First elected: 7th May 2015
Left House: 3rd May 2017 (Defeated)
Speeches made during Parliamentary debates are recorded in Hansard. For ease of browsing we have grouped debates into individual, departmental and legislative categories.
e-Petitions are administered by Parliament and allow members of the public to express support for a particular issue.
If an e-petition reaches 10,000 signatures the Government will issue a written response.
If an e-petition reaches 100,000 signatures the petition becomes eligible for a Parliamentary debate (usually Monday 4.30pm in Westminster Hall).
These initiatives were driven by James Berry, and are more likely to reflect personal policy preferences.
MPs who are act as Ministers or Shadow Ministers are generally restricted from performing Commons initiatives other than Urgent Questions.
James Berry has not been granted any Urgent Questions
James Berry has not been granted any Adjournment Debates
James Berry has not introduced any legislation before Parliament
Crime (Aggravated Murder of and Violence Against Women) Bill 2016-17
Sponsor - None ()
The Department is fully committed to the principle that end point assessment should either be delivered by an independent third party, or in such a way that no party involved in the management or training of an apprentice can make the sole decision on competence and passing the end-point assessment.
We are working to ensure the Register of Assessment Organisations and Register of Training Providers, which govern who can conduct training and assessment, support this principle.
The Girl Summit, hosted by the Prime Minister and UNICEF in July 2014, underlined the United Kingdom’s leadership in stamping out forced marriage and female genital mutilation (FGM).
We made forced marriage a criminal offence and the first conviction was secured last month. We also introduced a package of new measures to tackle FGM through the Serious Crime Act 2015 including victim anonymity, mandatory reporting of FGM, a new offence of parental liability and the introduction of FGM protection orders.
The Government recognises that legislation alone is not enough to tackle FGM and forced marriage, and our specialist FGM and Forced Marriage Units lead and deliver wide-ranging prevention and awareness-raising work.
A UK national commemorative event will take place on 1 July at the Commonwealth War Graves Commission Thiepval Memorial to the Missing of the Somme in France. This is a free ticketed event - the public ballot for tickets opened in September and will run until 18 November. There will be a daily service of remembrance at Thiepval on each of the 141 days of the Battle and a wide programme of events in the UK. Manchester will play a key role in this and I will announce further details shortly.
A UK national commemorative event will take place on 1 July at the Commonwealth War Graves Commission Thiepval Memorial to the Missing of the Somme in France. This is a free ticketed event - the public ballot for tickets opened in September and will run until 18 November. There will be a daily service of remembrance at Thiepval on each of the 141 days of the Battle and a wide programme of events in the UK. Manchester will play a key role in this and I will announce further details shortly.
The special educational needs and disability (SEND) reforms which came into effect in September 2014 represent the biggest change to the SEND system in a generation. They are transforming the support available to children and young people with SEND by joining up services across education, health and social care and by focusing on positive outcomes for education, employment, housing, health and community participation.
Since September 2014, our reforms have seen the introduction of:
o published ‘local offers’ for each local area, setting out the SEND services that are available;
o new Education, Health and Care (EHC) plans for those with more complex needs - replacing statements of SEN and post-16 Learning Difficulty Assessments (LDAs);
o a new legal requirement on local authorities to take the views of families fully into account when deciding what provision to offer;
o new statutory protections for 16-25 year olds in further education - including the right to request the educational institution of their choice;
o new duties for health to deliver the agreed health elements of EHC plans;
o the option of a personal budget for families and young people with an EHC plan;
o a review of disagreement resolution arrangements; and
o new arrangements for supporting young offenders with SEND.
The Government submitted a revised air quality plan to the European Commission on 17 December last year. There is no formal timetable under the Air Quality Directive for the Commission to assess the plan. The Government is working with the Commission to ensure compliance with the nitrogen dioxide limits in the Directive in the shortest possible time.
Data relating to the total number of employees working for the European Banking Authority can be found on their website: http://www.eba.europa.eu/about-us/careers/multimedia/eba-at-glance.
Current data relating to the nationality of employees of the European Banking Authority is not available.
It has not proved possible to respond to the hon. Member in the time available before Prorogation.
My predecessors in Government have made huge progress in improving British aid by creating an independent aid watchdog, introducing much tougher value-for-money controls and making DFID’s spending even more transparent.
The Airports Commission shortlisted three airport expansion schemes, two at Heathrow and one at Gatwick. The Government accepted the Commission’s shortlist in December 2015 and is considering all of the evidence very carefully before reaching a view on its preferred scheme. The Government is not providing a running commentary on this work and nor would it be appropriate to outline specific pieces of evidence before an announcement on its preference. Any work to inform an announcement will be set out in subsequent publications and associated consultation.
The Government is taking account of all relevant evidence in its current review of policy on aviation noise.
Public Health England’s recent report, Sugar Reduction: The evidence for action, highlights that portion sizes have been increasing over time and that this results in more calories being consumed. We have a number of tools to help inform what constitutes a healthy portion size, for example the Front of Pack nutrition labelling scheme, the eatwell plate and the Change4Life programme.
The Personal Social Services Research Unit (PSSRU) at the University of Kent estimates within their report ‘Unit Costs of Health and Social Care 2014’, published March 2014, that the average cost in 2014/15 of training to become a general practitioner is £485,390 with the consultant training cost being £726,551. These figures reflect the pre-registration costs of tuition, living expenses/lost production and clinical placements and the post-graduate costs of tuition and replacement costs not the average cost to the taxpayer.
The Department does not keep information centrally on how many doctors applied for a certificate of good standing in each of the last 10 years.
The Nursing and Midwifery Council (NMC) sets standards for the education of health visitors. Health visitor training is undertaken by already registered nurses or midwives who will have had to meet the relevant NMC standards which require a minimum of 4,600 hours of theory and practice learning. To qualify as a health visitor requires an additional 45 weeks of programmed learning, split equally between theory and practice.
The NMC document, Standards of proficiency for specialist community public health nurses, sets out the requirements that health visitors need to meet to be registered. Although there are no specific requirements regarding the care of the elderly, the NMC has a role to ensure health visitors have the right skills and qualities when they start work.
I refer the Hon. Member to my response to written question 70842, and the answers I gave when replying to an Urgent Question in the House on 20 April 2017. Since then, the FCO Director for Eastern Europe and Central Asia has written to the Russian Ambassador to the United Kingdom setting out our concerns and calling for the Russian authorities to undertake an investigation as a matter of urgency.
We recognise the need to increase public spending on infrastructure. That’s why, at Autumn Statement 2016, the Chancellor committed additional capital to fund new high-value economic infrastructure through the National Productivity Investment Fund. Coupled with the commitments made at Spending Review 2015, this means annual central government investment in economic infrastructure will now rise by almost 60% between 2016/17 and 2020/21, from £14bn to £22bn.
Last year the Government and the Financial Conduct Authority (FCA) jointly launched the Financial Advice Market Review. The Review is exploring how the UK’s financial advice market is operating for consumers, and what more can be done to ensure they have the access they need to high-quality, affordable advice so they can make informed decisions with their hard earned money. The Review will report ahead of Budget 2016.
From 2015/16 the Home Office started collecting data for the first time on ‘Misconduct and Criminal Investigations’ as part of the Annual Data Requirement (ADR).
These data are intended for publication next year, with the dates to be pre-announced on the Statistical Release Calendar on the gov.uk website. Data are not held centrally for previous years.
Combating modern slavery, which includes human trafficking, slavery, servitude and forced or compulsory labour, is a leading priority for Border Force. All frontline Border Force Officers have access to comprehensive guidance on modern slavery and must complete mandatory training on identifying victims of modern slavery.
Additionally, Border Force has specialist teams at ports across the country which receive additional, in depth, training to increase their levels of expertise. This allows Border Force to maintain a high degree of vigilance to identify and protect those who may be a victim of modern slavery and to identify those seeking to exploit them. Border Force officers follow established processes and referring all identified child and consenting adult potential victims to the National Referral Mechanism (NRM), which acts as the UK's identification and support process for victims.
Border Force staff also receive mandatory training also takes places on how to refer potential victims to NRM. Working in close partnership with police forces, social services and the UK Human Trafficking Centre, Border Force also carries out intelligence led exercises to tackle the threat of trafficking at the border.
Since January 2012, there have been a total of eight Sri Lankan nationals who have been granted refugee status in the UK after having previously been removed to Sri Lanka following a refused application for asylum.
The Home Office does not collect data on the number of people arrested in connection with firearms. For offences that may or may not involve a firearm (such as robbery) we cannot separately identify those that involved a firearm from those that did not. As a result, we cannot provide numbers of arrests made in connection with firearms. In addition, specific arrests made by the police cannot be linked to convictions and sentences given in court. As a result, we would be unable to say how many of those arrests led to a sentence of five years or more.
There was a significant change in the methodology used to record detections to the new outcomes framework introduced in April 2013. The new outcomes framework includes a broader range of “outcomes” for crimes dealt with by the police. This provides greater transparency on how crimes are resolved when compared with the former detections framework which only covered a subset of the new outcomes and, therefore, of the ways crimes are "resolved".
Information on the new outcomes framework and data for England and Wales were published by the Home Office in its “Crime Outcomes in England and Wales 2014/15” bulletin, alongside the number of outcomes in each police force area. www.gov.uk/government/statistics/crime-outcomes-in-england-and-wales-2014-to-2015
Figures for year ending March 2015 for England and Wales and the Metropolitan Police are shown in the table provided for all outcomes under the new framework. These show how crimes recorded in 2014/15 were dealt with. It is not possible to provide data for Kingston and Surbiton constituency as outcomes data are collected at police force area level.
Care needs to be taken when making comparisons of crime outcomes between police forces as different police forces use outcomes in different ways and will have a different mix of crimes to deal with. In addition, the figures for the Metropolitan Police are only available between December 2014 and March 2015, so a greater proportion of crimes from this more recent period will remain under investigation.
The Government has always been clear that we are committed to supporting the most vulnerable people in our society. One person without a home is one too many. That is why we have protected the homelessness prevention funding local authorities receive, totalling £315 million by 2019-20.
HMCTS collates data on the reasons for cracked and ineffective trials. A cracked trial is one that does not go ahead on the day of trial and does not require relisting, usually because the defendant pleads guilty or the prosecution withdraw or end the case. An ineffective trial is one that does not go ahead on the day and requires relisting at a later date. Data on cracked and ineffective trials and the reasons for them are published here:
The information is presented by Court and by Local Criminal Justice Board (LCJB). Sorting Column D will present the data appropriately grouped. London Crown Courts are under London Crown Courts LCJB, and London Magistrates Courts under Central London, East London, North East London, North London, North West London, South East London, South London, South West London and West London LCJBs.
Discontinued trials also include those ended by the prosecution at an earlier stage. Reasons for adjourning prior to the start of a trial are not collated. The number of discontinuances in London can be found in the table below:
| 2013 – 14 | 2014 – 15 |
Crown Court | 3,059 | 3,624 |
Magistrates’ Court | 43,168 | 34,815 |
These data are taken from a case management information system and are not subject to the same level of checks as official statistics. Data provided has been extracted specifically to answer this question and has not been cross-referenced with case files.