Andy Carter

Government and industry launched a Sector Deal for the Creative Industries in 2018, with more than £150m of funding. This aims to unlock growth for creative businesses across the country, and the North West benefits from a number of programmes within the Sector Deal.

These include a Creative Scale Up programme to help small creative businesses access the finance they need to grow and is launching today in the Manchester region.

In total, the department has announced almost £5 billion for an ambitious, multi-year education recovery plan to support young people to catch up on missed learning.

As part of education recovery, the department is investing up to £180 million of recovery support in the early years sector. Strengthening understanding of speech and language development is an important part of this support.

The recovery includes investing in continuous professional development for early years practitioners, through the national expansion of the early years Professional Development Programme, which has a focus on upskilling practitioners to support the early development of literacy and language and early mathematics, alongside personal, social, and emotional development. The department is also investing over £24 million for local authorities to select and train early years practitioners in the best programmes to support parents with the home learning environment. This aims to improve children’s early language and social and emotional development, giving priority to families that will benefit the most.

Additionally, the department is investing £17 million for the Nuffield Early Language Intervention (NELI), which is a proven programme aimed at the reception aged children needing extra support with their speech and language development. We are also increasing the number of qualified special educational needs coordinators in early years settings.

The Recovery Premium, providing £1.3 billion for the 2021/22, 2022/23 and 2023/24 academic years, is additional funding to help schools deliver evidence-based approaches to support education recovery. Recovery Premium eligibility builds on that of the pupil premium. However, school leaders have flexibility to use the funding to support any pupil where a need is identified, including those with speech and language difficulties. Schools can use their funding to assess and address immediate needs, such as those relating to speech and language difficulties, as well as longer-term strategic improvements, such as boosting the quality of oracy teaching.

The Parent Pledge in the Schools White Paper will also make the department’s vision clear that any child who falls behind in English or mathematics will receive the right evidence-based targeted support to get them back on track.

The Government has committed over £100 million to support vulnerable and disadvantaged children in England to access remote education and social care services, including by providing laptops, tablets and 4G wireless routers.

We are providing laptops and tablets to disadvantaged children who would otherwise not have access and are preparing for examinations in year 10, receiving support from a social worker or are a care leaver. Where care leavers, children with a social worker at secondary school and children in year 10 do not have internet connections, we are providing 4G wireless routers.

The Department has ordered over 200,000 laptops and tablets and allocated devices to local authorities and academy trusts based on its estimates of the number of eligible children that do not have access to a device. Local authorities and academy trusts are best place to identify and prioritise children and young people who need devices. The Department is working to provide these devices in the shortest possible timeframe; deliveries to schools and local authorities began in May and have continued throughout June. As of 14 June, we have shipped over 100,000 laptops and 20,000 4G routers, including 481 to Warrington for children with a social worker and care leavers and 45 for disadvantaged year 10 pupils.

The Department has published information about how many laptops, tablets and 4G wireless routers we have delivered or dispatched to local authorities and academy trusts as of 14 June, which can be viewed here: https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/laptops-tablets-and-4g-wireless-routers-progress-data.

Well-planned maintenance to prevent potholes and other defects from forming in the first place is vital, and the Department advocates a risk-based, whole life-cycle asset management approach to all aspects of the local highway network.

To assist local authorities in treating potholes and other road defects, the Department worked with the Association of Directors, for Environment, Economy, Planning and Transport (ADEPT) to publish Potholes: a repair guide.

The management of local roads, including provision of cycling facilities, is the responsibility of individual local traffic authorities. It is for them to ensure their streets are designed to provide safe movement for all road users. The Department has published updated guidance on Cycle Infrastructure Design to help local authorities deliver high quality cycle infrastructure in the future which can be accessed at www.gov.uk/government/publications/cycle-infrastructure-design-ltn-120. Cycling clearly does not work for everyone, or for every journey. But the more people that cycle, the more roadspace is freed up for those who really need to drive. High-quality infrastructure is a key part of enabling this.

The National Cycle Network (NCN), managed by Sustrans, is a UK-wide network of signed paths and routes for walking and cycling. It stretches over 12,000 miles and in 2019 an estimated 4.2 million people used the NCN to make almost 650 million journeys. Over 50% of journeys were made by modes other than a bicycle including equestrians.

On 14 May 2022 the Department announced £35m of funding for the National Cycle Network to deliver improved surfacing, widened paths and greater accessibility, such as the removal of barriers that impact disabled people and cyclists. Many of these projects are focused on canal towpaths, which are important elements of many local cycling and walking networks.

In February, the Government published a total police funding settlement of up to £15.8 billion in 2021/22.

This is an increase of up to £600 million compared to 2020/21 and cements our commitment to give the police the resources they need to keep the public safe.

This Government will reset our national homeownership offer – ensuring local people and key workers have the opportunity to build a life in their own community.

First Homes, our new homeownership programme, will discount homes by at least 30 per cent for key workers, local people, and first-time buyers – including those who have done so much to respond to the Covid-19 outbreak. We recently closed our consultation on First Homes and will publish our response soon.

At the same time our new £12 billion investment in affordable homes will create thousands of new homes for Shared Ownership.

And all of this adds to other Government-backed schemes, including Help to Buy, which have supported over 627,000 households into homeownership since 2010.