Samantha Niblett

Responsibility for investigating individual and market-wide competition issues, including vertical integration, falls to the Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) as the UK’s independent competition authority.

The CMA is currently conducting a market investigation into veterinary services for household pets.

The Competition and Markets Authority’s market investigation into veterinary services for household pets is on-going. The final report is expected early next year and will set out the actions the CMA has decided to take.

As the UK’s independent competition authority, the CMA is responsible for decisions relating to its investigations, including on remedies.

Responsibility for investigating individual and market-wide competition issues, including consolidation, falls to the Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) as the UK’s independent competition authority.

The CMA is currently conducting a market investigation into veterinary services for household pets.

The Department for Business and Trade has spent £4.8m on software licences from Microsoft in the last 12 months, December 2024 to November 2025. This represents 5% of the Department's total Digital, Data & Technology spend.

There are currently no plans to make such an assessment by the Department. The Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) is examining software licensing practices as part of its market investigation into cloud services. Its final report must be published by 4 August and Government will review the CMA's findings.

The June Spending Review set out the CMA's budget from 2026/27. The CMA has embarked on an operational transformation programme to ensure it can continue to deliver impactful outcomes, including in digital markets, while operating within its multi-year funding envelope.

The CMA's priorities across its work are set out in its Annual Plan 2025/26, which commits to using the new digital markets competition regime flexibly, proportionately and collaboratively to unlock opportunities for growth across the UK tech sector and the wider economy.

The Employment Rights Bill will make flexible working the default, including for working parents. Employers will have to accept flexible working requests unless not reasonably feasible and explain their decision if rejecting requests.

The Equality Act 2010 protects people from direct discrimination “by association”.

The Dedicated Schools Grant funds special educational and alternative provision. Local authorities distribute SEN Inclusion Funding. Disability Access Funding (DAF) is designed to support disabled children's access to entitlements. In 2025-26, DAF funding will increase to £938 per eligible child. The Government is reviewing SEN funding, looking at funding arrangements and considering whether changes are needed.

The Digital Markets, Competition and Consumers Act 2024 has empowered the Competition and Markets Authority to designate firms which exert significant control in respect of digital activities with “Strategic Market Status” (SMS), following an evidence-based assessment.

The CMA can carry out investigations to determine the most appropriate remedies for a specific competition concern. Remedies will ensure designated firms treat businesses and consumers fairly, promote more dynamic markets and help new competitors enter the market. The CMA has already exercised its new powers by launching three SMS investigations into large technology firms in January this year.

The Competition and Markets Authority has been awarded enhanced powers by the Digital Markets, Competition and Consumers (“DMCC”) Act 2024 to protect UK consumers and businesses from unfair or harmful practices by the very largest technology firms.

The DMCC Act enables the CMA to provide opportunities to encourage the benefits of investment and innovation from the largest digital firms, while ensuring a level playing-field for the many start-ups and scale-ups across the UK tech sector. This should promote greater innovation, more choice and more competitive process across the sector benefiting UK businesses, consumers and government.

The Digital Markets, Competition and Consumers Act 2024 has enhanced the powers of the Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) to promote competition in digital markets for the benefit of businesses and consumers.

Government software procurement is negotiated on a case-by-case basis in accordance with the new Procurement Act 2023, which came into effect in February of this year. The new rules under the Act increase flexibility, transparency and accountability.

The Government expects directors to act lawfully and responsibly in respect of the companies they run and that includes ensuring that liabilities and other obligations are discharged before they apply for a company's voluntary dissolution. Those who fail to do so lay themselves open to the risk of personal liability, director disqualification and, potentially, imprisonment. The Government made a commitment in the Autumn Statement 2024 to increase collaboration between HMRC, Companies House, and the Insolvency Service to tackle those using contrived corporate insolvencies and dissolutions to exploit and defraud customers and creditors.

We intend to introduce permanently lower tax rates for retail, hospitality, and leisure (RHL) properties, including those on the high street, from 2026-27. This tax cut must be sustainably funded, and so we intend to apply a higher rate from 2026-27 on the most valuable properties - those with a Rateable Value of £500,000 and above. These represent less than one per cent of all properties, but include the majority of large distribution warehouses, including those used by online giants.

Ahead of these changes being made, we have prevented RHL relief from ending in April 2025 by extending it for one year at 40 per cent up to a cash cap of £110,000 per business and frozen the small business multiplier.

We are also working with businesses to understand their barriers to growth and High Streets will be a key pillar of our forthcoming Small Business Strategy.

The Department for Business and Trade works with the private sector led Invest in Women, with the shared ambition to make the UK a great place to be a female business founder. On Monday 25th November, the Taskforce celebrated successfully raising over £250 million for its funding pool for women-led businesses.

The Government is determined to harness the talent and creativity of every woman in the country. The plan to 'Make Work Pay' will transform the lives of working women, including by strengthening rights to equal pay and providing protections from maternity and menopause discrimination and sexual harassment.

Pubs and hospitality businesses, including those in rural areas and South Derbyshire, are at the heart of our communities and are vital for economic growth. That is why the Government is creating a fairer business rate system by introducing permanently lower tax rates for retail, hospitality, and leisure businesses from 2026-27 and extending the current relief for 1 year at 40%.

The government is also reducing alcohol duty on qualifying draught products, representing an overall reduction in duty bills of over £85m a year.

We will also transform the apprenticeship levy into a more flexible growth and skills levy to support business, including in the hospitality industry and boost opportunity.

Through the Hospitality Sector Council, we are addressing strategic issues for the sector related to high street regeneration, skills, sustainability, and productivity.

Standing charges predominantly recover ‘fixed’ costs that do not vary by energy use. This includes supplier’s operational costs for serving each customer and the cost of essential network maintenance and upgrades, which are necessary to keep all consumers connected, minimise constraint costs, meet the capacity needed to deliver clean power by 2030, and help bring down bills for households and businesses for good.

However, we know that too much of the burden of the bill is placed on standing charges, and we are committed to ensuring that standing charges are fair to all consumers, including SMEs. As part of this, Ofgem have launched a Cost Allocation and Recovery Review (CARR) to consider how energy system costs can be recovered from consumers, including from SMEs, in a fairer and more efficient way and DESNZ will continue to engage closely with Ofgem on the work.

Ministers regularly engage with Ofgem on a range of issues covering the full breadth of the energy system.

As Minister for Energy, I do not personally approve any individual planning applications. The Department approves energy projects classified as Nationally Significant Infrastructure Projects, and the process is governed by the Planning Act 2008, which includes some large solar farms, including those with batter storage systems attached. Stand-alone battery energy storage systems are not classed as nationally significant infrastructure. Guidance for nationally significant infrastructure project projects is available on Planning Inspectorate website, including how local communities can engage with the examination process, register as an interest party and raise concerns about proposed developments.

Pensioners not in receipt of benefits may be able to access the Flexible Eligibility element of the ECO4 scheme (ECO Flex) which allows those with a gross combined household income of up to £31,000 to seek support. ECO Flex also has additional routes which are not based on income for households, but where a member has been diagnosed with a specific long-term health condition which could be impacted by living in a cold home. There are currently no plans to make further changes to eligibility under the ECO4 scheme.

To reach our Clean Power target by 2030 we need to decarbonise the way we heat and cool our homes and workplaces. After many years of stop-start settlements by previous governments, this government has provided an exceptional initial three-year settlement for home upgrades despite this only being a single-year fiscal event. This demonstrates our ambitions to deliver the Warm Homes Plan as effectively as possible.

The new Wave 3 of the Warm Homes: Social Housing Fund (WH:SHF) and Warm Homes: Local Grant (WH:LG) will support low-income homeowners and private tenants and social tenants in England with energy performance upgrades and cleaner heating, with delivery expected in 2025.

DSIT spend of £3,044,084.14 for DSIT Microsoft Licences in the last 12 months. We have not provided the proportion of the total technology spend as it is not a separate reporting category within Annual Report and Accounts (ARA).

The Department for Science, Innovation and Technology (DSIT) continues to monitor systemic risks to UK critical national infrastructure from reliance on cloud providers, including resilience measures and contingency planning following recent service outages. DSIT works closely with each cloud provider during and after any incident to ensure improved resilience and lessons learnt are shared across Government. For example, following earlier global digital resilience incidents, we are working to strengthen our capability to coordinate this kind of incident across Government.

Government recommends that public sector organisations adopt a multi-region approach, in which they make controlled, considered use of regions in a way which is compatible with UK law. This helps improve resilience by removing the reliance on any one region.

DSIT will publish the Government Cyber Action Plan this Winter, which sets out a clear approach for Government and the public sector to manage cyber security and resilience incidents impacting Government services.

Government also recognises the importance of robust protections for the services essential to our society and economy – that is why we introduced the Cyber Security and Resilience Bill on 12 November.

In July, the Competition and Markets Authority (the CMA) recommended their board prioritise a future Strategic Market Status investigation into competition in the cloud market. The CMA is independent of Government and any decisions on which markets it investigates is for their Board.

The Competition and Markets Authority (the CMA) has completed 3 Strategic Market Status investigations this year. The CMA is independent of the Government and decisions on which markets to investigate is for their Board. The CMA has published guidance on its website on how it will prioritise Strategic Market Status designations.

The Government is committed to supporting a competitive and innovative digital economy. This is why we prioritised the commencement of the Competition and Markets Authority’s (the CMA) new powers in digital markets. The CMA is independent of Government, and any decisions on which markets it investigates is for their Board.

The State of Digital Government review, A blueprint for modern digital government and the Performance Review of Digital Spend, all published this year, have highlighted the need to reform digital purchasing.

The Government has launched a Digital Commercial Centre of Excellence, containing experts from the Digital and Commercial Functions, within the Government Digital Service (GDS) in my department. It is pursuing multiple strategies to improve value for money and outcomes including central buying of commodity services, development of a digital sourcing strategy, creation of technical enablers and joined-up management of strategic digital suppliers.

The State of Digital Government review, A blueprint for modern digital government and the Performance Review of Digital Spend, all published this year, have highlighted the need to reform digital purchasing.

The Government has launched a Digital Commercial Centre of Excellence, containing experts from the Digital and Commercial Functions, within the Government Digital Service (GDS) in my department. It is pursuing multiple strategies to improve value for money and outcomes including central buying of commodity services, development of a digital sourcing strategy, creation of technical enablers and joined-up management of strategic digital suppliers.

The Government continues to fund the Health Innovation Network to support health and social care teams to identify, test, and scale new solutions – including new health technologies – to major NHS challenges. Since 2018, HIN programmes have created or secured over 10,000 jobs and provided bespoke support to thousands of SME innovators, contributing >£2.6bn to UK economy with a 3:1 return on investment.

Other Government-funded regional networks include the NIHR Research Delivery Network, which enables the health and care system to attract, optimise and deliver research across England. This includes supporting the delivery of research funded by health technology SMEs.

Government procures software via a number of agreed frameworks which are tendered via the Crown Commercial Service and are awarded under the relevant procurement regulations. The introduction of the new procurement act 2023 will provide government with an ability to consider how such services are contracted in the future.

The creation of the Digital Commercial Centre of Excellence is overseeing the development of sourcing/category strategies to co-ordinate how we shape demand, drive down usage and optmise the way such assets are used. This work is currently underway.