Jack Rankin

The Government highly values the charity sector, and its positive contribution across society.

Due to the difficult economic inheritance from the previous government, we have had to take a number of difficult decisions on tax, welfare and spending to fix the public finances, fund public services, and restore economic stability.

The Government has considered the implication of this policy change on the charity sector, and the impacts have been published in the usual way by HMRC as part of the Autumn Budget process.

A Tax Information and Impact Note (TIIN), which gives a clear explanation of the policy objective and an assessment of the impacts, was published alongside the National Insurance Contributions (Secondary Class 1 Contributions) Bill on 13 November 2024. This Note includes the impacts of the policy on the Exchequer; the economic impacts of the policy; and the impacts on individuals, businesses, civil society organisations and equality impacts.

The Consultation on The Enterprise Act 2002 (Mergers Involving Newspaper Enterprises and Foreign Powers) Regulations 2024 closed on 9 July 2024. Ministers recognise the high importance of this issue and are considering the responses carefully. Ministers take into account a wide range of issues and evidence when making a decision, and will publish the response in due course.

The Consultation on The Enterprise Act 2002 (Mergers Involving Newspaper Enterprises and Foreign Powers) Regulations 2024 closed on 9 July 2024. Ministers recognise the high importance of this issue and are considering the responses carefully. Ministers take into account a wide range of issues and evidence when making a decision, and will publish the response in due course.

The Secretary of State has a quasi-judicial role when considering foreign state ownership, influence and control in newspapers and news magazines, and as such we cannot comment further.

We are currently considering responses to the consultation, and hope to publish a response in the near future.

The department is not able to identify which non-UK domiciled students who hold British nationality are paying international fees.

The Higher Education Statistics Agency (HESA) is responsible for collecting and publishing data on the UK higher education sector. These data are shared with the department and includes a wide range of information on students coming from overseas to study in UK higher education providers (HEPs), including their legal nationality. Information on the type of fees a student pays, however, is not collected across all UK HEPs.

The department is not able to identify students who are paying international fees who are (a) British nationals and (b) non-domiciled in the UK.

The Higher Education Statistics Agency (HESA) is responsible for collecting and publishing data on the UK higher education sector. These data are shared with the department and include a wide range of information on students coming from overseas to study in UK higher education providers (HEPs). Information on the type of fees a student pays, however, is not collected across all UK HEPs.

The legal nationality of the student is collected across all HEPs that submit data to HESA. The department estimates that of the 288,465 full-time, undergraduate, international students (those with permanent address outside the UK) enrolled in UK HEPs in the 2022/23 academic year, 12,805 declared that they held British nationality. Of the remaining full-time, undergraduate, international students, 271,505 declared that they held an overseas nationality and 4,155 have an unknown nationality.

All school staff should feel safe and supported at work, and confident in being able to report concerns. We expect school leaders, as employers, to take appropriate action to tackle any issues that are raised.

All school employers, including trusts, have a duty to protect the health, safety and welfare of their employees. The primary duty to take reasonable care for the health and safety of all employees, including school leaders, rests with the employer. The employer is therefore responsible for doing what is reasonably practicable to ensure that employees are adequately supported in relation to wellbeing and should take appropriate action where they are aware of any matters that impact their employee’s welfare. It is the responsibility of individual trusts to have robust staffing policies in place to ensure this is the case.

This includes having complaints guidance and whistleblowing policies and procedures in place. Guidance is available here: https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/setting-up-an-academies-complaints-procedure/best-practice-guidance-for-academies-complaints-procedures and here: https://www.gov.uk/whistleblowing.

My right hon. Friend, the Secretary of State for Education, is the prescribed person for matters relating to education for whistleblowers who do not want to raise matters directly with their employer. Concerns can be raised with the department using the Customer Help Portal available here: https://customerhelpportal.education.gov.uk.

More widely, as Principal Regulator for academies, the Secretary of State is clear that accountability is non-negotiable. The department holds academies to high standards, setting and enforcing all non-financial standards, and facilitating, supporting and overseeing intervention in multi-academy trusts when it is needed.

Academy trusts are also bound by their funding agreements to conduct their academies within the terms and requirements of their Articles of Association, the Academies Trust Handbook and any legislation or legal requirement that applies to academies. Where concerns about an academy are identified or raised, the department works closely with trusts to ensure statutory requirements are being met.

The department does not collect data from schools which specifically distinguishes spending on non-special educational needs and disabilities (SEND) related facilities or non-SEND pupils.

Local authorities retain the legal duty to ensure appropriate support is provided for children with SEND. Local authorities can allocate high needs top-up funding to schools in respect of a particular pupil with more complex SEND, normally to secure the provision set out in an education, health and care plan, and they determine how much extra funding to allocate.

The cost of running the Child Maintenance Service is not separated between supervision and processing of (a) Direct Pay arrangements and (b) Collect and Pay arrangements, therefore, the information requested is not held.

Where parents fail to take responsibility for paying for their children, the Child Maintenance Service (CMS) will not hesitate to use the range of enforcement powers available, and a liability order facilitates this.

A liability order allows the CMS to formally have the debt a paying parent owes legally recognised in a court of law. It can choose which enforcement method to proceed with depending on the circumstances of the case, and the welfare of any qualifying children involved.

Following the Child Support (Enforcement) Act 2023 receiving royal assent in July 2023, secondary legislation is required to bring into force existing powers that allow the CMS to make an administrative liability order (ALO) against a person who has failed to pay child maintenance and is in arrears.

The ALO will replace the current requirement for the CMS to apply to the court for a liability order enabling CMS to take faster action against those paying parents who actively avoid their responsibilities and will get money to children more quickly.

Liability orders have not yet been replaced by ALOs, so we are only able to provide data for liability orders. Published data can be found on the national tables page 6.1. Please find a summary of the data below.

Data on the reasons a court rejected a liability order is not held centrally and to compile it would not be an effective use of operational resources.

The CMS applied for approximately;

• 17,800 liability orders between October 2023 and September 2024,
• 15,100 liability orders between October 2022 and September 2023, and
• 11,300 liability orders between October 2021 and September 2022.

Approximate number of liability orders withdrawn or dismissed (rejected);

• 1,200 liability orders between October 2023 and September 2024,
• 900 liability orders between October 2022 and September 2023, and
• 900 liability orders between October 2021 and September 2022.

(Please note that the figures exclude Scotland).

It is worth noting that an important reason for liability orders being withdrawn is that they are settled prior to going to court.

A consultation on proposed reforms to the Child Maintenance Service (CMS) was published by the previous Government on 8 May 2024. This included removing Direct Pay and managing all CMS cases in one service to allow the CMS to tackle non-compliance faster, and exploring how victims and survivors of domestic abuse can be better supported. This follows the Child Support Collection (Domestic Abuse) Act receiving royal assent in July 2023.

The consultation was extended by this Government at the end of July and ran until 30 September 2024. We are currently analysing the responses we have received, and the Government will publish a response in due course.

At the end of September 2024, the CMS was managing 749,000 arrangements of which approximately 60% of arrangements used Direct Pay and 40% Collect and Pay.

The number of staff who work for the Child Maintenance Service by each civil service pay bracket has been provided in the tables 1 and 2 below.

Table 1: The Child Maintenance Service, Great Britain (CMS GB) have a total of 3,831 staff in post.

Data to December 2024

Table 2: The Department for Communities, Northern Ireland (DFC NI) administers casework for Paying Parents living in Northern Ireland under Northern Ireland legislation for the 2012 scheme and have their own funding process, pay structure and grading system. DFC NI also provide services to CMS GB under a Memorandum of Understanding. There are a total of 987 staff in post providing these services who are either civil servants employed by the DFC NI or agency staff employed by The Recruitment Co.

Data to December 2024

The table below outlines the Child Maintenance Service budget for each year since 2021, sourced from the CMS Management Accounts.

The budget for 2025/2026 has not yet been finalised and therefore is not included.

Note: the budget information does not represent actual spend.

Internationally educated staff remain an important part of the workforce, and our Code of Practice for International Recruitment ensures stringent ethical standards when recruiting health and social care staff from overseas. Health and Care Worker visa holders may be eligible to apply for Indefinite Leave to Remain after five years on the visa. No estimate has been made of the potential impact on public services of grants of Indefinite Leave to Remain to people with Health and Care Worker visas.

The Government remains committed to growing homegrown talent and giving opportunities to more people across the country to join the National Health Service. In summer 2025, we will publish a refreshed Long Term Workforce Plan to deliver the transformed health service we will build over the next decade and treat patients on time again.

We have taken necessary decisions to fix the foundations in the public finances at the Autumn Budget, which enabled the Spending Review settlement of a £22.6 billion increase in resource spending for the Department from 2023/24 outturn to 2025/26. The employer National Insurance contributions (ENICs) rise will be implemented in April 2025.

The Government recognises the need to protect the smallest businesses and charities, like hospices, which is why we have more than doubled the Employment Allowance to £10,500, meaning more than half of businesses with ENICs liabilities either gain or see no change next year. Businesses and charities will still be able to claim ENICs reliefs, including those for under 21 and under 25 year old apprentices, where eligible.  The Department will set out further details on the allocation of funding for next year in due course.

Iran has long proliferated weapons across the Middle East, and continues to provide military, financial and political support to its proxies and partners - destabilising the region and jeopardising international security. The Prime Minister and Foreign Secretary have made clear to their Iranian counterparts that Iran must restrain its proxies and partners and take action to avoid regional escalation.

We will continue to work with our international partners to tackle Iran's malign behaviour. This includes holding them to account in multilateral fora, using sanctions regimes to target Iranian support to its proxies, and by maintaining our permanent defence presence in the region.

The Prime Minister spoke with Iranian President Pezeshkian on 12 August, warning against the risk of regional escalation. The Foreign Secretary has also spoken with both former Acting Foreign Minister Ali Bagheri-Kani, on 7 August, and Foreign Minister Abbas Aragchi, on 23 August.

The UK unequivocally condemns the strike in Golan Heights that has tragically claimed at least 12 lives. Hizballah must cease their indiscriminate attacks and their destabilising activity. The Foreign Secretary spoke with Israel's Foreign Minister Katz on 4 August following the attack, offering his condolences for the death of innocent children in Madj al Shams. He expressed the Government's concern about the escalation in tensions and the growing potential for miscalculation across the de-facto border between Lebanon and Israel. We continue to urge both Israel and Lebanon to engage with the US led discussions to reach a political settlement and resolve their tensions diplomatically.   A widening of the conflict is in nobody's interest. The Government is working in lockstep with our allies to deescalate tensions and urge all parties to end the destructive cycle of retaliatory violence.

The Office for Budget Responsibility (OBR) produces forecasts of the UK’s economic and fiscal position.

The government sets its fiscal policy on the basis of the official OBR forecast.

Box 4.5 of the OBR’s Economic and Fiscal Outlook published in March 2024 sets out estimated impacts of migration on the fiscal forecast. As the minimum residency required to move to indefinite leave to remain is currently at least 5 years, this falls outside the forecast period. As the OBR says in the March 2024 EFO. ”However, our forecasts will capture the cost of any immigrants from previous cohorts who now claim welfare through Indefinite leave to remain grants because their claims will be included in the outturn data that provides the starting point for our forecast”.

Every migrant is required to submit a valid certificate of sponsorship (CoS) that details their employment and earnings whenever they apply for a skilled worker (including a Health and Care) visa. These details remain on our Sponsor Management System.

Home Office staff carry out compliance checks on the employers that sponsor the migrant workers to verify their roles and earnings. No equivalent data is currently collected in respect of their dependents.

Impact Assessments evaluating the impacts of policy changes to the Health and Care Worker route since it was established can be found at: Impact assessments covering migration policy - GOV.UK. These provide insight into specific economic impacts of the route, addressing matters such as direct and indirect business impacts and the visa fee revenue collected by the Home Office.

Further analysis of the economic impact of those on the Health and Care Worker visa can be found in Chapter 1 of the independent Migration Advisory Committee’s 2024 Annual Report (Migration Advisory Committee (MAC) annual report, 2024 (accessible) - GOV.UK). The OBR also assesses the potential economic implications of net migration, to which those on the Health and Care Worker visa contribute, as part of their Economic and Fiscal outlook (Net migration forecast and its impact on the economy - Office for Budget Responsibility).

The information requested is not centrally held and could only be collected and verified for the purpose of answering this question at disproportionate cost.

Impact Assessments evaluating the impacts of policy changes to the Health and Care Worker route since it was established can be found at Impact assessments covering migration policy - GOV.UK. These provide insight into economic impacts of the route, addressing matters such as direct and indirect business impacts and the visa fee revenue collected by the Home Office.

Further analysis of the economic impact of those on the Health and Care Worker visa can be found in Chapter 1 of the independent Migration Advisory Committee’s 2024 Annual Report (Migration Advisory Committee (MAC) annual report, 2024 (accessible) - GOV.UK). The OBR also assesses the potential economic implications of net migration, to which those on the Health and Care Worker visa contribute, as part of their Economic and Fiscal outlook (Net migration forecast and its impact on the economy - Office for Budget Responsibility).

The information requested is not centrally held, and could only be collected and verified for the purpose of answering this question at disproportionate cost.