Asked by: Baroness Ritchie of Downpatrick (Labour - Life peer)
Question to the Department for Business and Trade:
To ask His Majesty's Government when they plan to introduce legislation to replace the Financial Reporting Council with the Audit, Reporting and Governance Authority and to place that body on a statutory footing.
Answered by Baroness Lloyd of Effra - Baroness in Waiting (HM Household) (Whip)
The government recognises the importance of having an effective and proportionate regulator of the audit sector and the significance of having a regulator that has the right legislative set-up to do the job. At present, the Financial Reporting Council (FRC) will not transition to become the Audit Reporting and Governance Authority (ARGA). The name of the regulator is less important than its effectiveness. The FRC has already undergone a substantial transformation since 2018, and we intend to put it on a proper statutory footing as soon as there is availability within the parliamentary schedule.
Asked by: Baroness Ritchie of Downpatrick (Labour - Life peer)
Question to the Department for Business and Trade:
To ask His Majesty's Government what steps they plan to take to mitigate the risk of further avoidable corporate failures pending the introduction of strengthened audit and governance regulations.
Answered by Baroness Lloyd of Effra - Baroness in Waiting (HM Household) (Whip)
The quality of audit regulation and audit itself has seen considerable improvement in the last eight years following the collapse of Carillion; however, we will continue to work closely with the Financial Reporting Council to keep improving the audit market. The government is committed to good governance, and the UK is a world leader in corporate governance. We will take a further step in this direction by launching a consultation to modernise, simplify and streamline the UK’s corporate reporting framework, with the ambition to make the UK’s reporting regime the most proportionate in the world.
Asked by: Baroness Ritchie of Downpatrick (Labour - Life peer)
Question to the Department for Business and Trade:
To ask His Majesty's Government what assessment they have made of the impact on jobs, growth and investment of major corporate collapses linked to audit and governance deficiencies over the past decade.
Answered by Baroness Lloyd of Effra - Baroness in Waiting (HM Household) (Whip)
The Government has not made such an assessment. At one level, almost all corporate collapses can be linked to governance deficiencies, since company directors have a duty to promote the success of the company. Audit deficiencies tend to exacerbate problems rather than being the cause of a company’s collapse. As an example of the impact of a major corporate collapse over the past decade, the failure of Carillion left approximately £4.5bn of debt, affecting around 7,000 first-tier suppliers and contractors, and displacing 19,000 UK jobs.
Asked by: Baroness Ritchie of Downpatrick (Labour - Life peer)
Question to the Department for Business and Trade:
To ask His Majesty's Government when they intend to publish their proposals for a modernised corporate reporting framework.
Answered by Baroness Lloyd of Effra - Baroness in Waiting (HM Household) (Whip)
On 21 October 2025, the government announced its intention to launch a consultation to modernise, simplify and streamline the UK’s corporate reporting framework, delivering the most proportionate framework in the world. The consultation will be issued shortly.
Asked by: Baroness Ritchie of Downpatrick (Labour - Life peer)
Question to the Home Office:
To ask His Majesty's Government whether they will provide a timeline for their engagement with technology companies on preventing nude image sharing among children, as referenced in Freedom from Violence and Abuse: a cross-government strategy to build a safer society for women and girls, published on 18 December 2025.
Answered by Lord Hanson of Flint - Minister of State (Home Office)
We committed in the Violence Against Women and Girls strategy ‘to make it impossible for children in the UK to take, share or view a nude image’, and that ‘we are working constructively with companies to make this a reality’. This engagement will be targeted and carried out with the urgency that the issue deserves.
We want device operating systems to be doing more to protect their child users. Applying nudity detection technology more comprehensively across the operating system can prevent nude imagery from being taken, shared or viewed on the phone at all. This intervention is about preventing the harm from happening by blocking the imagery entirely. Preventing the creation and sharing of self-generated indecent imagery (SGII) would undermine grooming and sextortion models, where imagery is extorted out of the child by offenders.
This intervention will also prevent children from being exposed to harmful content, building on similar protections already enacted through the Online Safety Act. Exposure to harmful content – especially pornography – at such an impressionable age can feed misogynistic views and give distorted views of healthy relationships.
We will provide an update on this work as soon as possible. If voluntary action from industry is not sufficient, we will not hesitate to consider other means.
Asked by: Baroness Ritchie of Downpatrick (Labour - Life peer)
Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:
To ask His Majesty's Government, further to the Written Answer by Baroness Merron on 5 January (HL12579), whether they will review the evaluation framework used to inform advice from the Joint Committee on Vaccination and Immunisation to ensure that it systematically captures the wider economic and societal benefits of vaccination, including impacts on productivity, education, and health inequalities.
Answered by Baroness Merron - Parliamentary Under-Secretary (Department of Health and Social Care)
When advising the Government on matters relating to vaccination and immunisation, the Joint Committee on Vaccination and Immunisation (JCVI) considers information on cost-effectiveness alongside evidence of the burden of disease, of vaccine safety and efficacy, and of the impact of immunisation strategies. Broader socio-economic impacts of vaccination may be highlighted by the JCVI or by officials who provide advice to ministers. However, these wider impacts are not formally included with the cost-effectiveness methodology.
A key reason for this is that these wider benefits cannot be quantified consistently across all vaccination programmes, due to the lack of high-quality data on socio-economic benefits currently available. Robust data may be available for very few programmes, but basing decisions on these wider benefits, rather than health benefits, would create disparities whereby vaccination programmes with high-quality data on wider benefits are considered more valuable.
Additionally, by maintaining a formal approach focused on health benefits, we are able to assess vaccines consistently with other health interventions in receipt of health spending, which are similarly focused on health benefits under the guidance of the National Institute for Health and Care Excellence (NICE).
By ensuring vaccine policymaking is informed by comparable and measurable health benefits and rigorous cost-effectiveness analysis, we ensure that public funds are spent responsibly and directed to programmes that deliver health benefits and savings to the health and social care system.