsibly, and supporting appropriate data sharing so that lessons from incidents can improve both national defences and underwriting insight. In short, the objective should be a virtuous circle: better cyber security, greater insurability, more uptake and stronger national resilience.

I turn to incident reporting, as discussed by the noble Lord, Lord Ravensdale, and my noble friend Lord Holmes. The policy intent to ensure that regulators and the NCSC receive timely warning of significant events is understandable. Many noble Lords have mentioned this in principle. But in a major cyber incident, the earliest hours and days are dominated by triage, containing the threat, protecting services, preserving evidence and restoring critical functionality. Those involved in the response work around the clock to keep the businesses running. In that context, the requirement for rapid reporting can create real operational tension.

As I understand it, the approach envisages a two-stage process: an initial notification shortly after the organisation becomes aware of a significant incident, followed by a fuller report within a tight timeframe. My concern is not with the concept of early warning; rather, it is that the requirement to produce a comprehensive report within 72 hours risks driving premature, incomplete or speculative reporting, and it can pull scarce technical leadership away from response and recovery at precisely the moment it is most needed.

That is why I intend to table an amendment to adjust the reporting time so that the full report is due within 30 days, with an expectation that the affected entity provides an initial notification promptly and submits updates as material facts become clear. This would preserve the Government’s need for awareness and situational insight, but it would also recognise the practical realities of incident response. Organisations often cannot state with confidence the root cause, scope of compromise or data impact within 72 hours, particularly where third-party suppliers and complex networks are involved. Can the Minister confirm whether the Government have considered an approach of this kind—one that distinguishes clearly between early warning and a detailed, evidence-based report? Requiring a detailed report too early can reduce the quality of the information that authorities receive, increase the risk of later correction, meaning rework and additional expense for all concerned, and potentially undermine trust and transparency.

I support the Bill’s overall aims, but if we are serious about resilience we must think not only about prevention but about recovery and continuity. Cyber insurance, properly understood and appropriately incentivised, can be one of the mechanisms that turns a cyber event from a national disruption into a managed incident. Finally, on reporting, we should insist on a regime that delivers timely awareness without undermining operational response.

20:59

[Lord Clement-Jones (LD)]

My Lords, first, I declare an interest as an adviser to DLA Piper on AI policy and regulation. I should also say that we as a law firm were subject to a ransomware attack by NotPetya back in 2017. It was not a pleasant experience.

I thank the Minister for her introduction and earlier engagement on the Bill and thank all noble Lords who spoke today in such an expert fashion. On these Benches, like many other noble Lords, we support the fundamental objectives of this legislation to modernise our outdated cyber security framework. But what has been remarkable today is the consensus across the Benches that the Bill is not nearly ambitious enough. Indeed, as my noble friends Lady Northover and Lady Ludford, the noble Lord, Lord Vaizey, and the noble Baronesses, Lady Neville-Jones and Lady Harding, have said, this could be a missed opportunity to align much more closely with the EU framework.

I would prefer not to be jumping off a cliff, with or without wings, with all due deference to the noble Lord, Lord Moraes, and I do not think that we are really living up to the motto of the city of Newcastle either. As the noble Lord, Lord Arbuthnot, said: where are the principles? The noble Earl, Lord Effingham, said: where is the strategy? The noble Baroness, Lady Kidron, asked where the plan of action was. There is quite a bit missing from the Bill, and I shall take noble Lords through some of those areas.

As many noble Lords have illustrated, the threat landscape has deteriorated sharply. The National Cyber Security Centre has managed 204 nationally significant incidents in a single year, double the year before. Yet, as the noble Lord, Lord Birt, pointed out, the Bill will apply directly to only a tiny minority of organisations; meanwhile, 43% of UK businesses have experienced a cyber breach in the last 12 months. One of the most glaring omissions is the almost entire exclusion of the public sector, as the noble Baroness, Lady Alexander, and the noble Lord, Lord Londesborough, pointed out. Central government, public administrations and local authorities are almost entirely exempt from the Bill’s direct statutory duties.

How can we claim national resilience when the state itself is exempt? We have seen the data of 270,000 military personnel compromised in the Ministry of Defence hack, and the devastating attack on the British Library, which destroyed irreplaceable data. Local authorities hold vast repositories of citizen data, from electoral registries to social care records. The ransomware attack on Redcar and Cleveland cost £10 million, the one on Hackney £12 million.

As my noble friends Lady Northover and Lady Ludford, the noble Lords, Lord Birt and Lord Vaizey, the noble Baroness, Lady Kidron, and the noble Viscount, Lord Colville, all said, we must make cyber security a boardroom issue. It was very good to hear from the noble Baroness, Lady Harding, with her lived experience of cyber attack, yet only 27% of businesses now have a board member explicitly responsible for cyber risk, down from 38% three years ago. The noble Lord, Lord Vaizey, was correct. Unlike the EU’s NIS2, the Bill fails to mandate executive responsibility. I support the noble Lord, Lord Birt, in saying that we must now extend corporate financial audits to report on how an organisation and its suppliers manage cyber security using existing governance codes.

The urgency here is multiplied by the rapid rise of agentic artificial intelligence. The noble Baroness, Lady Alexander, described this as “an AI-shaped hole”, and the noble Baronesses, Lady Kidron and Lady Harding, and the noble Viscount, Lord Colville, all pointed to this omission.

Anthropic recently withheld wide release of its Mythos model because it could autonomously find and exploit software vulnerabilities across every major operating system. The UK’s own AI Security Institute, as we have heard, found Mythos substantially more capable at cyber offence than any model previously assessed, and warned that frontier AI capability is doubling every four months. Of course, that will be further amplified by quantum computing, as mentioned by the noble Lord, Lord Ravensdale.

The EU’s AI Act already imposes binding cyber security and incident reporting duties on the handful of frontier model providers that it judges to pose systemic risk. California and New York do the same for the largest developers. This Bill, by contrast, does not mention AI systems at all, as many noble Lords have pointed out. Last month, the cyber security agencies of the Five Eyes alliance, including our own National Cyber Security Centre, issued a joint statement warning that frontier AI is shrinking the gap between vulnerability discovery and exploitation from months to a matter of days, and this can no longer be treated as a technical issue rather than a leadership responsibility.

Meanwhile, our own defenders have a skills crisis. The noble Lords, Lord Birt, Lord Arbuthnot and Lord Vaizey, and the noble Baroness, Lady Alexander, all raised the skills issue. ISC2 warns that 88% of UK cyber professionals have experienced a breach in the last 12 months as a direct result of skills shortages, yet Clause 43 references “a skilled person”, as pointed out by the noble Lord, Lord Taylor of Warwick, who must liaise with the Secretary of State during national security directions, without defining what “a skilled person” is.

Who will actually enforce the rules? The Bill distributes duties, as we have heard today, across 12 separate sectoral regulators, many of which, such as Ofwat, already struggle to regulate their own domains. This fragmented approach guarantees duplication and gaps. Again, I agree with the noble Lord, Lord Birt, and, indeed, the Joint Committee on the National Security Strategy: the UK needs a single expert or lead regulator —as mentioned by the noble Baronesses, Lady Alexander and Lady Harding, the noble Lords, Lord Vaizey and Lord Holmes, and the noble Viscount, Lord Colville—to oversee both public and private sectors. Failing that, the Government should at least adopt the EU’s Digital Omnibus model of a single report-once portal. I share the ambitions of the noble Baroness, Lady Paul, and those of the noble Lord, Lord Holmes, in this respect.

We must, as the noble Baroness, Lady Neville-Jones, said, fix the Bill’s definitions—also mentioned by the noble Lord, Lord Ravensdale. For instance, techUK warns that the current definition of a managed service provider is dangerously broad, risking capture of any basic IT support in the country.

The Bank of England’s own data shows that just three US giants control 73% of the cloud computing services supporting UK financial firms. A number of noble Lords raised the issue of cyber sovereignty. The Trump Administration blocked European and UK firms from accessing Mythos. If a foreign ally can pull the plug on a critical cyber security tool overnight, how can this Government claim true national resilience? That is why, as many noble Lords today have said, we need a comprehensive digital sovereignty strategy. My noble friend Lady Ludford called this “servitude” and the noble Baroness, Lady Berger, talked about critical defence. We need to assess our foreign policy dependencies and support domestic UK providers. I welcome what was said by the noble Baronesses, Lady Kidron, Lady Bennett and Lady Berger, in that respect.

The Bill is silent on cyber-enabled fraud, which costs our economy billions of pounds every year and exploits precisely the same weaknesses this Bill is meant to fix. The noble Lord, Lord Arbuthnot, mentioned a related threat which is emerging, as Thales has tracked that automated bot traffic has overtaken human traffic online for the first time. As suggested by the NMA, we need the Secretary of State, under this Bill, to assess the cyber security risks that anonymous bot traffic poses to UK websites.

If we expect businesses to defend themselves, we cannot handicap our own cyber professionals. I welcome what has been said by a number of noble Lords, including the noble Earl, Lord Effingham, the noble Lords, Lord Arbuthnot and Lord Holmes, and my noble friend Lady Ludford, on the question of the Computer Misuse Act, which badly needs amending.

Finally, in the face of autonomous AI threats, the Government need an ultimate backstop. We support proposals from ControlAI to introduce strictly constrained last resort powers, allowing the Secretary of State to direct the shutdown of data centres or AI systems in a catastrophic emergency. The cost of inaction vastly outweighs that compliance burden. The noble Baroness, Lady Gill, graphically described the situation at Jaguar Land Rover, which lost around £500 million in a single attack. But currently JLR sits entirely outside the scope of the Bill, as does the retail sector, as a number of noble Lords have pointed out. The noble Baroness, Lady Paul, indicated that that was true of the insurance sector too.

The Bill is a necessary foundation. In Committee, we will push hard for amendments to reflect the changes that are needed. In this way, we can ensure that our national cyber defences are genuinely whole of society and fit for the age of AI. We are going to have a very well-informed Committee; I hope the Minister is looking forward to it.

21:11

[Viscount Camrose (Con)]

My Lords, I am grateful to all noble Lords who have contributed to the debate and, of course, to the Minister for her introduction. It has been a really thoughtful, compelling and persuasive debate. It is clear that, on all sides of the House, there is a shared recognition of the scale of the threat that this legislation seeks to address and the importance of doing so effectively.

As my noble friend Lord Effingham said, we on these Benches support the objectives of the Bill. Indeed, much of what is in it has its origins in work begun by the previous Government, following the 2022 consultation, and we applaud the continuity. We do not intend to try to make the perfect the enemy of the good, although I wholly endorse the cyber insurance argument set out by the noble Baroness, Lady Paul of Shepherd’s Bush, my noble friend Lord Ashcombe and others.

Listening to the debate has only reinforced for me the central question with which we began: where is the strategy? Ministers have described the Bill as one part of a wider programme, yet the national cyber action plan that was promised before the end of last year, and then promised again for this summer, remains unpublished. I observe as an aside that, as with the defence investment plan, we are in danger of creating the perception, which we must avoid, that there is a pattern of delay and avoidance when it comes to defending ourselves. Noble Lords across the House have, in their own ways, returned again and again to that same point.

I started off the debate diligently writing down everybody who called for a change to the scope but that turned out to be everybody, which makes our task today far harder. I absolutely accept that this is a Bill designed to have a narrow scope, but we have no way to understand the broader context in which that narrow scope sits. It is like trying to judge an orchestra but being allowed to hear only the woodwind section.

It is inevitable that we will have questions, concerns and suggestions that go beyond the narrow scope and intent of the Bill. How will SMEs learn to protect themselves better? Many people have raised that. A great many noble Lords—again, almost everybody—mentioned AI, but what response overall is envisaged to the threats of emerging technologies of which as yet we know little, such as new AI models at the frontier, quantum cracking and so on? How will we reduce the number of vacancies for cyber roles? By the way, it is not a new problem, by any means, that there are too many vacancies for cyber roles. We were wrestling with it when we were in government. It is an intractable problem that we need to find better ways to address.

How will we address the growing prevalence and effectiveness of weaponised disinformation that does so much harm to our society every day, right now? More fundamentally, what are our strengths and weaknesses relative to those of our assailants and our allies? Let me express the hope—I will return to this point—that, during the Bill’s passage, and ideally before Committee, we have the national cyber action plan to answer these and no doubt many other questions. This could make the passage of the Bill considerably easier for all of us, in particular for the Minister, and indeed help bring about the wish of my noble friend Lady Neville-Jones that we get through the Bill quickly in order to get these measures on to the statute book as soon as possible.

Even the National Cyber Security Centre itself has publicly called on government to set out a clearer strategic policy agenda. If GCHQ’s own technical authority feels moved to say so, that ought to give the Minister and the Government pause.

In the other place, my honourable friend Dr Ben Spencer made precisely this point, warning that the National Audit Office had found

“inconsistent, and in some cases glacial, progress”,—[Official Report, Commons, 6/1/26; col. 223.]

in cyber resilience, and that the Bill risked becoming “yet another missed opportunity”. My honourable friend Julia Lopez for her part reminded the Commons that, if the pandemic had accelerated the adoption of digital technology, artificial intelligence would embed it further still. Yet, as she noted, and as noble Lords, including my noble friend Lord Arbuthnot, have echoed this evening—in fact, as everybody has said this evening—the Bill is silent on AI. It is silent on the Computer Misuse Act. These omissions go to the heart of whether this legislation will still be fit for purpose in five years’ time, given how disappointingly rarely Parliament revisits this ground.

On the question of regulatory burden, I was also struck by how many noble Lords share our concern for smaller businesses. I hope that the Minister agrees that this is not a party-political point. It was raised by members of the party opposite in the other place too, who rightly noted that SMEs are disproportionately targeted by cyber crime, yet are the least equipped to absorb new compliance obligations. In fact, techUK, as the noble Lord, Lord Clement-Jones, pointed out, has warned that leaving so much of the detail of this regime to secondary legislation, as well as using some of the rather woolly language that was commented on by the noble Lord, Lord Ravensdale, risks creating exactly the kinds of legal uncertainty and cost that fall hardest on smallest firms.

Again, I am trying to make not a political point—we urgently need this Bill—but a practical point. Indeed, my noble friend Lady Harding’s account of attempting to communicate while managing the crisis caused by an attack was absolutely salutary and I hope the Minister will take note of it.

So, as we move towards Committee after the Summer Recess—I think Committee promises to be a very productive activity—I hope the Minister will reflect carefully on the questions raised today and, in her closing, perhaps answer the following questions. First, will the Government commit to a firm date for publishing the strategy within which this legislation is meant to sit? Secondly, how will the effectiveness or otherwise of the Bill’s measures be assessed, and how will that assessment be reported to Parliament—we hope not every five years? Thirdly, what assessment has been made of the cumulative reporting burden facing businesses of all sizes already subject to data protection and sector-specific obligations? Fourthly, what confidence can the Minister offer the House that the 12 regulators tasked with enforcing this regime, which we have heard a great deal about, will have and will continue to have the resources and expertise to do so effectively?

In Committee, we on these Benches will continue to press the Government on precisely these questions because, as with any regulation, it must be built on a foundation of strategic clarity rather than being asked to substitute for it. I look forward to the Minister’s response.

21:20

[Baroness Lloyd of Effra (Lab)]

I thank noble Lords for their insightful and wide-ranging content, and I am pleased to hear the broad support for the Bill. I also thank the Minister in the other place and the parliamentarians who engaged with your Lordships and others ahead of the Bill’s introduction. The dialogue has been shaped by pragmatism and a genuine interest in protecting our people and businesses. Should I not be able to respond in the allocated time to all the very many specific points that were raised today, I will make sure that I review Hansard carefully and reply to noble Lords accordingly, placing copies in the Library.

The noble Viscount, Lord Camrose, raised an excellent point about the scope of the Bill and the many other government actions and activities to equip our businesses to tackle cyber threats. I agree that the national cyber action plan is the right place to set out exactly how this is all put together, but today I cannot provide noble Lords a date for the publication of the national cyber action plan.

As other noble Lords did, I started writing down the names of all the noble Lords who raised the question of scope—and I too decided that it was probably better to say “everybody”. This is a very pertinent question. Cyber security and resilience are a shared responsibility. The Government and the NCSC provide a range of tools for all parts of the economy, and it is for all organisations to make use of those to enhance their protections. We have invited all businesses, charities and other organisations to sign the Cyber Resilience Pledge and take the three tangible actions that can help boost their resilience to cyber attacks. For many organisations, this will be a significant step in their defences, and regulation will not be necessary nor proportionate.

Under the Bill, we have chosen to regulate where disruption to services—hospitals, drinking water, and cloud service providers—would mean that people and businesses are left with little or no easy alternatives. The significant steps we are taking in the Bill are reflective of the digital nature of our economy today and the risks we encounter. I recognise and share the sentiment of exploring other parts of the economy that would benefit from being under these regulations in the future, and I assure the House that I have asked my officials to work with other government departments to consider what additional services could be brought into scope in future. At the same time, this work needs to be undertaken with thorough consideration for a range of factors, such as the threats posed to such services by hostile actors and the potential impact they could have on the wider economy, as well as the overall value of the sector. We need to take into account the important points that noble Lords have made about proportionate regulation. I confirm to the noble Baroness, Lady Neville-Jones, that, were we to extend these regulations to further sectors, that would follow consultation.

The noble Baronesses, Lady Northover, Lady Neville-Jones and Lady Ludford, and the noble Lords, Lord Londesborough and Lord Clement-Jones, raised an important point about the government cyber action plan. It is crucial that our Government and public sector are covered. The government cyber action plan, which was published in January, will transform cyber security and resilience across government and the entire public sector by 2030. It will enable us to achieve the same outcomes that we want to achieve for services regulated under the Bill: clear and robust requirements, better incident reporting, and stronger accountability and transparency. The plan sets out accountability structures to ensure that cyber risks at all levels of government are actively owned and effectively managed. I assure your Lordships that we will continue to work with Parliament to ensure proper oversight of the plan’s implementation.

The extension to local government is also covered under the overarching strategy of the Government’s cyber action plan. I say to my noble friend Lady Alexander of Cleveden that MHCLG is taking action to strengthen local authorities’ cyber resilience, backed by £20 million of cyber grant funding and technical support, because it is incredibly important that local authorities are prepared and enhance their cyber action.

On the question about the food and retail sector, raised by the noble Lords, Lord Holmes of Richmond and Lord Taylor of Warwick, and the noble Baronesses, Lady Northover, Lady Ludford and Lady Harding of Winscombe, probably among others, it is very important that the sector enhances its cyber resilience. The food sector is unusual among critical sectors because of its high levels of diversity. There are approximately 20,000 small and medium-sized food manufacturers in the UK alone, and many more farms, distribution services, retailers and other types of businesses that form the UK’s food supply chain. Given the lack of a single point of failure, we think there are more proportionate levers to pull than bringing food into the scope of the NIS regime.

The question of AI was raised by the noble Earl, Lord Effingham, the noble Viscount, Lord Colville of Culross, the noble Baroness, Lady Kidron, and my noble friend Lady Berger. The Government are committed to protecting our national security against the risks posed by advanced AI models, and our AI Security Institute is world leading and one of a small group of organisations with access to Anthropic’s Claude Mythos model before its release. As for addressing the risks of cyber attacks facilitated by AI, it is true that AI capabilities are moving very fast, but strong cyber fundamentals still work. Our advice, and that of the NCSC, is to ensure that organisations get the basics right and that they are managing risks at board level. There is extensive guidance on this from the Government and from the NCSC.

As for whether AI is in scope, the Bill does not specifically bring large language models or AI companies into scope, but where organisations in scope use AI models and systems, those organisations will need to take appropriate and proportionate steps to manage the risks to these from hackers. For example, if an LLM is used as part of the day-to-day software available to staff in a hospital, and is therefore part of the network and information systems, it would be considered in scope.

On the example given by the noble Baroness, Lady Kidron, of how this would happen, the Bill grants the Secretary of State the power to direct entities if the compromise of the relevant NIS or the threat of one gives rise to a national security risk. This could, for example, require an entity to cease using and to isolate an AI model. These powers are a backstop to an effective cyber security regime, enabling the Government to act swiftly in the face of unexpected national security threats, but they are also designed to be proportionate, recognising the need for stability among regulated entities and the importance of proper accountability.

Many noble Lords reflected on the need for effective implementation and the importance of consultation and secondary legislation. There will indeed be secondary legislation and guidance and a business adjustment period for the Bill. To answer the question posed by the noble Baroness, Lady Neville-Jones, this will probably be for the period up to 2028, when we expect the duties to come into force.

On the questions about incident reporting raised by the noble Earl, Lord Effingham, the noble Lord, Lord Ravensdale, and the noble Baronesses, Lady Northover and Lady Harding of Winscombe, we have heard the clear ask from businesses to minimise the time they spend filling in different reporting templates following an attack. We understand the pressure that institutions can be under in the midst of an attack, and we want to make sure that they can prioritise the technical response. We are exploring all options and will look closely at other regimes in the UK and the new template used by EU member states for the NIS2 reporting, reflecting questions posed by noble Lords about where we are looking at the EU regime.

We do not believe that there is a risk of overreporting, but we will provide further clarity by setting out thresholds in secondary legislation following consultation. That will set out when an incident is considered to have had, or to be likely to have had, a significant impact—a question posed by the noble Lords, Lord Holmes of Richmond and Lord Ravensdale.

On the questions raised by the noble Baroness, Lady Bennett of Manor Castle, the ability to share information with like-minded countries is important if we are to make cyber security a global effort. But the Bill does not mandate information sharing across borders, and there are important safeguards around the sharing of information for the purpose of prosecuting a crime. I followed the debate on this topic in the other place, and I would be happy to meet with those interested in this topic to discuss it further.

Noble Lords raised the question of the balance between a single consistent approach and being attuned to sector-specific issues. One of the ways in which we are going to pursue consistency and provide clarity on what is expected is through the new security and resilience requirements for regulated entities, which will be set out in secondary legislation. These will set out the clear and consistent steps that regulated entities will need to take to mitigate their security risks. On the questions posed by the noble Lords, Lord Arbuthnot, Lord Birt and Lord Ravensdale, these will be high-level, outcomes-based requirements that will be consistent with the NCSC’s cyber assessment framework, including requirements on board responsibility and governance, supply chain and incident reporting and recovery, as well as requirements around testing and exercising protective security. These proposals will be technology- and sector-agnostic, and take an all-hazards approach to ensure resilience in the face of an evolving threat landscape and emerging technologies. They reflect the requirement for regulated entities to have regard to state-of-the-art technology when assessing the risks they face.

On the question posed by the noble Lord, Lord Ravensdale, and others on post-quantum cryptography, and that posed by the noble Lord, Lord Birt, on quantum, these would be considered as part of that requirement by regulated entities, but would not necessarily be singled out as a specific technology in the regulation so that we keep these regulations up to date and matched to the cyber risks that individual entities face.

In addition to how the requirements in the Bill will capture board responsibilities, we recognise that board-level governance is essential to effective cyber risk management, which is why the Cyber Resilience Pledge sets out that making cyber a board responsibility is one of the three clear tangible actions that any organisation can make to boost its resilience. The Government’s forthcoming modernising corporate reporting consultation will seek views on whether the existing risk reporting framework produces sufficient reporting on cyber risk management as an additional step that could be considered.

On the questions about the Secretary of State reporting to Parliament at least every five years, this is a minimum baseline. Additional reports can be published if deemed appropriate.

The noble Earl, Lord Effingham, and the noble Lords, Lord Londesborough and Lord Ravensdale, asked about business burden and the definition of small businesses. We believe that this legislation is targeted and proportionate, only regulating where necessary to protect the most essential services on which we rely. That is why small and micro digital service providers are exempt from the regulations, unless designated as a critical supplier. Small businesses are defined as entities that employ up to 50 people and have an annual turnover or balance sheet of less than €10 million. They are exempt from being an RDSP or an RMSP under the Bill. They can be regulated only if they are designated as critical suppliers, for which there will be a high bar for designation.

My noble friend asked how we can support small businesses. This is a very important part of our approach. The NCSC provides support through the Cyber Action Toolkit and Cyber Essentials, which also includes cyber insurance for those who get the certification. For any organisation that experiences an incident, the Government’s Cyber Incident Signposting Service helps point them towards where the issue should be reported and where appropriate support can be sought.

Questions on regulator capacity and consistency were raised by the noble Lord, Lord Vaizey, and my noble friend Lady Alexander. The framework will drive consistency across sectors through these common security requirements and through the statement of strategic priorities, which will set the objectives that regulators must seek to achieve. Sector-specific guidance from regulators will also remain key to address sectoral nuances and risks, building on a common foundation of good practice.

Many noble Lords raised the importance of building out sovereign capability in the UK, and I note that the Government are committed to pursuing that. I am sure that we will have other opportunities to talk further about tech sovereignty in the coming week in Oral Questions and the forthcoming debate on that subject.

My noble friend Lady Paul of Shepherd’s Bush and the noble Lords, Lord Ashcombe and Lord Arbuthnot, discussed cyber insurance. It can absolutely play an important role as part of a wider approach to cyber resilience, particularly in helping organisations to manage the impacts of cyber resilience and to support recovery. We do not believe that cyber insurance is a replacement for cyber security, but it is definitely part of a wider suite of cyber measures.

Many noble Lords made points about skills, which are incredibly important. We are improving industry understanding of cyber security, we are investing in cyber skills through TechFirst, and we are working with the UK Cyber Security Council to develop professional standards to bring cyber security in line with professions such as engineering and accounting. I also heartily endorse the points made by the noble Lords, Lord Ravensdale and Lord Vaizey, about the strength of the cyber security industry and sector in this country. It is not only strong within this country; it is also exporting to many other parts of the world, building on our strengths.

I note that product security, which was mentioned by many today in the sense of building in requirements, is indeed a feature of our product security and telecoms infrastructure—or PSTI—regime, which is an important complement to what is in the Bill.

Finally, the noble Lord, Lord Clement-Jones, led the charge on the Computer Misuse Act. We highlighted in the King’s Speech that a Bill focused on national security will update that Act and provide law enforcement with the updated powers and capabilities, so they can remain effective in the digital age.

I, too, look forward to Committee. This is an incredibly important Bill. I welcome the high level of engagement from across the House tonight on the practicalities and the details.

This Bill is fundamentally about national security. It will deliver stronger protections against those who want to disrupt our way of life. It will do so with growth at the forefront, focusing first on support and partnership and regulating only where it is necessary. I thank noble Lords and look forward to the Bill’s next stages.

Bill read a second time.

Commitment and Order of Consideration Motion

Moved by

[Baroness Lloyd of Effra]

That the bill be committed to a Grand Committee, and that it be an instruction to the Grand Committee that they consider the bill in the following order:

Clauses 1 to 22, Schedule 1, Clause 23, Schedule 2, Clauses 24 to 61, Title.

Motion agreed.

Steel Industry (Nationalisation) Bill

Tuesday 14th July 2026 Lords Chamber

Returned from the Commons

The Bill was returned from the Commons agreed to.

House adjourned at 9.41 pm.