Legislation Day: Finance Bill
(1 day, 21 hours ago)
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The Exchequer Secretary to the Treasury (James Murray)
The Government are committed to developing and legislating for tax policy in a way that achieves long-term economic stability and supports economic growth.
The Government are committed to a single major fiscal event each year, through which the Budget is delivered. Following the Budget, relevant tax policy measures will be legislated for in the Finance Bill or another appropriate legislative vehicle.
The Government will publish draft clauses for the next Finance Bill, covering pre-announced policy changes, on 21 July, along with accompanying explanatory notes, tax information and impact notes, responses to consultations and other supporting documents. All publications will be available on the gov.uk website.
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Afghan Resettlement Scheme Data Incident: Update
(1 day, 21 hours ago)
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The Minister for the Armed Forces (Luke Pollard)
I would like to update the House on the proactive approach the Ministry of Defence has taken for a historical data handling incident affecting 277 individuals that applied to the Afghan relocation and assistance policy scheme in 2021 under the previous Administration.
Members will be aware this data handling incident involved group emails being sent to multiple individuals in September 2021. These emails mistakenly made recipients’ email addresses visible to all, instead of using the blind carbon copy function. After an investigation by the Information Commissioner’s Office, the then Minister for the Armed Forces laid before the House a written ministerial statement on 13 December 2023, detailing the Ministry of Defence’s commitment to financially compensate those directly impacted by the data incident.
Having reviewed this matter, it is my full intention to make good on the previous Ministers’ commitments. I can confirm to Members that the Ministry of Defence will be directly contacting those individuals who were affected by the data incident. Once a response is received and the affected individual’s identity confirmed, a single ex-gratia payment of up to £4,000 per individual will be made. The total cost is expected to be in the region of £1.6 million and every effort will be made to ensure payments are made as quickly as reasonably practical.
I cannot undo past mistakes, but I wish to assure Members that, in my role as Minister for the Armed Forces, I intend to drive improvement in the Department’s data handling training and practices. Defence’s record on these topics must improve and I am determined to ensure it does.
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UK Onshore Wind Industry
(1 day, 21 hours ago)
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The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Energy Security and Net Zero (Michael Shanks)
I am tabling this statement to inform members of the publication of the onshore wind taskforce strategy and updated community benefits guidance for onshore wind in England.
The Government are committed to delivering a clean, affordable and secure energy system by 2030, and accelerating progress towards net zero. Onshore wind is one of the cheapest electricity generation technologies and will play a crucial role in delivering our decarbonisation goals. Having more low-cost renewables like onshore wind reduces the UK’s exposure to volatile global fossil fuel prices, which protects consumer energy bills against future price shocks. Onshore wind is therefore vital to boost Britain’s energy independence, protect bill payers, support high-skilled jobs and tackle the climate crisis.
Making Britain a clean energy superpower is one of the Government’s five missions. The clean power action plan, published in December 2024, set a target for 27 to 29 GW of onshore wind by 2030. Today’s publications are a significant step forward in delivering the 2030 mission. This mission is about driving economic growth as well as clean power, and industries such as onshore wind present a significant economic opportunity. For example, by 2030 up to 45,000 UK jobs could be supported by the onshore wind sector.
Onshore wind taskforce strategy
The strategy is the main output of a joint Government and industry taskforce established to identify and agree essential actions to mitigate barriers to deployment across the UK and capitalise on the economic benefits. The taskforce was set up following the removal of the de facto ban on onshore wind in England in July 2024 to streamline and maximise the deployment of onshore wind.
This is the Government’s first ever dedicated strategy for onshore wind, committing to 42 actions across planning, grid, workforce, financing and aviation. This will ensure we quickly unlock onshore wind deployment, deliver on the economic benefits, and make progress towards our clean power mission. Highlights of the onshore wind strategy include:
New actions to ensure the planning system is ready for the first English projects to come through the pipeline since the removal of the de facto ban, which severely limited deployment.
Ambitious actions to address interference issues between onshore wind turbines and civil and military aviation systems, to help get onshore wind projects moving.
A range of new commitments, alongside industry, to build the evidence base to support future onshore wind supply chain and skills interventions.
Today we are also announcing the establishment of an onshore wind council to ensure we deliver on the critical actions in today’s publications and continue the excellent collaboration with industry.
Guidance on community benefits for onshore wind in England
Government want to ensure that communities directly benefit from our 2030 goals, and today we have published updated voluntary guidance on community benefits for onshore wind in England, ensuring developments have a lasting positive impact on communities. The guidance includes:
Best practice models for benefits schemes such as community benefit funds, local electricity bill discounts and shared ownership.
Support available to communities when co-designing and administering funds, summarising best practice engagement principles.
A resource kit for communities with detailed case studies and example documentation.
The guidance sets expectations that developers pay community benefits of £5,000 per megawatt of installed capacity per year for the operational lifetime of the project. This would mean a 25 MW wind farm would deliver £3.75 million of funding for communities on local initiatives across a 30-year operating life. If we deliver 29 GW of onshore wind by 2030, we could unlock around £70 million of additional private investment in our rural towns and villages every year.
Scaling up onshore wind generation will be critical to the success of the Government’s clean energy mission. Today’s publications will give a boost to the onshore wind industry and local communities, reduce our dependence on volatile fossil fuels, and improve our energy security.
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Residential Personal Emergency Evacuation Plans
(1 day, 21 hours ago)
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The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Housing, Communities and Local Government (Alex Norris)
The Government are today laying regulations to address the last three outstanding Grenfell Tower inquiry phase 1 recommendations, on personal emergency evacuation plans, or PEEPs, and building-level evacuation plans.
The Fire Safety (Residential Evacuation Plans) (England) Regulations 2025 mandate residential PEEPs and mark a long-awaited step forward in improving the fire safety and evacuation of vulnerable residents who were so badly let down on the night of the tragedy. It applies to residents living in England in high-rise residential buildings—at least seven storeys or 18 metres high—and 11-metre to 18-metre high buildings with a simultaneous evacuation strategy.
Through these regulations, residents with physical and mental disabilities and impairments will be entitled to:
a person-centred fire risk assessment to consider their specific individual risks and ability to evacuate in the event of a fire;
the measures that could be reasonably and proportionately introduced to mitigate against their risks and aid their evacuation;
a written statement recording what they should do in a fire and;
provision of information to their local fire and rescue service (where the resident consents to the information being shared) so they know where the most vulnerable residents live and can support their evacuation or rescue in the event of a fire.
The regulations also mandate production of whole-building evacuation plans, shared with local fire and rescue services.
The laying of the regulations addresses recommendations 33.22c, 33.22e, 33.22f—now numbers 59, 60 and 61—from phase 1 of the Grenfell Tower inquiry.
The Government have committed funding this year to begin this important work by supporting social housing providers to deliver residential PEEPs for their renters. Future years’ funding will be confirmed through the spending review and business planning processes.
In addition, Government are today publishing a factsheet and toolkit to support building owners and managers as they develop residential PEEPs. This toolkit contains real-life and proven initiatives to support vulnerable residents which have already been successfully deployed at scale.
The regulations will come into force on 6 April 2026.
The Government are committed to continued and full engagement with stakeholders as the policy is operationalised to ensure that it addresses the needs of users and reflects their lived experience. Specifically, we will:
continue to engage key stakeholders on draft statutory guidance to support building owners and managers in fulfilling the requirements of the regulations. The guidance will be published in the autumn.
set up a stakeholder advisory panel with representatives of disability stakeholders and building owners and managers, to identify and review new initiatives for inclusion in the toolkit.
continue to listen to stakeholders as residential PEEPs beds in, as part of monitoring the impact and effectiveness of the policy.
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Leaseholder Consumer Rights: Consultation
(1 day, 21 hours ago)
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The Minister for Housing and Planning (Matthew Pennycook)
The cost of living remains a pressing concern for leaseholders across England and Wales. In addition to managing the costs of household bills and other essentials, many are struggling to cope with the additional financial strain placed on them by high and rising service charges that are all too often opaque in nature.
With a view to better protecting leaseholders, I am pleased to announce that the Government have launched a wide-ranging consultation on proposals to hold landlords and managing agents to account for the services they provide and the charges and fees they levy.
At the heart of the consultation are the measures contained in the Leasehold and Freehold Reform Act 2024 to improve fairness and transparency in the calculation and presentation of service charge demands. Once enacted, these will ensure that all leaseholders are issued with standard service charge documentation in a form that provides clear, detailed information about how their service charges are calculated and spent. The result will be service charges that are more easily challengeable at the appropriate tribunal if leaseholders consider them to be unreasonable.
Through the consultation, we are also seeking views on the measures contained in the Leasehold and Freehold Reform Act 2024 relating to landlords’ legal costs. By addressing the unreasonable practice where landlords are able to recover their litigation costs from leaseholders regardless of the outcome of a legal challenge, we intend to reduce existing barriers to justified challenges against poor practice.
We are also acutely aware of the ongoing impact of opaque and substantial building insurance commissions recovered from leaseholders through service charges. As part of the remediation acceleration plan announcement last December, the Government launched a public consultation on measures to prevent the imposition of such charges. It closed in February and we intend to set out next steps in due course.
Improving the fairness and transparency of service charges and rebalancing the legal costs regime will significantly strengthen leaseholder consumer rights, but we are using the consultation to seek views on proposals that extend beyond those reforms to the leasehold system already in statute as a result of the Leasehold and Freehold Reform Act 2024.
Specifically, we are inviting views on reform of the section 20 process that leaseholders must go through when a landlord wants to carry out “major works” funded by a service charge. We know that one-off, unexpected, and often very large bills for major works can place huge financial strain on leaseholders. Far too many receive little or no notice about such works and so have little time to obtain sufficient funds.
It is not in dispute that buildings must be properly maintained, but major works, such as repairing a roof or replacing a lift, should be properly planned for, with leaseholders as far as possible kept fully informed. The current system does not work for anyone, whether leaseholders, managing agents or landlords, and we are seeking views on how we can improve it to make it fit for purpose.
Through this consultation, we are also taking initial steps to strengthen the regulation of managing agents by introducing mandatory professional qualifications that will set a new basic standard that managing agents will be required to meet.
Managing agents play a key role in the maintenance of multi-occupancy buildings and freehold estates, and their importance will only increase as commonhold becomes the default tenure and existing leaseholders are empowered to exercise their right to manage, collectively enfranchise, or to convert to commonhold.
While we know that there is good practice in the sector, far too many leaseholders and residential freeholders suffer abuse and poor service at the hands of unscrupulous managing agents. While further reform will be necessary to drive up the standard of service provided by managing agents and ensure they are made more accountable to leaseholders, the introduction of mandatory qualifications in England is an important first step to ensuring all agents have the knowledge and skills they need to do their jobs effectively.
The consultation also explores other ways in which the regulation of managing agents could be strengthened, including specific interventions recommended in the final report of the regulation of property agents working group chaired by Lord Best, such as giving leaseholders the power to switch and veto managing agents. We will continue to reflect on the various other recommendations made in the 2019 report.
Taken together, the various proposals outlined in the consultation will provide existing leaseholders with far greater rights and protections and will empower them to challenge poor practice and unreasonable charge and fees.
Given the complexity of property law and the wide variation of leases across millions of homes, it is important that we engage extensively through the consultation to ensure the smooth implementation of the proposals in question. As such, we want to hear from leaseholders themselves as well as all those involved in managing leasehold buildings.
Following the consultation, we intend to bring the various measures into force as quickly as possible. We also remain firmly committed to commencing the remaining provisions in the Leasehold and Freehold Reform Act 2024 and to progressing the wider set of reforms necessary to end the feudal leasehold system for good, as set out in the written ministerial statement of 21 November 2024.
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