Question to the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs:

To ask the Secretary of State for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, what steps she is taking to help tackle fly-tipping in Huddersfield constituency.

Answered by Mary Creagh - Parliamentary Under-Secretary (Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs)

Local councils are usually best placed to tackle fly-tipping in their areas, and they have a range of enforcement powers to help them do so. These include fixed penalty notices of up to £1000, seizing and crushing of vehicles and prosecution action. We encourage councils to make good use of their enforcement powers and are taking steps to develop statutory fly-tipping enforcement guidance to support councils to consistently, appropriately and effectively exercise these existing powers. We have also announced a review of council powers to seize and crush vehicles of fly-tippers, to identify how we could help them make better use of this tool.

In our manifesto we committed to forcing fly-tippers to clean up the mess that they have created. We will provide further details on this commitment in due course.

In the meantime, Defra continue to chair the National Fly-Tipping Prevention Group through which we work with a wide range of stakeholders, such as local authorities and the National Farmers Union, to share good practice on preventing fly-tipping, including on private land. Various practical tools are available from their webpage which is available at: https://nftpg.com/.

Question to the Department for Education:

To ask the Secretary of State for Education, what steps she is taking with her Cabinet colleagues to promote equality as part of the Government mission entitled Break Down Barriers to Opportunity.

Answered by Georgia Gould - Minister of State (Education)

All children and young people should have every opportunity to succeed, no matter where they are from. However, we know educational inequalities exists across the country. This is not acceptable in Huddersfield or nationally.

The department is tackling inequalities in the system head-on through our Plan for Change. In September, we rolled out 30 hours of funded childcare for working parents, saving eligible parents using their full entitlement an average of £75,000 a year.

We are also rolling out free breakfast clubs in every state-funded primary school, expanding free school meals to all children on Universal Credit, and have delivered the largest ever uplift to early years pupil premium.

We are recruiting an additional 6,500 expert teachers in our schools and colleges and are making good progress, with over 2,000 more teachers in our secondary and special schools.

The department will spend close to £1.5 billion over the next three years on improving family services and early years education to begin the hard work needed.

We will fund Best Start Family Hubs in every local authority to ensure that children and families who need support the most, especially those from low-income backgrounds or with additional vulnerabilities, can access it. These hubs will be open to all families but will be located in disadvantaged communities where support is most needed, ensuring services are both inclusive and targeted.