Marie Goldman

We have no current plans to introduce country-of-origin marking requirements on non-food products and it is a commercial matter for business to decide where they source their products and to assess to what extent the origin might affect the potential market for those products.

More broadly, the government encourages traders to include helpful information on goods on a voluntary basis, particularly where this may be in the best interests of the consumer or represents a unique selling point for a business, as long as the additional information is true and not misleading in any way.

It is for Ofcom, as the independent regulator of postal services, to set and monitor Royal Mail’s service standards, and to decide how to use its powers to investigate and take enforcement action. In December 2024, following its investigation of Royal Mail’s performance in the 2023-24 financial year, Ofcom fined the company £10.5m because of its failure to significantly improve service levels.

Ofcom is currently considering the future of the universal postal service and published a consultation in January proposing a package of reforms to better reflect people’s usage of postal services and support financial sustainability.

The Government has no current plans to change the approach to Daylight Savings.

Copying protected material in the UK will infringe copyright unless it is licensed, or an exception to copyright applies.

The Government published a consultation on Copyright and AI in December 2024 seeking views on proposals for a new regulatory model for text and data mining.

An initial assessment of the options under consideration and their impacts can be found in the summary assessment published alongside the consultation. The Government intends to update its assessment in light of evidence received through the consultation process.

The consultation closed on 25 February and the Government will respond in due course.

Apprenticeships are a great way for individuals to begin, or progress in, a successful career in hairdressing. Employers in the sector have developed a level 2 Hairdressing Professional apprenticeship and a level 2 Barbering Professional apprenticeship to help them develop their workforces.

The department continues to promote the benefits that apprenticeships offer, to students in schools and colleges through the Apprenticeship Support and Knowledge programme, as part of the Skills for Life campaign.

Employers who do not pay the apprenticeship levy, that are usually small to medium-sized enterprises (SMEs), are important to the economy and to apprenticeships. SMEs are more likely to employ younger apprentices and apprentices from disadvantaged areas.

To support non-levy paying employers to access apprenticeships, the government pays full training costs for young apprentices aged 16 to 21, and for apprentices aged 22 to 24 who have an education, health and care (EHC) plan or have been in local authority care. Employers of all sizes, including SMEs, can also benefit from £1000 payments when they take on apprentices aged 16 to 18, or apprentices aged 19 to 24 who have an EHC plan or have been in local authority care.

Employers also benefit from not being required to pay anything towards employees’ National Insurance for all apprentices aged up to age 25 where they earn less than £967 a week, or £50,270 a year.

The government is committed to ensuring that every child has the best start in life. This includes all children and young people with special educational needs and disabilities (SEND). We are committed to improving inclusivity and expertise in mainstream schools.

The department regularly consults with various experts, stakeholders and stakeholder groups, including the Royal College of Occupational Therapists. We will continue to work with the sector as essential and valued partners to deliver our shared mission.

The department is working closely with NHS England to improve access to community health services, including occupational therapy, for children and young people with SEND. NHS England continues to monitor community services waiting lists to assess the number of people on them and the length of time they wait for services, and continues to look at actions to reduce waiting times for these services.

The Department of Health and Social Care have launched a 10 Year Health Plan to reform the NHS. A central part of this will be workforce and how they ensure they train and provide the staff the NHS needs to care for patients across our communities.

The government is committed to ensuring that every child has the best start in life. This includes all children and young people with special educational needs and disabilities (SEND). We are committed to improving inclusivity and expertise in mainstream schools.

The department regularly consults with various experts, stakeholders and stakeholder groups, including the Royal College of Occupational Therapists. We will continue to work with the sector as essential and valued partners to deliver our shared mission.

The department is working closely with NHS England to improve access to community health services, including occupational therapy, for children and young people with SEND. NHS England continues to monitor community services waiting lists to assess the number of people on them and the length of time they wait for services, and continues to look at actions to reduce waiting times for these services.

The Department of Health and Social Care have launched a 10 Year Health Plan to reform the NHS. A central part of this will be workforce and how they ensure they train and provide the staff the NHS needs to care for patients across our communities.

The government has agreed that the department will be compensated for the increase in National Insurance Contributions (NICs) paid by state-funding schools. Work is underway to determine how much the department will receive for those employers within its remit.

Compensation for special education providers funded from local authorities’ high needs budgets will be additional to the £1 billion increase to high needs funding announced at the Autumn Budget 2024. Due to timing constraints, NICs funding will need to be provided as a separate grant, alongside the dedicated schools grant, in 2025/26.

The government does not set or recommend pay in further education (FE), including in sixth form colleges and other FE institutions. The pay and conditions of FE staff remains the responsibility of individual colleges and providers who are free to implement pay arrangements in line with their local needs.

The department recognises the vital role that teachers in sixth form colleges, as well as other FE colleges, play in developing the skills needed to drive our missions to improve opportunity and economic growth. The department is investing around an additional £600 million to support FE across the 2024/25 and 2025/26 financial years. This includes extending retention payments of up to £6,000 after tax to eligible early career FE teachers in key subject areas, including in sixth form colleges. The department also continues to support recruitment and retention with teacher training bursaries worth up to £30,000 tax-free in certain key subject areas, and with support for industry professionals to enter the teaching workforce through the Taking Teaching Further programme.

My right hon. Friend, the Chancellor of the Exchequer has announced a budget on 30 October to be followed by a multi-year spending review in the spring of next year. Decisions about future post-16 funding and capital programmes will be subject to the outcomes of these fiscal events.

The Government is working together with the devolved Governments to understand the issue, with a view to legislate to ban wet wipes containing plastic across the UK.

Whilst it is a commercial decision for Eurostar to make on the reinstatement of these services, I recognise the continued disappointment felt by local communities and businesses and I too am keen to see the reinstatement of these services. Officials regularly engage with Kent stakeholders, including MPs, councillors and representatives to discuss this and are committed to continue explore potential solutions.

The Driver and Vehicle Standards Agency (DVSA) believes that most people want to be safe, law-abiding drivers and any post-test intervention needs to be focused where it will achieve most benefit and, where appropriate, should be targeted against irresponsible drivers.

The courts already have the powers to require drivers to retake the driving test in certain circumstances, and the police can also offer remedial education courses to those who would otherwise be prosecuted for some driving offences.

There are no plans to introduce mandatory vehicle driving re-tests.

If drivers do not drive for a period of time, DVSA recommends they receive a form of refresher training.

The first payment of Universal Credit is usually made around five weeks after the claim is made.

The first calendar month is the initial assessment period, during which information is verified to ensure accurate payments. At the end of that period, entitlement for that month is calculated and paid seven days later. Payments thereafter are made monthly in arrears. Assessment Periods, once made, are set and cannot be changed.

Universal Credit is designed to top-up earnings from employment, adapting to changes in the amount of earnings received each month. Assessing UC monthly ensures that we receive at least one update of earnings information for each working member of a household, meaning that the benefit calculated accurately reflects the needs of the household.

There are currently no plans to change Universal Credit assessment periods.

The PPF and FAS rules on indexation have been the subject of much discussion. I am aware of the concerns surrounding the matter and understand the problems experienced by Defined Benefit pension scheme members adjusting to an income in retirement which may be less than they were expecting. I will continue to consider this issue over the coming months.

The Government is considering the Select Committee’s valuable report and will respond fully to the report and recommendations later this year.

Officials from the Department for Work and Pensions and the Office for Equality and Opportunity met with Endometriosis UK to discuss the development of Equality Action Plans on 13th November 2024.

On 18^th October 2024 the Government appointed Mariella Frostrup as the new Menopause Employment Ambassador. The Menopause Employment Ambassador will work closely with employers across the country to improve workplace support for women experiencing menopause and wider women’s health issues including menstrual health conditions.

This appointment comes as the government has proposed a wide-ranging set of generational reforms to boost protections for workers. The Employment Rights Bill is the first phase of delivering the Government’s plan to Make Work Pay, supporting workers through strengthening statutory sick pay, making flexible working the default, and requiring large employers to produce equality action plans.

NHS England commissioned Frontier Economics to undertake an independent economic analysis of National Health Service pharmacy funding in 2024. This work is nearing completion and will be published.

Interoperability between IT systems would improve the quality of care and safety for patients, as well as enabling better informed clinical and care decision-making, by allowing for information to be shared easily, in real time, between organisations that use different systems.

Information standards relating to information technology would enable such interoperability. The Government will shortly commence section 95 of the Health and Care Act 2022 and introduce regulations, which will, with Parliament’s approval, set out the procedure for preparing and publishing mandatory information standards for public and private health and adult social care providers.

The Data (Use and Access) (DUA) Bill will, Parliament permitting, subsequently make standards mandatory for IT providers in the health and care system, and make provision for ensuring compliance.

The impact assessment for these measures in the DUA Bill estimates benefits in terms of efficiencies of over £100 million over ten years. This is available at the following link:

https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/media/6719388b0d1a5bc610b778cd/data_use_and_access_bill_open_data_architecture_information_standards_impact_assessment.pdf

The Building the Right Support Action Plan, published in 2022, contains commitments which have not yet passed their delivery dates, including the commitment to reform the Mental Health Act.

We do not plan to create new actions in a new action plan while the bill is before Parliament. However, we recognise that this is a vitally important area, and we are considering how to ensure that more people with a learning disability and autistic people are supported well in the community, ahead of the commencement of the Mental Health Act reforms.

Adult social care is a historically low paid sector, as most care workers are paid at or just above the National Living Wage. The recently introduced Employment Rights Bill aims to address this by establishing a framework for Fair Pay Agreements, through which an agreement on pay and other terms and conditions for the adult social care sector can be negotiated and reached by employers, worker representatives, and others in partnership.

We have no plans to do so, as there is already an existing National Health Service-funded salaried training route for education based mental health practitioners, which enables them to work across education and healthcare to provide mental health support for children and young people in schools and colleges.