Matt Vickers

On 14 May, the Government announced it will:

• strengthen its presence in 13 cross Government locations across the UK;

• ensure that 50% of UK-based SCS are located outside of London by 2030;

• strengthen the talent pipeline by launching a new apprenticeship programme, setting an ambition for 50% of Fast Stream roles to be based outside London by 2030, and committing to develop and launch a local government interchange programme in partnership with the Local Government Association (LGA);

• reduce the number of Civil Service buildings in London, closing 11 buildings by 2030 to deliver £94m in savings per year; and

• launch two new thematic campuses: an Energy Campus in Aberdeen; and a Digital & AI Innovation Campus in Manchester.

The recently-published UK Export Finance (UKEF) Annual Report and Accounts (ARA) for the last financial year show that it provided a record £14.5 billion of support for exports, supported up to 70,000 UK jobs, and contributed up to £5.4 billion to the UK economy. The report is available online, along with those from previous years, at: UK Export Finance annual reports and accounts - GOV.UK.

As the Chancellor set out her Mansion House Speech on Tuesday, we recognise the transformative potential for digital assets and blockchain technologies to drive economic growth in the UK and increase efficiencies across financial markets. We are proceeding with proposals to create a new financial services regulatory regime for fiat-backed stablecoins.

This will support growth in the UK by giving cryptoasset firms the regulatory certainty needed to invest here, and to help drive innovation in our financial services sector whilst at the same time including rules on regulation, safeguarding and market integrity.

Since the announcement of the UK-US Economic Deal on 8 May, the Secretary of State and senior officials from the Department for Business and Trade have been meeting with representatives of the bioethanol sector in the Tees Valley and Humberside to discuss how the quota will impact their businesses.

In parallel, DBT officials are continuing to work closely with other government departments, including the Department for Transport and the Department for Environment Food and Rural Affairs, to monitor and assess risks across the supply chain.

We will continue to work closely with the industry to understand the impacts of the trade deal and other pressures on the UK’s bioethanol sector.

Since the announcement of the UK-US Economic Deal on 8 May, the Secretary of State and senior officials from the Department for Business and Trade have been meeting with representatives of the bioethanol sector in the Tees Valley and Humberside to discuss how the quota will impact their businesses.

In parallel, DBT officials are continuing to work closely with other government departments, including the Department for Transport and the Department for Environment Food and Rural Affairs, to monitor and assess risks across the supply chain.

We will continue to work closely with the industry to understand the impacts of the trade deal and other pressures on the UK’s bioethanol sector.

The Department for Business and Trade supports the adoption and deployment of technologies to increase productivity in these areas. The upcoming Industrial Strategy will set out our vision and the ambitious set of actions we will take, in partnership with business and academia, to support the tech sector and power the economy of the future. The Industrial Strategy, alongside the upcoming Trade Strategy, will also set out further detail on the steps we are taking to enhance supply chain resilience.

As well, the Department for Transport will publish a new freight plan later this year. While currently under development, we anticipate this will consider the role of technology in enabling the sector to boost economic growth.

The Office for Budget Responsibility is an independent macroeconomic forecasting body. As such it would not be appropriate for us to comment on the specifics of its forecasts.

The Government’s forthcoming Industrial Strategy White Paper has an explicit ambition to support productivity, as well as economic growth, jobs, and wages across the UK, by delivering a credible 10-year plan which provides the certainty and stability businesses need to invest in the high-growth sectors that will drive our growth in the future.

An impact assessment for the Fair Work Agency (FWA) was published on 21^st October 2024.

The FWA will take a balanced approach to upholding workers’ rights, providing better support on how to comply with the law but taking tough action against rogue employers who exploit their workers. Every business will be treated with fairness and equity, but it is not fair when businesses who want to do right by their staff are undercut by a minority who flout the law.

The Fair Work Agency (FWA) will not change the obligations on businesses who should always have been paying their workers correctly. The FWA’s enforcement powers are largely natural evolutions of powers that existing bodies have.

The FWA will take a balanced approach to upholding workers’ rights and provide better support to businesses on how to comply with the law and will take tough action against rogue employers who exploit their workers. Most businesses want to do right by their staff, and it is not fair when they are undercut by a minority who flout the law.

The chemicals sector underpins almost all manufacturing in the UK and is fundamental to maximising growth and productivity across the economy to drive forward the government’s missions, including delivering growth for all. Reforms are underway to address planning barriers to growth, channel finance towards growth priorities and accelerate the transition to net zero.

This will be supported by our modern Industrial Strategy which will implement targeted policy interventions to drive long-term sustainable, inclusive and secure growth.

Last autumn’s Budget announced continued support for Energy Intensive Industries – including chemical companies – through £350M of additional funding across the next two years.

The UK Government is as committed as ever to ensuring the long-term sustainability of the Post Office network. It is inevitable that with a network of this size, there will be variations in the number of branches open at any one time. As postmasters move on, branches close and new ones open. The Post Office Chair’s recent announcement on the future of the Post Office has led to concerns around potential closures of Directly Managed Branches. However, no decisions have yet been taken on the future of any individual branch. While the Post Office network can fluctuate between areas and regions, the Post Office works with communities to consider how to best meet needs for Post Office services in a local area. The Government-set Access Criteria ensures that however the network changes, services remain within local reach of all citizens.

Hospitality businesses are at the heart of our communities and are vital for economic growth.

This is why the Government is creating a fairer business rate system, reducing alcohol duty on qualifying draught products and transforming the apprenticeship levy to support business and boost opportunities. This work will be supported by the publication of The Small Business Strategy Command Paper next year.

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

Growth is the number one mission of the Government and we will continue to work with and listen carefully to the business community. In the Budget, the Government was forced to make difficult choices to plug the black hole in the Government’s finances, but the fundamentals for doing business in the UK remains strong. The Government has already taken steps to strengthen business and investor confidence through, reforming the planning system, getting people back to work and creating the growth and skills levy. DBT is driving long term, inclusive growth through our Industrial Strategy, Trade Strategy, Small Business Strategy and Plan to Make Work Pay.

The Government is determined to kick-start economic growth, which is why it is essential that we identify areas where the costs of regulations may be unnecessarily high and burdensome for businesses. This is why the Department is developing an ambitious regulatory reform agenda to ensure that any future regulation, or reforms to regulation, work for businesses, consumers and supports the Government’s growth mission. As part of this, we are working across government to identify regulatory reforms that will support the Industrial Strategy. Our proposals will be set out in due course.

The automotive industry is an important part of the Government’s plans for growth. Through our modern Industrial Strategy, we will support growth sectors to create high-quality, well-paid jobs across the country.

The Budget committed over £2 billion of capital and R&D funding to 2030 for zero emission vehicle manufacturing and their supply chains. Building on the achievements of the Automotive Transformation Fund and Advanced Propulsion Centre R&D programmes, we will launch a new initiative, kickstarting economic growth by supporting good jobs and productivity growth across the UK automotive sector. The Industrial Strategy will provide more details in the Spring.

We are creating a fairer business rates system that protects the high street, supports investment, and is fit for the 21st century. The Secretary of State works closely with all his cabinet colleagues, including the Chancellor of the Exchequer.

To deliver our manifesto pledge, we intend to introduce permanently lower tax rates for retail, hospitality, and leisure (RHL) properties, including those on the high street, from 2026-27. The Government has also published a Discussion Paper setting out priority areas for business rates reform and inviting industry to co-design a fairer business rates system: https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/transforming-business-rates

The Office for Clean Energy Jobs is funding targeted Regional Skills Pilots across the UK which will address skill gaps in a limited number of places which have been identified as priority areas for clean energy, including Aberdeen and Aberdeenshire.

The Aberdeen and Aberdeenshire pilot, the Oil and Gas Transition Training Fund, is being delivered in partnership between UK Government, Scottish Government and Skills Development Scotland. This is a targeted pilot for workers in Aberdeen and Aberdeenshire.

Pilots are also running in Cheshire West and Chester, North and North East Lincolnshire and Pembrokeshire, with local and devolved partners empowered to develop their own plans for how best to target the funding. The Department will publish a Clean Energy Workforce Strategy setting out our approach to creating good jobs across the country.

We will shortly be publishing a Clean Energy Workforce Strategy which will set out our approach to upskilling and reskilling the workforce into clean energy roles through initiatives including the Energy Skills Passport, in collaboration with industry, which is helping oil and gas workers to identify routes into roles in offshore wind including construction and maintenance.

The skills system is delivering training for existing workers looking to retrain or upskill into clean energy. Support includes the announcement of 10 Technical Excellence Colleges for construction, which will transform existing further education colleges to deliver the skills needed for growth-driving sectors like clean energy; the Growth and Skills levy to deliver greater flexibility for learners and employers in England; and Skill Bootcamps to address the need for clean energy skills where this reflects regional priorities.

The Department (DESNZ) established the Office for Clean Energy Jobs (OCEJ) to engage industry and employers on skills needs and challenges. In partnership with Skills England, it leads workforce planning by identifying skills gaps and supporting reskilling.

DESNZ consulted with all stakeholders, including employers on ‘Building the North Sea’s Energy Future’. It included questions on supporting the oil and gas workforce to transition to clean energy sectors. A Government response will be published in due course.

These engagements have informed recent initiatives, including the Energy Skills Passport, the Oil and Gas Transition Training Fund pilot in Aberdeen, and the training guarantee for at-risk workers at Petroineos and Prax oil refineries.

The North Sea basin is super-mature, and production is in natural decline. Oil and gas production fell by 72% between 1999 and 2023. Direct jobs in oil and gas extraction fell by around a third between 2014 and 2023.

The clean energy transition creates an opportunity for our expert oil and gas sector to play a central role in the future of energy supply.

Robert Gordon University estimates that the renewables workforce could grow from 39,000 in 2024 to 84,000-153,000 by 2035, subject to realised deployment across those technologies and proportion of UK content delivered by the domestic supply chain.

The Government believes that our mission to deliver clean power by 2030 is the best way to break our dependence on global fossil fuel markets and protect billpayers permanently.

The creation of Great British Energy will help us to harness clean energy and have less reliance on volatile international energy markets and help in our commitment to make Britain a clean energy superpower by 2030. This, combined with our Warm Homes Plan to upgrade millions of homes to make them warmer and cheaper to run is how we will drive down energy bills and make cold homes a thing of the past.

We recognise that we need to support households struggling with bills whilst we transition to clean power by 2030. This is why we are delivering the Warm Home Discount to around 3 million eligible low-income households this winter. On 25 February, we published a consultation on the expansion of the Warm Home Discount, giving more eligible households £150 off their energy bills. These proposals would bring around 2.7 million households into the scheme – pushing the total number of households that would receive the discount next winter up to around 6 million. The consultation has now closed and the Department is evaluating the responses.

Emissions savings through fuel switching from fossil fuels to low carbon alternatives, improvements in resource and energy efficiency and industrial carbon capture are all needed for the industrial sector to transition to net zero, and government is developing a suite of policies to deliver these savings.

We will bring forward a clear plan for industrial decarbonisation. A new Industrial Decarbonisation Strategy will set the strategic direction for our approach to working with industry towards a competitive and low carbon industrial base in the UK, ensuring growth opportunities are captured in tandem with emissions reductions.

Great Britain has a highly resilient energy network with diverse sources of supply and maintaining the security of electricity supply is a key priority for Government.

We are working with the National Protective Security Authority, the energy industry, regulators and other stakeholders to continually improve and maintain the resilience and security of energy infrastructure. We work to reduce the vulnerability of networks and assets, taking into account a range of threats and future system changes.

The National Energy System Operator can balance the system in a wide range of scenarios, including potential disruptions to offshore infrastructure.

NESO's analysis confirmed delivering clean power by 2030 is deliverable, more secure, and could see a lower cost of electricity, and lower bills.

We are committed to working with industry to grow our clean energy system with once-in-a-generation levels of energy investment – an estimated £40 billion, the vast majority of which will come from the private sector.

The Government is leveraging public finance institutions like the National Wealth Fund and Great British Energy to catalyse private investment. By providing early-stage funding, de-risking projects, and supporting the development of critical infrastructure, we aim to attract private capital and accelerate the deployment of clean power technologies.

In an unstable world, the only way to guarantee energy security and protect billpayers is to accelerate the transition away from fossil fuels. That is why government has a mission to make Britain a clean energy superpower.

We have a sustainable, long-term plan to protect all UK billpayers from volatile international gas markets. Backed by £8.3 billion, Great British Energy is part of this plan, driving the deployment of the clean, homegrown energy we need to boost our energy independence. As a publicly owned company, Great British Energy will ensure UK taxpayers, billpayers, and communities reap the benefits of this plan.

The Clean Heat Market Mechanism does not require any change in the price of fossil fuel boilers.

The Government took steps before introducing the scheme to revise the 2023 proposals in order to reduce impacts on boiler manufacturers and provide them more time to scale up supply chains.

The Government has consulted on ‘Building the North Sea’s Energy Future’, setting out its overarching objective to make the North Sea a world leading example of an offshore clean energy industry and on its commitment to not issue new oil and gas licences to explore new fields. A response setting out its next steps will be published in due course.

The Clean Power 2030 Action Plan makes clear that nuclear will play an important role in our future energy system, providing low-carbon, baseload power to the grid. Government will continue to seek to streamline regulatory processes, and foster innovation in nuclear technology, to ensure that nuclear continues to play an important role in the net zero transition after 2030.