Baroness Royall of Blaisdon

The Office for Students will be publishing updated guidance for the higher education sector to support it to understand how to comply with its duties in relation to freedom of speech and academic freedom.

The department recognises that UK higher education (HE) creates opportunity, is an engine for growth in our economy and supports local communities. We are determined that the HE funding system should deliver for our economy, for universities and for students, and the government is committed to supporting the aspiration of every person who meets the requirements and wants to go to university. We have already started reviewing options to deliver a more robust HE sector but it will take time to get it right.

We will be announcing further details on HE student finance for the 2025/26 academic year in due course.

The department recognises that UK higher education (HE) creates opportunity, is an engine for growth in our economy and supports local communities. We are determined that the HE funding system should deliver for our economy, for universities and for students, and the government is committed to supporting the aspiration of every person who meets the requirements and wants to go to university. We have already started reviewing options to deliver a more robust HE sector but it will take time to get it right.

We will be announcing further details on HE student finance for the 2025/26 academic year in due course.

The Government understands that more needs to be done to improve outcomes for all people with prostate cancer, including for black men.

NHS England runs Help Us Help You campaigns in England to increase knowledge of cancer symptoms and address barriers to acting on them, to encourage people to come forward as soon as possible to see their general practitioner. The campaigns focus on a range of symptoms, as well as encouraging body awareness, to help people spot symptoms across a wide range of cancers at an earlier point. These campaigns are developed and tailored to reach and resonate with people who are more likely to experience health inequalities, such as black people. Cancer alliances across the country are engaging with their local communities to deliver campaigns, community engagement, and partnership activity to increase symptom knowledge and encourage earlier presentation.

To address disparities and find ways to better detect prostate cancer earlier, we have invested £16 million in the United Kingdom-wide TRANSFORM trial, aimed at helping find the best ways of detecting prostate cancer in men, even if they are not displaying any symptoms. This research will aim to address some of the inequalities that exist in prostate cancer diagnosis by targeting black men in trial recruitment, ensuring that one in ten participants are black men. This is vital as previous trials have not included enough black men to adequately demonstrate the harms and benefits of screening for this group specifically, despite their significantly higher risk.

In addition, following publication of the 10-Year Health Plan, we will develop a new National Cancer Plan. The plan will seek to improve outcomes and address disparities for people diagnosed with cancer, including for prostate cancer. A call for evidence, seeking contributions from individuals and organisations, including ideas on how to improve outcomes for prostate cancer, is available on the GOV.UK website, in an online only format.

The BBC is editorially and operationally independent and decides the most effective and efficient way of delivering the World Service. Expanding coverage would be a decision for the BBC in line with its operational and editorial independence although if this were to involve the creation (or closing) of a full language service, the Foreign Secretary would need to approve, as per Framework Agreement requirements.

The Government highly values the BBC World Service, which provides impartial accurate news to a global audience of 320 million. HMG is providing an uplift of £32.6million (or 31 per cent) for 2025/26 taking our total funding to £137million. This is a large funding uplift in a tough fiscal situation.

As part of this Government's ambitious goal to halve violence against women and girls (VAWG) in a decade, we have committed to use every tool available to protect more women and girls from harm, to relentlessly target perpetrators including via methods used to tackle terrorism and serious organised crime, and other measures to improve the police response to VAWG.

Working closely with the National Police Chiefs' Council and the College of Policing, the Home Office is overseeing the development of a new national approach for the use of data-driven tools and algorithms to identify and pursue offenders involved in domestic abuse, sexual assault, harassment, and stalking. Recognising the range of applicable technologies already in use across police forces in England and Wales, the new framework will support forces to meet their local need while standardising the use of these tools, ensuring those who pose the greatest threat are identified and managed through the criminal justice system or community-based, multi-agency interventions.

In February, we announced £13.1 million funding to launch a new National Centre for VAWG and Public Protection to improve the policing response to VAWG and child sexual abuse. Centralising policing expertise to tackle these crimes will drive national coordination. The creation of the Centre is a key step in delivering on the Government's public protection priorities through bringing together expertise to drive organisational change and improve practice, and work on the use of data-driven tools in VAWG policing is central to this.

Later this year we will publish a cross-government VAWG strategy, unpinning the ambitious agenda to halve VAWG and tackle the most prolific and harmful perpetrators.

The Government has set out an unprecedented mission to halve violence against women. Stalking is an insidious crime that leaves victims living in fear every day, which is why it is essential to ensure the police and wider criminal justice system have the tools they need to protect victims and pursue perpetrators.

Those convicted of the offence of stalking involving fear, harassment, alarm or distress and sentenced to more than 12 months' imprisonment are automatically managed under Multi-Agency Public Protection Arrangements (MAPPA), a process which involves the police, probation and prison services working together to assess and manage the risk of specified offenders. Those convicted of that offence and sentenced to fewer than 12 months' imprisonment or convicted of section 2A stalking offence can be MAPPA managed on a discretionary basis. In the MAPPA guidance, it is stressed that every stalking perpetrator should be considered for MAPPA management. We continue to consider how these systems can be strengthened.

Those managed under MAPPA have their details stored on the ViSOR database. In addition, anyone subject to a Stalking Protection Order (SPO) is subject to notification requirements. This means if the name used by or the address of the person changes during the duration of the order, they must notify the police within a 3-day period of that change. Failure to do so is a criminal offence punishable by a maximum of 12 months' imprisonment.

To ensure the effective management of stalking perpetrators we also announced six new measures on 3 December. This includes legislating in the Crime and Policing Bill to provide for the courts to issue SPOs on conviction or acquittal and introducing national standards for stalking perpetrator interventions to help improve the efficacy and consistency of such programmes.

We are also working with a new policing centre to create models such as V100 in the MET to look at the specific offender management of the most violent perpetrators in an area.

There are no such plans at present, but the Government keeps all aspects of the Immigration Health Surcharge under regular review.

Homelessness levels are far too high. This can have a devastating impact on those affected. We must address this and deliver long term solutions. We recognise that women sleeping on the streets have different experiences and needs to men, particularly relating to experience of violence and abuse, and that services may need to be delivered differently to meet the needs of women.

MHCLG encourages local authorities to consider taking part in the Women’s Rough Sleeping Census, led by Solace and Single Homeless Project. The Census collects data on women experiencing rough sleeping or insecure housing and encourages closer collaboration between local support agencies so that more women can be supported into safe accommodation.

The Government will look at these issues carefully as part of our wider work to develop a new cross-government strategy, working with mayors and councils across the country to get us on back on track to ending homelessness.