Peter Prinsley

This is a devolved matter, and the information provided therefore relates to England only.

The Secretary of State has recently announced that the secondary legislation necessary to implement the Precision Breeding Act for plants in England will be laid by the end of March.

Defra is also considering the animal welfare framework outlined in the Precision Breeding Act.

This government is committed to delivering economic growth, and projects such as the Ely Area Capacity Enhancement and upgrades to Haughley Junction have the potential to contribute to this. While the previous government made public statements of support for both projects, no funding was provided to allow either to progress.

The Chancellor has been clear about the state of the nation's finances and has launched a multi-year Spending Review. Decisions and timescales about individual projects will be informed by the review process and confirmed in due course.

Duties on employers are well established in the Control of Noise at Work Regulations 2005, which require employers to:

a) Carry out hearing tests regularly by a competent person (health surveillance) when there may be a risk to their employee’s hearing, and undertake protective measures based on the results, and

b) Provide adequate personal hearing protection where noise exposure cannot be eliminated or controlled at source.

Health and Safety Executive (HSE) provides guidance and tools to help employers understand their obligations through its website, and regularly engages stakeholders to promote noise controls and ensuring hearing protection is fit for purpose in terms of its condition and specific use.

HSE enforces these regulations and is conducting a long-term programme of targeted inspections of higher risk workplaces, forming a key element of HSE’s Protecting People and Places strategy to reduce work-related ill-health in the workplace.

All local education providers, including in the East of England, are responsible for ensuring they have the appropriate capacity, including facilities, for training staff, including surgeons.

The General Medical Council’s (GMC’s) Promoting excellence: standards for medical education and training sets out the standards that the GMC expects organisations responsible for educating and training medical students and doctors in the United Kingdom to meet. This includes having the capacity, resources, and facilities to deliver safe and relevant learning opportunities, clinical supervision, and practical experiences for learners.

NHS England’s Education Quality Framework states that all staff, including learners and educators, should have access to the necessary resources, facilities, and equipment to ensure their safety within the workplace and to deliver safe clinical care. The framework is monitored locally in collaboration with medical schools. In addition, NHS England’s NHS Education Funding Agreement sets out in detail the expectations around the premises and facilities of placement providers.

The Elective Reform Plan, launched as part of the Government’s Plan for Change, sets out how we will get back to the NHS Constitutional Standard that 92% of patients wait no longer than 18 weeks from Referral to Treatment by the end of this Parliament, and will also ensure that patients have the best possible experience of care.

We have set an ambition for 2025/26 that we reach 65% of patients waiting no longer than 18 weeks nationally, and for all trusts to deliver a minimum 5% improvement by March 2026. We will also publish minimum standards of care that patients can expect to experience, and will make digital improvements, including to the NHS App, to provide patients with greater choice, control, and flexibility.

At the Autumn Budget, my Rt. Hon. Friend, the Chancellor of the Exchequer announced an additional £1.5 billion in funding to support National Health Service performance across secondary and emergency care, including for surgical hubs. We will set out details of the allocation of funding for surgical hubs at the earliest opportunity, including details and locations of surgical hubs. Trusts with no operational or planned surgical hubs will be prioritised for new hub funding, as well as trusts with the highest waiting lists.

Across the country, dedicated and protected surgical hubs are transforming the way the NHS provides elective care, by focussing on high volume low complexity surgeries. The Bury St Edmunds and Stowmarket constituency falls under the Suffolk and North East Essex Integrated Care Board. They have two recently opened surgical hubs, one in Ipswich, which opened in July 2024, and the second is the Essex and Suffolk Elective Orthopaedic Centre ESEOC, which opened in November 2024.

NHS England is currently reviewing the service provision and national service specification for Hyperbaric Oxygen Therapy Services, used to clearly define the standards of care expected from organisations funded by NHS England to provide specialised care, due to the current service contracts expiring during 2025. Revisions to service specification follow the published process, which supports appropriate stakeholder engagement and governance. More information on the process is available at the following link:

https://www.england.nhs.uk/publication/methods-national-service-specifications/

NHS England has considered the feedback received from the recent public consultation on the Hyperbaric Oxygen Therapy Services revised service specification, alongside other sources of evidence, to inform its plans for the service re-procurement. The outcome of this will be made available in due course.

Further, NHS England is required to commission services, including Hyperbaric Oxygen Therapy Services, in line with the National Health Service’s triple aim of improving health outcomes, improving quality of care and ensuring value for the system.

The Department plans to commence section 95 in 2025. This will be subject to Parliament’s approval of the regulations setting out the procedure for preparing and publishing mandatory information standards, which are a necessary part of the package of measures introduced by section 95.

National Health Service organisations and publicly funded social care providers must comply with the Accessible Information Standard (AIS), to meet the communication needs of patients and carers with a disability, impairment, or sensory loss. The AIS conformance criteria, published in 2016, set out how organisations should comply with the AIS, with further information available at the following link:

https://www.england.nhs.uk/about/equality/equality-hub/patient-equalities-programme/equality-frameworks-and-information-standards/accessibleinfo/resources/assess-conformance/

The responsibility for monitoring compliance with the AIS sits with the commissioner of the service.

NHS England is responsible for the AIS, and has completed a review of the AIS to help ensure that the communication needs of people with a disability, impairment, or sensory loss are met in health and care provision. One of the aims of the review was to strengthen assurance of implementation of the AIS, and a self-assessment framework has been developed to support providers of NHS and social care services to measure their performance against the AIS, and develop improvement action plans to address gaps in implementation. The AIS self-assessment framework is designed to enable enhancements around assurance, and allows organisations, commissioners, and the Care Quality Commission to judge performance and compliance.

A revised AIS is being reviewed with a view to publication, and in the meantime NHS England is continuing to work to support implementation with awareness raising, communication and engagement, and a review of the current e-learning modules on the AIS. The intention is to ensure that staff and organisations in the NHS are aware of the AIS and the importance of meeting the information and communication needs of disabled people using these services.

The different relative strengths of the tax bases of councils in England are taken into account in the Local Government Finance Settlement through the Settlement Funding Assessment (SFA) formula, which is used to calculate the SFA allocation that each authority is given.

When the Settlement Funding Assessment was last calculated in 2013/14, Class P exemptions (meaning that the property will be exempt where members and their dependants of visiting forces would be liable for council tax if property is occupied or unoccupied) were considered within the calculation.

This led to West Suffolk receiving an increased share of grant and retained business rates to account for the loss in council tax income. From our assessment in 2013 to 2024, the number of Class P exempt dwellings in West Suffolk has increased by 171 to 4,872, an increase of 2%.The Government has committed to updating the approach to funding allocations within the Local Government Finance Settlement.