Afzal Khan

The Government is committed to deliver a Deposit Return Scheme (DRS) in England in October 2027 and to realise its benefits of reducing litter, increasing recycling, and creating high quality recyclate that will support the transition to a circular economy.

Following a period of joint development of DRS across all four nations, the Welsh Government made the decision to withdraw from this approach in November 2024.

Defra Ministers remain in close contact with Welsh Government counterparts through bilateral meetings, calls, and written correspondence. Officials remain in close working partnership with the Welsh Government as they take the decisions regarding a DRS in Wales.

The UK Government is keen to keep the door open to provide as much interoperability of schemes across the UK as possible.

Collection targets are not a feature of the extended producer responsibility scheme for packaging (pEPR). However, the Producer Responsibility Obligations (Packaging and Packaging Waste) Regulations 2024, which implement pEPR, set challenging, but achievable, recycling targets for all glass packaging which rise year on year to 85% by 2030.

The Secretary of State has not held discussions on plastic waste with his counterparts in France, Germany, and Sweden. However, officials have had discussions with their counterparts in other countries to learn lessons on tackling waste, including plastic waste. For instance, officials have had discussions with the German Deposit Return Scheme (DRS) administrator to assist in developing the DRS in the UK.

The Secretary of State has asked his department to convene a taskforce of experts from across the Government, industry, academia and relevant non-governmental organisations. The Taskforce will help to develop a Circular Economy Strategy for England and a series of roadmaps detailing the interventions that the Government will make on a sector-by-sector basis. The Taskforce will consider the evidence for action right across the economy, and as such the Taskforce will evaluate what interventions, including financial incentives, may need to be made in the textiles sector as it helps to develop the Circular Economy Strategy.

Financial incentives are primarily a matter for the Treasury, and Treasury Ministers will be part of a Small Ministerial Group on the Circular Economy, which is also being convened, along with Ministers from Defra, the Department for Business and Trade, Department for Energy Security and Net Zero, the Department for Transport and the Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government. This group will govern, join up and drive work to promote a Circular Economy across the Government. supporting the Government’s Missions to kickstart economic growth and make Britain a clean energy superpower.

We are committed to tackling poverty and supporting people into good work will be the foundation of our approach. Our plan to Make Work Pay will tackle poor working conditions, poor job security and low pay.

To take crucial steps towards the creation of a genuine living wage that supports families the Government increased the National Living Wage and National Minimum Wage rates on 1 April 2025, delivering a pay rise to over three million workers.

Our Get Britain Working White Paper, backed by £240 million investment, will target and tackle economic inactivity and unemployment and join up employment, health and skills support to meet the needs of local communities.

Alongside this, we are committed to reviewing Universal Credit to make sure it is doing the job we want it to do, to make work pay and tackle poverty. We have begun this work with the announcement of the Fair Repayment Rate in April, giving 1.2 million of the poorest households an average of £420 per year. Furthermore, in the Pathways to Work Green Paper, we announced that we will improve the adequacy of the standard allowance with the first sustained above inflation rise in the basic rate of Universal Credit since it was introduced.

To further support struggling households, funding of £742 million has been provided to enable the extension of the Household Support Fund from 1 April 2025 to 31 March 2026 in England, plus additional funding for the Devolved Governments through the Barnett formula to be spent at their discretion.

Statistics on the number of people living in absolute and relative poverty in the UK are published annually in the “Households Below Average Income” publication at  Households below average income: for financial years ending 1995 to 2024 - GOV.UK. Tables giving the percentage of individuals in relative poverty by state support received by the family are published in “table 5.9db” of “workingage-hbai-detalied-breakdown-2023-24-tables”, “table 6.6db” of “pensioners-hbai-detailed-breakdown-2023-24-tables”, and “table 4.6db” of “children-hbai-detailed-breakdown-2023-24-tables”. The latest statistics published on 27 March 2025 are for the financial period 2023/24.

The latest available data can also be found on Stat-Xplore: https://stat-xplore.dwp.gov.uk/. Guidance on how to use it can be found here: https://stat-xplore.dwp.gov.uk/webapi/online-help/User-Guide.html.

The Child Poverty Taskforce is continuing its urgent work and is exploring all available levers to drive forward short and long-term actions across government to reduce child poverty.

Our metrics must also reflect the experience of poverty in households across the UK and the urgent need to focus on those children experiencing the most severe and acute forms of poverty. The Taskforce will consider how best to measure this as the strategy develops, including through our work on the material deprivation measure following the recent review of the material deprivation survey questions carried out by the Centre for Analysis of Social Exclusion at the London School of Economics and Political Science.

The National Health Service is already home to world-first digital innovation, with NHS England supporting the rollout of key products, many of which support the shift to prevention and early diagnosis. Examples include the world's first certified autonomous artificially intelligent (AI) diagnostic tool, which can triage patients with suspected skin cancer, as well as digital innovations supporting people struggling with mental health and musculoskeletal issues to gain or remain in employment.

NHS England, the National Institute for Health and Care Excellence, and the Department are developing a rules based pathway (RBP) for medical technology in the NHS. The RBP aims to create a clear, consistent, and efficient process for evaluating and adopting medical technologies, including digital technologies, in the NHS.

The Early Detection using Information Technology in Health, or EDITH trial, announced in February 2025, is backed by £11 million of Government support via the National Institute for Health and Care Research. It is the latest example of how British scientists are transforming cancer care, building on the promising potential of cutting-edge innovations to tackle one of the United Kingdom’s biggest killers.

Between October 2021 and May 2023 funding was invested in a risk-stratification tool to identify women who are at most risk of developing life-threatening and life-altering complications of pre-eclampsia.

Between October 2020 and September 2023, the Department invested £1.9 million in an AI stroke technology, capable of automatically processing acute stroke computed tomography or magnetic resonance imaging scans, which can provide real-time, clinically useful information in the acute stroke setting, leading to faster decisions.

Between October 2020 and September 2021 funding was invested towards generating a toolkit prototype which can automatically generate placental metrics from a 3D-US scan. These can be combined with other known risk factors and blood results to generate a multi-factorial screening test for fetal growth restriction, which is the single most common cause of stillbirth.

The deployment of AI in the NHS is still at a relatively early stage, with many AI tools being used in a research capacity. To address this, the Department is carrying out work, with NHS England, to assess the barriers of safe, ethical, and effective adoption, and improve the way AI tools are deployed and used in the NHS across England.

NHS England has supported over 160 trusts with digital transformation, which includes the implementation of Electronic Patient Records. Currently, we have achieved a 91% rollout of Electronic Patient Records, with work underway to provide tailored support to the remaining 19 trusts that do not yet have an Electronic Patient Record.

The Digital Maturity Assessment was also successfully completed in May 2024, with a 100% response rate from secondary care organisations and integrated care systems. This assessment provides a baseline and a holistic view of digital maturity across National Health Service trusts in England. The assessment will be run yearly to track progress and identify areas for improvement.

The Department has provided £113 million, through the NHS AI Health and Care Awards, to 86 artificial intelligence (AI) technologies, which have been live in 40% of National Health Service acute trusts in England and hundreds of primary care networks across the United Kingdom. This funding is helping us to generate the evidence needed to deploy effective AI tools across the NHS and improve the lives and health outcomes of our population.

Many of these AI technologies are being tested and evaluated to aid healthcare diagnostics. For example, AI is being used to analyse and interpret acute stroke brain scans, to support doctors making treatment decisions in 100% of stroke units in England. In addition, the Department is focusing the £21 million AI Diagnostic Fund on the deployment of technologies in key, high-demand areas such as chest X-ray and chest computed tomography scans, to enable faster diagnosis of lung cancer in over half of acute trusts in England.

Despite these exciting examples of AI use, deployment of AI in the NHS is still at a relatively early stage. To address this, the Department is carrying out work to assess the barriers of effective adoption and improve the way AI tools are deployed across the NHS.

The Manchester University NHS Foundation Trust is the largest National Health Service trust serving both the Manchester Rusholme constituency and Manchester. At the end of January 2025, the waiting list for gynaecology services at the Manchester University Trust stood at 19,952, and in 42.7% of cases, the patient had been waiting up to 18 weeks. The median waiting time for gynaecology services at the Manchester University Trust was 21.8 weeks at the end of January 2025.

As set out in the Plan for Change, we have committed to return to the NHS constitutional standard that 92% of patients, including those waiting for gynaecological care, wait no longer than 18 weeks from referral to treatment by March 2029. We provided additional investment in the Autumn Budget that has enabled us to deliver an additional two million appointments as a first step to achieving this, seven months ahead of schedule.

The Elective Reform Plan, published in January 2025, sets out the reform we will undertake to return to the 18-week standard, and ensure patients have the best possible experience while they wait. This includes commitments to offer patients care closer to home, in the community, including piloting gynaecology pathways in community diagnostic centres for patients with unscheduled bleeding on hormone replacement therapy. We have also committed to increasing the relative funding available to support gynaecology procedures with the largest waiting lists and reviewing support options from the independent sector.

The Manchester University Foundation Trust is part of the Further Faster 20 initiative, which sees expert clinicians and managers deployed into NHS trusts in areas with the highest levels of economic inactivity to get patients treated faster. Greater Manchester is also served by four surgical hubs and seven community diagnostic centres.

Decisions about recruitment are matters for individual National Health Service employers. NHS England’s Equality, Diversity and Inclusion plan, published in 2023, includes a commitment to embed fair and inclusive recruitment processes and talent management strategies that target under-representation and lack of diversity.

Targeted retention work for midwives is being undertaken by NHS England and led by the Chief Nursing Officer. This includes a midwifery and nursing retention self-assessment tool, mentoring schemes, and targeted efforts to improve the diversity of the workforce through four nationally run programmes to develop staff from ethnic minority backgrounds.

The UK has not made a specific assessment of the role of the SSC-Khatumo area in supporting stability, development and growth in Somalia. We engage closely with all parties in Somalia and are a core security and development partner to the country.

The Foreign Secretary has no current engagement plans with Abdikadir Ahmed Aw-Ali. The UK Ambassador to Somalia engages regularly with a wide range of contacts in Somalia, including those from the SSC-Khatumo area.

HMT will consider departmental budget requests as part of the Spending Review process and set out funding for future years at Phase 2 of the Spending Review. The government has already made steps to tackle homelessness through: funding at Autumn Budget 2024 where we announced an additional £233 million of resource funding for services in 2025/26; a commitment to the delivery of the biggest increase in social and affordable housebuilding in a generation and building 1.5 million new homes over the next parliament and through protecting renters by abolishing Section 21 ‘no fault’ evictions.

Illustrative analysis in the OBR's 2024 Fiscal Risks and Sustainability Report suggests that UK GDP could be around 3% lower by 2074 under a below 2°C warming scenario and around 5% lower under a below 3°C warming scenario.

For decades, the North Sea’s workers, businesses and communities have been at the heart of Britain’s energy future - something they will continue to do for decades to come. This Government will not revoke existing licences and will partner with businesses and workers to manage our existing fields for the entirety of their lifespans

This Government is engaging industry via the ‘Building the North Sea’s Energy Future’ consultation to develop and set out the next steps for the overarching objective for the North Sea. Scaling up industries that will shape the future of the North Sea (including offshore wind, carbon capture and storage, hydrogen, and decommissioning), will be vital for delivering the best outcomes for workers and communities, energy security, and sustainable economic growth.

Small businesses are vital to our high streets and communities. The Government is committed to supporting the hospitality sector and we recognise the significant contribution they make to the UK economy.

The Government will introduce permanently lower tax rates for high street retail, hospitality, and leisure (RHL) properties, with rateable values below £500,000, from 2026-27. In the meantime, the Government has 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.

The Government has protected the smallest businesses from the impact of the increase to employer National Insurance by increasing the Employment Allowance from £5,000 to £10,500, which means that 865,000 employers will pay no employer NICs at all next year.

The Government has committed £250m in 25-26 for the British Business Bank’s small business loans programmes, including Start Up Loans and the Growth Guarantee Scheme.

To drive further progress on our manifesto commitments, as part of the growth mission, the Government will bring forward a Small Business Strategy this year.

The Government is committed to the continued strength of the UK Islamic Finance sector, both as an important part of the UK’s overall financial ecosystem and as an instrument of financial inclusion.

The alternative finance tax rules aim to provide a level playing field for tax purposes across alternative and conventional financing arrangements.

On 16 January 2024, HM Treasury published a consultation proposing changes to the Capital Gains Tax (CGT) rules that apply to alternative finance arrangements. The proposed changes seek to amend those rules so that where property is used as collateral for the purposes of raising finance, the CGT outcome is the same whether alternative finance or conventional finance is used. The consultation also asked whether there are any implications for capital allowances. The consultation closed on 9 April 2024 and the Government is considering responses. Next steps will be set out in due course.

The Government is committed to the continued strength of the UK Islamic Finance sector, both as an important part of the UK’s overall financial ecosystem and as an instrument of financial inclusion.

The alternative finance tax rules aim to provide a level playing field for tax purposes across alternative and conventional financing arrangements.

On 16 January 2024, HM Treasury published a consultation proposing changes to the Capital Gains Tax (CGT) rules that apply to alternative finance arrangements. The proposed changes seek to amend those rules so that where property is used as collateral for the purposes of raising finance, the CGT outcome is the same whether alternative finance or conventional finance is used. The consultation also asked whether there are any implications for capital allowances. The consultation closed on 9 April 2024 and the Government is considering responses. Next steps will be set out in due course.

The Home Office does not have a defined range of initiatives that fall under the umbrella term of ‘community safety’. Greater Manchester Police’s funding will be up to £871.2 million in 2025-26, an increase of up to £55.6 million when compared to the 2024-25 funding settlement.

It is for locally elected Police and Crime Commissioners, or in this case the Mayor of Greater Manchester, to make decisions on how they use their funding and deploy their resources using their knowledge of local need.

Since mid-2024, Atlas has been the primary caseworking system for operational teams across Migration & Borders with the legacy CID (Case Information Database) caseworking system only being used for very small volume case types. Work to migrate legacy CID ‘work in progress’ cases across to Atlas has been in progress since late 2024, and the capability to handle those small volume case types is due to be completed by the end of April 2025, when it is currently scheduled to decommission CID.

The government supports Mayor Burnham’s initiative to improve access to quality housing across Greater Manchester.

Nationally, we are increasing funding for homelessness to nearly £1 billion in 2025/26 and working to reduce homelessness by delivering 1.5 million new homes over the next Parliament and abolishing ‘no fault’ evictions through our Renters’ Rights Bill.

The government is committed to taking further action to raise quality standards in both rented sectors. Reforms are underway to drive up social housing standards, with stronger regulations to hold landlords accountable to regulatory standards. We will introduce Awaab’s Law to both rented sectors and bring forward consultation on the Decent Homes Standard that all social housing landlords must meet.

For more information on the steps we are taking to increasing the supply of social and affordable housing, I refer the hon. Member to my answer to Question UIN 41721 on 3 April 2025.

The Deputy Prime Minister is leading cross-government work to deliver the long-term solutions we need to get us back on track to ending all forms of homelessness. This includes chairing a dedicated Inter-Ministerial Group, bringing together ministers from across government to develop a long-term strategy.

We expect to publish the strategy following the conclusion of Phase 2 of the Spending Review.

I refer the hon. Member to my answer to Question UIN 41721 on 3 April 2025.

£630 million is being devolved to Greater Manchester Combined Authority (GMCA) and Mayor Burnham through the integrated settlement for 2025-26 to support growth in the city region.

As the relevant local planning authorities, it is for Manchester City Council and GMCA to work together to consider infrastructure requirements in support of any new housing developments.

£630 million is being devolved to Greater Manchester Combined Authority (GMCA) and Mayor Burnham through the integrated settlement for 2025-26 to support growth in the city region.

As the relevant local planning authorities, it is for Manchester City Council and GMCA to work together to consider infrastructure requirements in support of any new housing developments.

The number of prisoners serving indeterminate sentences of Imprisonment for Public Protection (IPP) in HMP Buckley, HMP Hindley, HMP Forest Bank and HMP Manchester, as at 30 June 2024, are set out in the table below.

Please note:

(1) Figures for the IPP population include both unreleased and recalled IPP prisoners.

(2) The figures in this table have been drawn from administrative IT systems which, as with any large-scale recording system, are subject to possible errors with data entry and processing.

This Government believes it is right that these sentences were abolished and is determined to make further progress towards a safe and sustainable release for those serving the IPP sentence, but not in a way that impacts public protection.