Asked by: Mike Weatherley (Conservative - Hove)
Question to the Department for Transport:
To ask the Secretary of State for Transport, what steps his Department is taking to make bus lane access standardised throughout the country.
Answered by Robert Goodwill
Bus lanes are provided to give bus services priority during congested times, which can improve punctuality, reliability and journey times.
Provision of bus lanes is the responsibility of local traffic authorities, including decisions on what type of vehicles are allowed access. The Government believes these decisions are best made at local level as local circumstances will influence what is appropriate. Traffic signing must clearly reflect the classes of vehicle permitted to access bus lanes, so that drivers are clear what is expected of them.
As well as buses and pedal cycles, authorities have discretion to allow motorcycles, hackney carriages and ‘authorised vehicles’ to access bus lanes.
Asked by: Mike Weatherley (Conservative - Hove)
Question to the Department for Education:
To ask the Secretary of State for Education, if she will discuss with the Secretary of State for Business, Innovation and Skills potential steps to support teachers in raising awareness among schoolchildren of the importance of intellectual property.
Answered by Nick Gibb
Schools are required to teach a broad and balanced curriculum which prepares pupils for the opportunities, responsibilities and experiences of later life. Our new national curriculum, introduced in September 2014, provides an outline of core knowledge around which teachers can develop stimulating lessons to promote the development of pupils’ knowledge, understanding and skills as part of the wider school curriculum.
The new national curriculum gives teachers greater flexibility to teach topics that are appropriate and meet the needs of pupils, including the importance of intellectual property rights. It is for individual schools to decide what support and resources they wish to draw on in developing and teaching their school curriculum.
Asked by: Mike Weatherley (Conservative - Hove)
Question to the Department for Digital, Culture, Media & Sport:
To ask the Secretary of State for Culture, Media and Sport, what assessment process his Department plans to implement for the 12 month secondary ticketing review.
Answered by Helen Grant
The statutory review of the secondary ticketing market will be a full review of consumer protection measures in the market. It will be independently led and it will be presented to Parliament.
Asked by: Mike Weatherley (Conservative - Hove)
Question
To ask the Secretary of State for Business, Innovation and Skills, what progress he has made on the creation of a copyright education programme.
Answered by Lord Vaizey of Didcot
The Intellectual Property Office (IPO) has a programme of intellectual property (IP) education, covering all forms of IP including copyright. This IPO provides teaching resources covering all ages of education, from early years through to university. All elements of this work are developed in partnership with industry as well as IP professionals.
This year the IPO will update its crackingideas.com website to develop it into a portal for all education resources. The portal will target teachers and university tutors, providing them with a variety of resources that link into curriculum subjects to bring IP to life and make it easy to introduce IP issues including copyright into the classroom. It will bring together the various products of the IPO as well as linking to other material developed by partners. A cross section of representatives from the creative industries are providing input to the development of resources and the IPO has already commissioned focus group research with teachers to ensure that all resources are effective. The portal will complement other IPO initiatives to raise understanding of copyright, including Music Inc, a downloadable game about the music industry and the impact of piracy.
Asked by: Mike Weatherley (Conservative - Hove)
Question
To ask the Secretary of State for Business, Innovation and Skills, what progress he has made on an agreement with the BBC on the creation of a copyright education programme.
Answered by Lord Vaizey of Didcot
The department has not formalised an agreement with the BBC regarding its editorial content on intellectual property. However, the BBC has done a great deal of work in this area. In particular, the BBC has just launched a new website, Copyright Aware, highlighting and explaining the subject of copyright. The site includes a variety of resources and aims to encourage consumers and creators to deal more consciously and responsibly with creative works, recognising the effort and skill that has gone into producing them.
Asked by: Mike Weatherley (Conservative - Hove)
Question
To ask the Secretary of State for Business, Innovation and Skills, what steps he has taken to support small and medium-sized digital businesses to encourage them to create resources to educate people about intellectual property rights.
Answered by Lord Vaizey of Didcot
The Intellectual Property Office (IPO) produces a wide variety of resources to educate SMEs about the use of intellectual property (IP). The suite of online tools ‘IP for business’ includes an information booklet, a short free online learning tool, a series of IP health checks that allow businesses to assess IP related opportunities and risks for their own company, and a paid for master class providing more in depth IP knowledge. These tools will help businesses in all sectors, including digital businesses. The IPO also attends events for small businesses, providing information and signposting to advice on IP issues. In addition, the IPO provides support to business advisors, including training and networking events, to improve their understanding of IP and how it can apply to the businesses they advise.
The Intellectual Property Office also works with partner organisations to promote IP understanding and encourage the sharing of information, including any educational resources, amongst businesses.
Asked by: Mike Weatherley (Conservative - Hove)
Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:
To ask the Secretary of State for Health, if he will bring forward proposals to give GPs greater access to hospital diagnostic tests and specialist tests.
Answered by Dan Poulter
Arrangements are already in place locally to enable general practitioners to have direct access to appropriate tests to support the primary investigation of disease in all areas of diagnostic tests.
A significant proportion of the work undertaken by pathology laboratories and imaging services is associated with direct access from primary care.
Asked by: Mike Weatherley (Conservative - Hove)
Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:
To ask the Secretary of State for Health, what steps he has taken to increase public awareness of symptoms of cancer.
Answered by Jane Ellison
Since early 2011 the Department of Health (Public Health England from 1 April 2013) has been running Be Clear on Cancer campaigns. These are designed to:
- raise the public’s awareness of specific cancer symptoms;
- encourage people with those symptoms to go to the doctor; and
- diagnose cancer at an earlier stage, and therefore make it more treatable, and thereby improve cancer survival rates.
Campaigns that have run nationally include bowel, lung, kidney and bladder (under the common symptom of “blood in pee”), oesophago-gastric, and breast cancer in older women.
Public Health England works closely with the Department and NHS England to ensure that health care professionals are also targeted with campaign information to encourage earlier diagnoses and referrals.
Asked by: Mike Weatherley (Conservative - Hove)
Question to the Department for Transport:
To ask the Secretary of State for Transport, what assessment he has made of the effects of removing bus lanes in Manchester on the rate of traffic flow.
Answered by Robert Goodwill
The Department has not carried out any recent assessment of the impact of bus lanes on traffic flow. However, in 2004 we published ‘Bus Priority: The Way Ahead (Resource Pack Edition 2)’ which was the final report of a 4-year research project comprising the analysis of case studies about bus priority projects on UK roads.
Provision of bus priority facilities, including bus lanes, are for the relevant local authority. Assessment and monitoring of the impact of bus lanes on traffic is for the authority concerned to carry out. In relation to Manchester, the responsible authority is Transport for Greater Manchester.
Asked by: Mike Weatherley (Conservative - Hove)
Question
To ask the Secretary of State for Business, Innovation and Skills, what progress has been made on giving intellectual property rights holders an opportunity to discuss with search engine providers how to maximise the prioritisation of sites with legitimate content.
Answered by Lord Vaizey of Didcot
Since October 2014, my noble Friend the Minister for Intellectual Property Baroness Neville-Rolfe has chaired 4 roundtable meetings between representatives of the creative industries and leading UK search engines.
The meetings have been focused on discussing steps that can be taken to reduce the number of consumers led to copyright infringing websites through search results.
Work continues, but during this period the group has seen a substantial improvement in the way some of the most infringing sites are dealt with in search rankings.