Liam Fox

The government expects suppliers to pass through to consumers any reductions in the costs of supplying energy.

Strong competition is key to ensuring that prices are kept as low as possible and reductions in the costs of supplying energy are passed through to consumers. There are now 34 companies supplying gas and electricity to households, compared to 13 in 2010.

The Government has worked with the industry to cut the time it takes to switch from 5 weeks to 17 days. We are now working with Ofgem to deliver reliable next day switching by 2018.

Smart meters will make the energy market more accessible, and energy consumers will feel more in control. This increased engagement will drive a more vibrant and competitive market.

Ofgem has referred the energy markets to the Competition and Markets Authority for investigation. The Government has committed to acting on the Competition and Market Authority’s recommendations which are due to be published by June this year.

The Government is committed to securing an ambitious, legally binding, global deal on climate change at the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) Conference of the Parties (COP) 21 in Paris in December.

The UK is working with other countries to secure ambitious mitigation commitments from all parties that together keep the global goal of limiting global warming to below 2°C within reach. We also want an agreement that includes a regular review of targets to increase ambition over time, a global long term goal and a robust, legally binding rules framework to ensure transparency and accountability of commitments to help the world track progress, improve competitiveness and provide business certainty.

It will also be important that the Agreement supports the most vulnerable countries to build climate resilience. I am pleased that my rt. hon. Friend the Prime Minister announced a significant uplift in funding through the International Climate Fund (ICF) providing at least £5.8 billion over the next five years. This complements commitments from other countries such as France and Germany and should help build momentum for climate action beyond Paris.

However, there remains a lot of work to do and we are working closely with international counterparts to help secure an ambitious deal.

Following the outcome in Paris, my rt. hon. Friend the Secretary of State will lay a statement in the House.

The information requested falls under the remit of the UK Statistics Authority.

A response to the Hon gentleman’s Parliamentary Question of 1 September is attached.

The number of dismissals in the Civil Service for each of the last 10 years are shown in the table below. The number of dismissals for the year ending 31 March 2023 are scheduled for release on 26 July 2023 as part of the National Statistics bulletin Civil Service Statistics 2023. The number of staff leaving, by leaving cause, is published as one of the standard tables and all of the dismissal data presented in the answer is already in the public domain.

Table 1: Number of dismissals in the Civil Service, 2012/13 to 2021/22

Source: Annual Civil Service Employment Survey, Cabinet Office

Figures rounded to nearest 10

Simon Case, Cabinet Secretary and Head of the Civil Service, line manages the permanent secretaries of the Devolved Administrations, including Leslie Evans as Permanent Secretary to the Scottish Government.

In January 2020, the then Minister for the Cabinet Office and the Minister for Patient Safety met campaigners representing the people infected and affected, and campaigners raised a number of issues about the support that would assist them outside of the Inquiry process. Ministers have committed to looking at these issues carefully, including to consider a request to look at a framework for compensation before the Inquiry reports, and to report back on where progress can be made. The Paymaster General is the lead Minister for the Inquiry and is taking forward these actions.

The automotive sector relies on rare earths for magnets in electric vehicle motors, and other critical minerals – like lithium, graphite and cobalt – for batteries.

Of the 18 critical minerals defined in the UK criticality assessment, China is the largest producer for 12 of them as refined products. China produced 76% of rare earth elements between 2016 and 2020.[1]

We are working closely with international partners in the G7, International Energy Agency and Mineral Security Partnership to strengthen and diversify our critical mineral supply chains and improve environmental and social governance – including engaging with China to achieve our objectives.

[1] British Geological Survey, World Mineral Statistics Database 2022

The Government will retain the current scope of the Pubs Code in England and Wales, which excludes pub-owning companies with fewer than 500 tied pubs, provided that these companies continue to engage in the voluntary rent dispute and complaints procedures and the level of complaints remains low. The Government will keep the threshold under review.

BT have madea public commitment to answer at least 80% of calls in the UK by the end of 2016. They also have planstoinvestin new tools for call centres and customers over the next 18 months to make it easier to get help; ensurethat customers with complex issues have a UK-based case handler; work to simplify bills and charges; and to increase the UK capacity in its call centres in the evenings and at weekends. I shall be watching their progress with interest, as I am sure will be my Rt Hon friend.

The Department for Education does not hold data on the numbers of suspended headteachers, deputy headteachers or senior leaders that have returned to their posts. This information would be held by individual school employers.

The Department for Education does not hold data on the numbers of confidentiality agreements entered into by teachers without or following an Ofsted inspection. This information would be held by individual school employers.

Settlement agreements, previously known as compromise agreements, are sometimes used when teachers leave a school. These agreements are voluntary and neither employers nor employees are obliged to enter into them. Such agreements usually include a confidentiality clause, but they cannot be used to suppress information such as that relating to pupil safety, nor can they be used to prevent someone from making a protected disclosure under whistleblowing arrangements.

The Department for Education does not hold data on the numbers of suspensions of headteachers, deputy headteachers and senior leaders either without or following an Ofsted inspection. This information would be held by individual school employers.

The Department for Education does not hold data on the numbers of confidentiality agreements entered into by headteachers, deputy headteachers or senior leaders. This information would be held by individual school employers.

Settlement agreements, previously known as compromise agreements, are sometimes used when teachers leave a school. These agreements are voluntary and neither employer nor employees have to enter into them. Such agreements usually include a confidentiality clause, but they cannot be used to suppress information such as that relating to pupil safety or to prevent someone from making a protected disclosure under whistleblowing arrangements.

Bristol is introducing a Clean Air Zone (CAZ) to bring the roads in the city into compliance with NO2 limits in the shortest possible time.

Bristol has proposed that the zone boundary should include the Portway and Brunel Bridge routes, and has carried out modelling to understand the traffic and air quality data to show the impact of removing these routes from the CAZ. This modelling indicated that removing these roads from within the zone boundary would delay the date by which roads in Bristol are compliant with legal limits for NO2. The Government is currently considering this information as part of our review of Bristol’s Full Business Case.

No such discussions have taken place.

Redcliffe Bay Petroleum Storage Depot is jointly regulated by the Health and Safety Executive and the Environment Agency under the Control of Major Accident Hazards (COMAH) Regulations 2015 as an Upper Tier establishment. The Environment Agency has had discussions at an operational level with the site operator about containment in the event of an emergency. Based on the information obtained at the last inspection, the Environment Agency was satisfied with the containment and associated procedures at the site.

Food supply in the UK is a critical national infrastructure (CNI) sector and a sector resilience plan is completed annually by Defra as lead Government Department. The plan sets out the background to resilience of the sector, an assessment of risk, and a plan for mitigation action. A summary of the plan is published by the Cabinet Office at

https://www.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/370156/20141103_Summary_sector_resilience_plan_2014.pdf.

Food supply is considered to be resilient because of the size, diversity, and strong contingency planning in the food industry sectors, as demonstrated by the response to potentially disruptive challenges in recent years. There is a clear recognition of the dependency on other critical sectors such as energy, transport, and communications, and Defra works closely with the industry sectors and with other lead Government Departments to mitigate risk.

The Government sees the contribution of UK agriculture as vital to our food security. A detailed analysis of the global and domestic factors affecting UK food security, the UK Food Security Assessment, was published in 2010 and refreshed in 2012. Its main conclusion was that UK food security depends on a combination of a strong domestic food production base and access to a wide variety of world markets. The assessment also analysed the impact of extreme scenarios and concluded that if necessary the UK could feed itself from domestic resources.

The Government is working on a 25 Year Plan for Food and Farming which will set out ways our domestic food production base can be further strengthened, building on the Great British brand.

The payment window for the Basic Payment Scheme 2015 runs between 1st December 2015 and 30th June 2016.

We received around 88,000 Basic Payment Scheme applications for 2015. On the 1st December, the opening of the Basic Payment Scheme 2015 payment window, we paid around 33,000 claims. This means that, as a proportion, around 62% of claims are still being processed.

The industry is making considerable efforts to keep as much of the railway running for passengers and freight. However, strikes have a hugely negative impact, and come at a significant cost to our economy, affecting a wide range of businesses and sectors.

My Department is taking part in regular roundtables and discussions with those industries most disrupted by industrial action, so we understand the concerns of businesses and passenger groups

Airport planning applications should be judged by the relevant planning authority, taking careful account of all relevant considerations, including environmental impacts and proposed mitigations.

In July 2021, we published the Jet Zero Consultation which outlines our vision for the aviation sector to reach net zero by 2050. The consultation focuses on the rapid development of technologies in a way that maintains the benefits of air travel whilst maximising the opportunities that decarbonisation can bring to the UK. We continue to carefully consider the consultation responses in the development of the final Jet Zero Strategy which is to be published later this year and will set out the framework for reducing aviation emissions from the sector.

Reopening the railway line from Bristol to Portishead is being led and funded by the West of England Combined Authority and North Somerset Council as Phase 1B of MetroWest. The Department for Transport has committed to make a capped funding contribution of £31.9m towards the scheme. My Department expects to receive the Planning Inspectorate’s recommendation regarding the scheme’s Development Consent Order shortly and on which the Secretary of State will need to give his decision.

The Government's Aviation Policy Framework, published in March 2013, recognised the contribution that airports across the UK – such as Bristol Airport – make to local, regional and national economies, and the important role they play an in securing connectivity for local populations. Bristol Airport handled over six million passengers during 2013, has direct air services to over one hundred destinations, and its on-site businesses provide valuable employment for approximately three thousand people.

Last month the independent Airports Commission published a call for evidence on the domestic and international air connectivity provided by airports across the country. It also examines connectivity trends at these airports, how the business models of these airports are developing, and whether the connectivity provided by these airports can be enhanced.

Personal Independence Payment (PIP) has been available in Great Britain since April 2013 and will be introduced in Northern Ireland later this year. A person’s nationality is not a consideration when assessing entitlement to PIP; rather it is whether they have a right to reside in Great Britain and whether they have met the presence conditions which are material. Information on the amount of PIP paid to UK and non-UK citizens is not available. Information on benefit expenditure as is available is published on Gov.UK: https://www.gov.uk/government/collections/benefit-expenditure-tables.

The Radcliffe Bay Petroleum Storage Depot is subject to the Control of Major Accident Hazard (COMAH) Regulations 2015 at Upper Tier. This requires it to produce a Safety Report that includes an assessment of the hazards posed by the site to its environmental surroundings including the Severn Estuary, the measures in place to prevent an accident and a plan for mitigatory action, including clean-up, in the event of an accident. Through these Regulations the Environment Agency is working with the site to ensure that adequate and appropriate risk assessments are in place.

The Delivery plan for recovering access to primary care, published by NHS England in May 2023, set out actions on how bureaucracy and workload can be cut by improving the interface between primary and secondary care, cutting unnecessary burdens on general practitioners (GPs) through the Bureaucracy Busting Concordat, published in August 2022, and streamlining the Investment and Impact Fund from 36 to five indicators from 2023/24.

In response to feedback from the profession to make incentive schemes more streamlined and focused, the Department has launched a public consultation on incentive schemes in general practice.

The expanded primary care teams funded through the Additional Roles Reimbursement Scheme add extra clinical capacity, helping to reduce the burden on GPs.

The Delivery plan for recovering access to primary care, published by NHS England in May 2023, set out actions on how bureaucracy and workload can be cut by improving the interface between primary and secondary care, cutting unnecessary burdens on general practitioners (GPs) through the Bureaucracy Busting Concordat, published in August 2022, and streamlining the Investment and Impact Fund from 36 to five indicators from 2023/24.

In response to feedback from the profession to make incentive schemes more streamlined and focused, the Department has launched a public consultation on incentive schemes in general practice.

The expanded primary care teams funded through the Additional Roles Reimbursement Scheme add extra clinical capacity, helping to reduce the burden on GPs.

The following table shows the headcount number of managers in the National Health Service with total earnings of over the requested amounts in the 12 months to the end of March 2023, the latest period available. These are total earnings, which include non-basic-pay elements such as overtime, geographic allowances, or on-call payments, though these will not make a significant part of managers earnings.

Source: NHS England Digital Earnings Statistics

Notes:

1. Data is sourced from the ESR, which is the Human Resources and Payroll system used throughout secondary care by organisations in the HCHS. It includes staff working for NHS trusts, NHS foundation trusts, integrated care boards and central and support organisations in England.
2. Data covers people in the staff groups of ‘managers’ and ‘senior managers’ as defined by their NHS Occupation Code. All managers/senior managers who need to be a qualified doctor, qualified nurse, qualified therapist, qualified scientist, or trained ambulance personnel should be coded in their professional staff group, for example as a nurse and are not included in these figures.
3. If an individual worked in more than one managerial role over the course of the year the earnings are summed to give a person level total. Earnings for roles outside of management are not included.

Following any period of strike action, NHS England publish data on their website on the impact of industrial action. This sets out the number of staff absent as a result of industrial action, and the number of procedures and appointments rescheduled. The data do not include the impact on waiting lists. The data is available at the following link:

https://www.england.nhs.uk/publication/preparedness-for-potential-industrial-action-in-the-nhs/

The table below shows the number of full-time general practice staff who were male and female in September 2005, 2010, 2015 and 2020. Data is not broken down by gender for all practice staff for 2000 and 1995.

Source: https://digital.nhs.uk/data-and-information/publications/statistical/general-and-personal-medical-services

Notes

1. Full-Time Equivalent (FTE) refers to the proportion of full-time contracted hours that the post holder is contracted to work. 1 would indicate they work a full set of hours (37.5), 0.5 that they worked half time. For GPs in Training Grades’ contracts 1 FTE = 40 hours and in this table these FTEs have been converted to the standard wMDS measure of 1 FTE = 37.5 hours for consistency.

1. Figures shown do not include staff working in prisons, army bases, educational establishments, specialist care centres including drug rehabilitation centres, walk-in centres and other alternative settings outside of traditional general practice such as urgent treatment centres and minor injury units.
2. Data from September 2015 onwards was collected using a new methodology and should therefore not be directly compared with data from before September 2015. Figures from September 2015 should be treated with caution as the data submission rates under the new methodology from practices were appreciably lower than for subsequent reporting periods. This means that the reported figures for the early years of the collection may be lower than the true picture. In September 2015, which was the first extract from the new Workforce Minimum Data Set, only three of four Health Education England regions submitted data.
3. It is not recommended that comparisons be made between quarterly or monthly figures (e.g. Mar 16 to Sept 16) due to the unknown effect of seasonality on workforce numbers. Any such comparisons should therefore be treated with extreme caution.
4. Figures from earlier collections (September 2005 to September 2015) should be treated with caution as the data submission rates from practices were appreciably lower than for subsequent reporting periods. This means that the reported figures for the early years of the collection may be lower than the true picture.

This information is published in the FCDO Annual Report and Accounts, the 2021-22 report can be found on gov.uk. I refer the Honourable Member to pages 17(9) and 149(141) of the report https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/1095304/FCDO_Annual_Report_2021_2022_Accessible_290722.pdf

This information is published in the FCDO Annual Report and Accounts, the 2021-22 report can be found on gov.uk. I refer the Honourable Member to pages 17(9) and 149(141) of the report https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/1095304/FCDO_Annual_Report_2021_2022_Accessible_290722.pdf