King’s Speech

Baroness Smith of Malvern Excerpts

Tuesday 19th May 2026 Lords Chamber

[The Minister of State, Department for Education and Department for Work and Pensions (Baroness Smith of Malvern) (Lab)]

My Lords, it is a tremendous honour and pleasure to be closing today’s debate—a debate, as we have heard, with very many interesting and important contributions, not all of which, I am afraid, I will be able to do justice to in this response. But I certainly want to draw attention to the excellent maiden speeches we have heard today. My noble friend Lord Hobby, notwithstanding his confession of not having actually taught, nevertheless, through his representation of head teachers and his important work to bring new people into the teaching profession through Teach First, brings an enormous amount of experience in the field of education that I know he will use to good effect in this House.

My good friend, the Conservative broadcaster, blogger and podcaster Iain Dale, told me to be nice to the noble Lord, Lord Blackwater. I can see it will be worthwhile if I am, recognising, of course, that what Iain and the noble Lord have in common is that they are both Essex boys. I do not think it is a bad thing to have more political staffers around the place. I think that was demonstrated by both the noble Baroness, Lady Leaman, and the noble Lord, Lord Dixon. The noble Baroness will undoubtedly, as we heard from her experience, bring an emphasis on cohesion, children and care to our debates in this House. I say to the noble Lord, Lord Dixon, that it is always a winner to bring your mum into it, speaking as a mother myself, and I am sure she is very proud of his great achievements, bringing not only that political background but that leadership in the voluntary sector to our debates in this House.

As we begin a new parliamentary Session, we know that this country continues to face long-standing challenges that cannot be solved quickly but require long-term strategic solutions that make a positive difference to people’s everyday lives. Rather than promising quick fixes, this Government have set out a series of Bills and measures that face down these challenges and deliver the change the British public voted for. The hard work of change is already under way. I will not list the full legislative programme of the last Session, but for my part I am proud of our reforms to education and children’s social care through the Children’s Wellbeing and Schools Act. Through the IfATE Act we laid the foundations for Skills England and the post-16 skills White Paper to help us understand and meet the country’s skills needs; and, of course, our non-legislative reforms and implementation continue to drive change outside this Chamber.

We had a volley of criticism of education policy at the beginning of this debate from the noble Baroness, Lady Bloomfield, although I note that we do not yet have an opposition education spokesperson. The Opposition chose not to have a debate on education in the other place. Perhaps today we have been watching an audition for that Opposition spokesperson. The shoes of the noble Baroness, Lady Barran, are enormous ones to fill, but I look forward to somebody making an effort, at least, at that.

Since coming into government, we have got children back to school for 5 million more days and turned the tide on teachers leaving the classroom. Parents are benefiting by as much as £8,000 from government-funded childcare, and young people are benefiting from new training opportunities in technical excellence colleges across our country. New foundation apprenticeships and hiring incentives for small businesses are turning around the 40% fall in apprenticeships for young people and the tragedy of nearly 1 million young people not earning or learning. We, unlike the previous Government, will not abandon a generation to this. We are cutting the cost of living and boosting standards at every stage of our children’s education.

To return to this Session, as noble Lords have heard, we are going further, because we cannot deliver opportunity and economic growth in every part of the country without a programme of legislation to match our ambitions. This includes our once-in-a-generation reforms to special needs education, which we have designed in partnership with families and teachers to give every child the opportunity to do well at school.

We are accelerating the UK’s drive to energy security through the nuclear regulation and energy independence Bills. The cyber security and resilience Bill will strengthen a different kind of infrastructure, supporting businesses of all sizes to improve defence against cyberattacks across the economy. We will introduce digital ID to parliamentary scrutiny during this Session; built to the highest security standards, it will provide an optional choice for efficient access to public services. Finally, our secondary ticket Bill and Sporting Events Bill will strengthen the UK’s capacity to host world-class sporting fixtures and ensure fans of live events can no longer be exploited by ticket touts. All this legislation supports the Government’s primary mission: to build the economic growth this country needs and the opportunities our people deserve.

To respond to some of the particular points raised during this debate, I thought we had very good contributions on special educational needs from many noble Lords with both personal and professional experience in this area. We are clear that every child deserves a chance to achieve and thrive—not some children, not children in the right postcode but every child, whatever their background and whatever their need. Raising standards means raising expectations for all.

The education for all Bill will transform support for children and young people by providing access to high-quality education, health and care services in every community. It will ensure every setting delivers the stretching, rewarding education that all children and young people deserve. This is how we build a truly inclusive education system, because when settings get it right for children and young people with SEND, every child and young person benefits. We will carefully consider responses to the ongoing SEND consultation. Subject to this and ongoing engagement with the sector and experts, we will meet our reform principles by providing support that is early, local, fair, effective and shared.

The Bill will bring forward measures to enable effective delivery from 2029. We will provide early support to children with SEND through embedding inclusive practice and requiring settings to publish an inclusion strategy. We will equip early years providers, schools and colleges to intervene early and effectively by creating national inclusion standards to support settings to identify and implement best practice. We will enable local support by making mainstream settings more inclusive. Of course, we recognise the significance of teachers in this, which is why we will deliver more training on SEND and inclusion than ever before, backed by over £200 million of investment. The Bill will require settings to produce an individual support plan for every child and young person with SEND, but we will streamline and standardise both the content of EHCPs and the process for obtaining them, while ensuring that the transition from the current to the new system is as smooth as possible.

Once the new system is in place, a triple lock of transitional protections will mean that no child loses the effective support they already receive. Every child with a special school place in September 2029 will be able to stay in a special school until they finish education. No child with a current EHCP will transition until the end of their phase of education and not before September 2030. Children who transition out of their EHCP will have an individual support plan in place, ahead of their plan’s ceasing and when the new inclusive mainstream has been built, to ensure no break in support.

We will reform the role of the SEND tribunal, encouraging greater use of mediation before appeals, including placement appeals. There will be a continued right of appeal to the SEND tribunal for key decisions about education, health and care needs, assessment plans and placements. We will ensure that children with the most complex needs receive high-quality, consistent support through new specialist provision packages. This legislation will utilise partnerships and ensure that support is shared across settings. We will make these changes because every child and young person deserves to belong, achieve and thrive.

In order to facilitate them, we will put in place the necessary investment. We are already supporting local authorities with the deficits that they built up through the failed system we inherited. We will invest £1.6 billion over three years in our inclusive mainstream fund to support high-quality inclusive teaching. Over the next three years, £1.8 billion will be invested to create a new national offer called Experts at Hand, wrapping professionals such as educational psychologists, speech and language therapists and occupational therapists around mainstream settings. We will put in place £3.7 billion-worth of investment to create 60,000 specialist and inclusive education places.

I turn to some other aspects of education. Several noble Lords raised higher education. These are challenging times for higher education. The freezing of tuition fee income by the previous Government has caused considerable financial stress. We took the decision to reverse this and we will legislate to ensure that that tuition fee income for universities is index-linked. We have already ensured that that will happen for three years. We are putting research funding on a more sustainable basis.

On the subject of student finance, I have to point out to the noble Lord, Lord Markham, that plan 2 loans were introduced by his Government. We have inherited the problems; their design was the previous Government’s. We will review the student finance system to make sure that we protect those who have taken part in higher education. To encourage more to take up the opportunity of higher education, we will also reintroduce the maintenance grants that were done away with by the previous Government.

When it comes to young people who are neither earning nor learning, we are determined to break down barriers to opportunity for all our young people. That is why we are investing £2.5 billion over the next three years in the youth guarantee and the growth and skills levy, to create up to 500,000 opportunities for young people to earn and learn. We will strengthen the role of schools, so that every young person leaves with a planned post-16 destination. We are piloting the automatic allocation of places in further education for those who do not already have one. We are improving how the system works together with local authorities, strategic authorities, schools and FE providers. We are investing in new data tools to identify earlier those at risk of becoming NEET. We are expanding the number of youth hubs across the country and through the jobs guarantee scheme, the youth jobs grant and new apprenticeship incentive for small and medium-sized businesses. By doing that, we will work with employers to get more young people into work.

I turn to the important issue of energy, mentioned by several noble Lords, including my noble friends Lady Curran and Lord Lennie. My noble friend Lord Whitehead tells me that my noble friend Lord Lennie gets five “yeses” for the questions he asked in his speech. The lessons for the UK, as we face a second fossil fuel shock, is clear: we need to get off the fossil fuel rollercoaster with clean, home-grown power that we control and the electrification of our wider economy.

The energy independence Bill will underpin action on three core objectives: tackling the affordability crisis and protecting consumers; accelerating the UK’s drive for energy security; and delivering a fair, managed and prosperous transition and good jobs in clean energy. Important points, particularly around the transition, were made by my noble friend Lady Griffin. The Bill supports the Government’s efforts to bring down energy bills and support vulnerable households. It gives the energy regulator the powers it needs to act as a strong consumer champion and stay ahead of a rapidly changing energy system. It supports the biggest investment in home upgrades in British history through the warm homes plan.

The energy independence Bill accelerates the delivery of clean power 2030 and the electrification of the economy so that we can deliver a fair, affordable, secure and efficient electricity system that will bring down bills for good. The Bill will enable vital grid upgrades after decades of underinvestment and help to create a global blueprint for a fair, managed and prosperous transition in the North Sea that acts in line with the science of fossil fuel. The Bill will expand workers’ rights and protections and pave the way for a new generation of good jobs in clean energy. The energy independence Bill legislates for the powers the Government need to fight peoples’ corner and go further and faster on our clean energy mission.

The nuclear regulation Bill fulfils the Government’s commitment to strengthening the UK as a nuclear nation. We have been clear that nuclear power will play a key role in achieving clean power 2030 and beyond. The Government have committed almost £17 billion across the spending review period to the biggest nuclear building programme in a generation, funding Sizewell C in Suffolk and the small modular reactor programme at Wylfa in north Wales. We have progressed Hinkley Point C in Somerset, and we are welcoming a new era of advanced modular reactors as part of our clean energy mission.

On the point made by the noble Lord, Lord Willetts, we recognise, as the 2025 nuclear regulatory review found, that an overly complex and bureaucratic regulatory system that favours process over safe outcomes is holding back the industry and making the UK the most expensive place in the world to build new nuclear. We accept this diagnosis, and the measures in the nuclear regulation Bill will support quicker delivery of nuclear projects in a way that produces a win-win for building critical infrastructure while protecting nature, the environment and high standards of nuclear safety.

I now turn to the issues around technology and AI. First, in response to the contributions by the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of Oxford, the noble Baronesses, Lady Kidron and Lady Owen, my noble friend Lady Hazarika, and the noble Lord, Lord Carlile, this Government have been clear that we will be putting some form of age or functionality restrictions for online services in place for under-16s. Our consultation will determine the best route to do this. To ensure the safety and well-being of our children, we will act by the end of the year.

When this Government published the AI Opportunities Action Plan, we set out our ambition to ensure that Britain leads in shaping the AI revolution. AI has the potential to grow the economy, create good jobs and deliver huge societal benefits. We are making sure that we shape a future that works for all, not just a few at the top. We are building on Britain’s technological strengths and expanding our domestic capabilities through the £500-million sovereign AI fund to back British start-ups. At the same time, our AI growth zones are accelerating the delivery of data centres and bringing in billions in private investment, and we are working towards a copyright solution that both protects the UK’s creative industries and unlocks the potential of AI driven innovation. However, if we are to realise any of AI’s benefits, we need to make sure that it is safe. That is why we have taken important steps to ensure that most AI systems are already regulated at the point of use by our existing expert regulators.

The Government continue to act decisively to address harms where the evidence suggests it is necessary to do so. That is why we have taken powers in the Crime and Policing Act to bring unregulated chatbots into scope of the Act to mitigate illegal content risks like non-consensual intimate images and child sexual abuse material. We have also taken powers in the Children’s Wellbeing and Schools Act to ensure that we can act on the findings of the consultation, including, as I say, whether restrictions should be placed on children’s use of chatbots.

We recognise that AI capabilities are accelerating rapidly and bring the potential for serious risks. This is why we are strengthening cyber resilience through the cyber security and resilience Bill and a new national cyber action plan, while ensuring that AI is regulated at the point of use. We are also supporting our world-leading security institute, which is working with frontier developers to identify and mitigate model vulnerabilities to ensure that we understand and prepare for AI’s potential impacts.

In the area of culture, in introducing the draft secondary ticketing Bill, we will have the opportunity to build on the important work of my noble friends Lady Debbonaire and Lady Keeley and to reflect the comments made by the noble Lord, Lord Brennan, preventing fans being ripped off by touts, bringing support to those who want to attend events and ensuring that money is going into those events rather than into the pockets of touts.

Arts and culture are at the heart of community life. They bring people together across divides, which is why we are taking decisive action to ensure that the arts are accessible to everyone, everywhere. In March, we published our response to my noble friend Lady Hodge’s independent review of Arts Council England, accepting all the recommendations. We are backing that vision with significant investment. Last year, we announced £1.5 billion to help protect more than 1,000 treasured arts venues, museums, libraries and heritage buildings across England. In April this year, we announced the first set of organisations to benefit from this support, which included £96 million through the creative foundations fund, £25.5 million for museum repairs and development and £6.3 million to modernise libraries so that they can continue serving communities for generations to come.

In recent decades, we have lived through a revolution in media. That is why we are improving the curriculum to ensure better standards of media literacy, and it is why we launched the local media action plan as well as committing up to £12 million in funding. This includes a campaign to inspire young people about future media careers and help them understand the importance of journalism to our society. Similarly, both the Prime Minister and the Secretary of State believe that public service broadcasting, and the BBC in particular, are vital British assets that support our democracy, bring our communities together, and help to shape and define our nation through telling stories about the lives of people in all parts of the UK, enabling the noble Baroness, Lady Benjamin, to have influenced very many of our childhoods through her “Playschool” period—and of course, perhaps enabling us to all get to know “KPop Demon Hunters”, if that is something we want to do. We are acting to future-proof this vital institution and our review of the BBC’s charter aims to protect the BBC for decades to come.

We are at the beginning of this new legislative agenda, which does not shy away from tackling problems that are complex, long-standing and multifaceted. We will build on the foundations we have laid in our first two years in government, reforming where carefully designed change is needed and strengthening and empowering what works well. I look forward to working with noble Lords as we take this important legislative agenda through this House.

Debate adjourned until Wednesday 20 May.