Matt Vickers

The UK is hosting Eurovision on behalf of Ukraine and we are committed to hosting a competition that celebrates both the UK and Ukraine.

I have announced £10 million in support of a collaborative show celebrating music and how it unites people from around the world.

This funding will be used by Liverpool and the BBC to collaborate with the Ukrainian national broadcaster, and artists and performers from Ukraine, and for security and other operational aspects of the competition.

The Public Libraries and Museums Act 1964 places a duty upon local authorities to provide a comprehensive and efficient library service. This duty includes having regard to encouraging both adults and children to make full use of the library service. It is for local authorities to ensure that their libraries provide services such as access to books, PCs and study space, as well as access to activities and events which meet residents’ needs and will therefore contribute to and encourage footfall.

Libraries actively engage with a number of organisations and people to encourage visits and use of their services. This includes working with schools on a programme of class visits to encourage children to read for pleasure, to support schools with literacy, and to support parents with the home-learning environment, while also driving footfall. They are also actively engaged in specific initiatives aimed at school children such as the Holiday Activities and Food programme. Libraries also work in partnership with the Reading Agency to bring people of all ages into libraries each year through reading programmes, such as the Summer Reading Challenge, Reading Friends; through book issues, such as Reading Well and Quick Reads and attendance at themed events, such as the Big Jubilee Read and Story Trails.

The Government has appointed Baroness Sanderson of Welton to chair an independent panel to help inform a new libraries strategy. Baroness Sanderson has visited a number of library services across the country to find out about their work, and is having numerous discussions with the libraries sector, plus partners and others with an interest in their work. These include organisations active in boosting and supporting children’s literacy work such as the Association of Senior Children’s and Education Librarians, The Reading Agency, National Literacy Trust and BookTrust.

Baroness Sanderson is also running a series of deep-dive discussion sessions at libraries around the country, themed on different aspects of libraries’ work. Four have already been held (covering culture, health and well-being, communities, and digital), with five others planned through to the middle of May (covering learning, business support and employability, reading, governance and blue-sky thinking).

This Government’s central mission is to level up the UK and break the link between geography and destiny so that no matter where you live, you have the same life chances. Our landmark Levelling Up White Paper, published in February, sets out how we will address regional disparities across the UK, put more money in the pockets of those who need it most, and transform the UK economy by generating higher paid jobs and new investment.

To support this, we are delivering the Equality Data Programme, which is the Government’s biggest and broadest review of the equality challenges we face, including geographic and socio-economic barriers to opportunity.

The work of the Social Mobility Commission is also central to the Government’s commitment to levelling up opportunities and ensuring fairness for all. We have bolstered the Commission by recruiting Katharine Birbalsingh as its new Chair and Alun Francis as Deputy Chair, and giving the Commission more leverage to influence other government departments.

In May, the Government published the review of disclosure and amended the Disclosure Guidelines to deliver improvements for police prosecutors, and victims of crime.

The new guidelines feature an annex on data protection which will ease the burden on police, leaving them more time on the beat and investigating crime.

Updated principles on accessing third party material have strengthened the protection of victim's personal information and mandate officers to have clear, written reasons in place before accessing any material such as therapy notes.

On 28 September this year, the Court of Appeal handed down judgment in the Colston statue case, after the then Attorney General asked the Court to clarify a point of law following the acquittal of those who pulled down the statue on 07 June 2020.

The Attorney General welcomes the Court's judgement and is pleased that the law has been clarified. The proper scope of certain defences to criminal damage arising from protests is now clear. While the acquittals in question were not the subject of the challenge, it has now made clear that in future, defendants will not be able to rely on this particular defence in the same way.

It is, and always will be, an absolute priority for this government to protect our democratic and electoral processes against foreign interference.

Last year, the Prime Minister established the Defending Democracy Taskforce to protect the democratic integrity of the UK from threats of foreign influence. Its mission is to reduce the risk to the UK’s democratic processes, institutions and society, and ensure that these are secure and resilient to threats of foreign interference.

In addition, the National Security Act 2023 creates a new offence of foreign interference. This will make it an offence to illegitimately influence the UK’s democratic processes and elected officials on behalf of a foreign power. The offence will also significantly increase sentences for electoral offences if they are carried out on behalf of a foreign power. Related measures in the Online Safety Bill will require digital platforms to proactively take action against a wide range of state-sponsored disinformation and state-linked online interference, including digitally manipulated content, where this has the aim of interfering with UK elections.

The Elections Act 2022 strengthened three important components of the political finance framework: fairness, transparency and controls against foreign spending. Since its introduction, the Government has restricted foreign campaign spending at elections and introduced a new requirement on political parties to declare their assets and liabilities over £500 upon registration. Foreign donations (and channelling foreign money) are already illegal. The Act also ensures greater transparency on digital campaigning, through the introduction of digital imprints.

For an emergency alert to be issued, a major incident must pose a risk to life. Risks to health or property will not be considered reasonable use. Members of the resilience community who may need to request an alert have been informed of this threshold.

Releasing an alert will require a request from the lead government department to the Cabinet Office National Situation Centre watchkeeper, and then approval by a Cabinet Office Duty Director. Where an alert is likely to be received by 1 million people or more, it must also receive ministerial approval. This system ensures that the Cabinet Office will only send emergency alerts when there is an imminent threat to life.

GREAT’s global promotion of the UK for over 10 years has been highly effective. In the last year alone, GREAT has attracted over £50m of foreign direct investment and helped generate over £400m through international promotion of the UK education sector. Finally, there is a further £600m of export, investment and tourism returns that are currently being assessed.

Departments are working towards having 5% of headcount being apprentices by 2025 as set out by the CS apprenticeship strategy. Apprenticeships will be integrated into skills and capability plans and other people strategies. We will provide entry and progression routes within a range of careers and professions for new and existing staff.

Since the Veterans Strategy Action Plan was published in January, we have delivered 24% of the over 60 cross-government commitments.

Recent achievements delivered through the Strategy Action Plan include;

• Provision of £150k in grant funding to charities to aid the development of best practice to ensure that veteran charities are inclusive and promote accessibility to female veterans

• Appointment of the first Veterans Commissioner for Wales, Colonel James Phillips

• Completion of a scoping study looking into the design of a service offering the digital verification of veteran status, with a further investment of £1m provided to develop this project further

• Continued support to phase 4 of the King’s Centre for Military Health Research longitudinal study through over £1.2m in funding being provided over the next two years. This study looked at the health and wellbeing of UK Armed Forces Personnel and for the first time, this will also look at topics including social mobility, taking the insights beyond health and wellbeing.

The UK has a generous system of parental leave and pay entitlements which include Maternity and Paternity Leave and Pay.

The standard rate of Statutory Maternity Pay and Paternity Pay is reviewed annually. Subject to parliamentary approval, from April 2024, it will increase by 6.7% from £172.48 to £184.03.

Statutory parental payments are designed to offer a degree of earnings replacement and have never been intended to fully replace lost earnings. The Government also has provisions in place such as tax credits, child benefit and Universal Credit, which provide support with the cost of raising children.

The Government’s Export Strategy, ‘Made in the UK, Sold to the World’, supports businesses through a 12 point plan which targets barriers to trade and helps them at every stage of their export journey.

My Department supports companies through its network of domestic and overseas trade advisers, sector specialists, the Export Support Service, and the Export Academy, as well as UK Export Finance (UKEF) which ensures that no viable UK export fails for lack of finance or insurance.

DBT Secretary of State and her ministerial team regularly engage with Cabinet colleagues to discuss measures to support the UK automotive sector’s successful transition to electric vehicles.

The Government is committed to securing investment into the automotive sector, which will play an important role in levelling up across the UK and driving down emissions to net zero by 2050.

The Government supports an industry-led transition to Net Zero and it continues to work with global investors via the Automotive Transformation Fund (ATF) to unlock private investment to build an internationally competitive electric vehicle supply chain.

The UK is home to the four largest operational offshore wind farms thanks to its successful Contracts for Difference (CfD) scheme. Following the publication of the last CfD allocation round outcome on 8 September, the Government held a roundtable with the offshore wind sector on 12 September to discuss the results. Officials are analysing the results as they build the evidence base for the next round, which will open in March 2024. The timeline for the round has been published on the CfD microsite. Core parameters will be published in mid-November. These will be informed by updated evidence and benchmarked against industry intelligence. The Government will publish its methodology note at the same time.

The Government invested up to £12m with the UK’s nuclear regulators between 2017 and 2022 under the Nuclear Innovation Programme, to build regulatory capability for small and advanced modular reactors (SMR and AMR).

With this funding, the regulators modernised the Generic Design Assessment process introducing efficiencies while maintaining rigour and updated their Technical Assessment Guidance and Assessment Principles for regulating SMRs and AMRs.

As outlined in the British Energy Security Strategy, the Government will work with the regulators to understand the potential for additional streamlining or removing of duplication from the regulation of new nuclear power stations.

The Department for Science, Innovation and Technology draws on regularly updated evidence from the Office for National Statistics (ONS). The ONS run the regular Business and Insights Conditions Survey (BICS) survey, which is refreshed every two weeks and now contains questions on AI uptake in UK businesses.

The ONS estimated that in September 2023, only 16% of UK businesses were using AI, with 19% planning to adopt solutions in the future (ONS, BICS survey). A separate global study by KPMG finds a similar level of uptake in the use of AI in business settings of 20% in the UK (KMPG, Trust in Artificial Intelligence 2023).

Our understanding of AI diffusion in the economy can also be informed by consumer use, which is reported at much higher levels. 50% of adults reported to the ONS that they used AI in their day-to-day life (ONS, OPN survey). It is possible that while businesses do not report formal use of AI, workers in these companies use tools such as ChatGPT or other Large Language Models for daily work tasks.

On the potential impact of AI use by businesses on the number of jobs created, in each of the next five years, AI has the potential to be a net creator of jobs and have a positive impact on economic growth - the World Economic Forum concluded in October 2020 that while AI may take away 85 million jobs globally by 2025, it is also likely to generate

97 million new jobs in areas such as data, machine learning and digital marketing.

DSIT will continue to monitor the take-up of AI in businesses and the impact this has on job creation closely.

Protecting children is at the heart of the Government’s Online Safety Bill. All companies in scope will need to take robust steps to protect children from illegal content and criminal behaviour on their services. In addition, services which are likely to be accessed by children, which will include social media platforms, will be required to provide safety measures for child users to protect them from inappropriate and harmful content or activity, such as pornography, bullying and content that promotes or glorifies self-harm, suicide and eating disorders. If they fail to do so, they will be subject to tough enforcement action by the regulator, Ofcom.

Ahead of the Online Safety Bill, video-sharing platform (VSP) providers currently regulated by the VSP regime are required to take ‘appropriate measures’ to protect under-18s from potentially harmful material. Appropriate measures could include, but are not limited to, age assurance, parental controls, and comprehensive terms and conditions.

Protecting children is at the heart of the Government’s Online Safety Bill. All companies in scope will need to take robust steps to protect children from illegal content and criminal behaviour on their services. In addition, services which are likely to be accessed by children, which will include social media platforms, will be required to provide safety measures for child users to protect them from inappropriate and harmful content or activity, such as pornography, bullying and content that promotes or glorifies self-harm, suicide and eating disorders. If they fail to do so, they will be subject to tough enforcement action by the regulator, Ofcom.

Ahead of the Online Safety Bill, video-sharing platform (VSP) providers currently regulated by the VSP regime are required to take ‘appropriate measures’ to protect under-18s from potentially harmful material. Appropriate measures could include, but are not limited to, age assurance, parental controls, and comprehensive terms and conditions.

The Government is committed to delivering nationwide gigabit connectivity as soon as possible. Today, 74% of premises can access gigabit-capable networks, up from just 6% in February 2019. By 2025, the Government is targeting a minimum of 85% gigabit-capable coverage, and we are investing £5 billion as part of Project Gigabit to ensure the hardest-to-reach areas in the UK receive coverage.

Through Project Gigabit, we have issued procurements with a value of over £700 million to deliver gigabit connections to hard-to-reach homes and businesses across the UK, including a £6.6 million contract covering over 4,000 premises in Teesdale in Durham.

Alongside this, the Gigabit Broadband Voucher Scheme allows eligible individuals and businesses to apply for vouchers to help incentivise broadband providers to build in certain areas. The scheme and its previous iterations have already issued more than 111,000 vouchers, and are enhancing the scheme further by boosting the value of vouchers so individual applicants can access as much as £4,500 worth of support.

We have also made it as easy and attractive as possible for firms to build their networks, having instructed Ofcom to increase competition and investment in the market. These measures include reducing barriers to entry by requiring Openreach to offer competitors access to their existing duct and pole network via Physical Infrastructure Access (PIA) where possible, rather than deploying new infrastructure.

We also introduced measures in the Product Security and Telecommunications Infrastructure Act 2022 to specifically assist telecoms operators providing broadband services, such as an increased ability to upgrade and share the existing duct and pole network and a procedure to deal with non-responsive landowners. This is in addition to the Telecommunications Infrastructure (Leasehold Property) Act 2021, which makes it easier for broadband operators to install in multiple dwelling units where the landlord is repeatedly unresponsive to requests for access.

Additionally, it is a priority to ensure that new homes are built with fast, reliable and resilient broadband. On 26 December 2022, new regulations came into force making it mandatory for new homes in England to be future-proofed with gigabit-ready physical infrastructure and - where they can be provided within a cost cap - gigabit-capable connections. This will help ensure that many more new households each year get the connectivity they want and need without costly and disruptive installation work after the home is built.

The Government is providing the fastest ever sustained uplift in R&D funding, reaching £20 billion per annum by the end of the SR period – £5 billion more than 2021/22 with HM Treasury committed to £22bn in 2026/7 as part of our commitment to the target of UK economy-wide R&D investment reaching 2.4% of GDP by 2027.

In order to achieve 2.4% by 2027, we are mapping out the current private and public R&D investment by sector and modelling options for securing the necessary private sector investment, using a combination of policy tools across the R&D ecosystem – from innovation accelerators to the catapults, catalyst funds, and a range of fiscal incentives including R&D tax credits, the patient capital review, scale up capital taskforce, pension fund reforms and post-Brexit regulatory reform.

The UK stands in solidarity with Ukraine, and we are assisting those who have been displaced and disrupted by this illegal invasion, including researchers and scientists.

We have announced the Researchers at Risk Fellowship Programme, which will support Ukrainian researchers fleeing the conflict, as well as those already in the UK who are unable to return home. The ‘Researchers at Risk’ programme, which launched in March 2022, was initially allocated £3m and a further £9.8 million of funding was announced on 28 June. With this funding more than 130 Ukrainian academics will be brought to, and supported in, the UK.

I refer my hon. Friend to the answer I gave the hon. Member for Newcastle upon Tyne Central on 27 April 2022 to Question 156445.

I refer my hon. Friend to the answer I gave him on 25^th May 2022 to Question 3766.

The Government intends to take one project to Final Investment Decision (FID) this Parliament and future projects in the next Parliament, subject to value for money and relevant approvals.

The Government will set up Great British Nuclear later this year, which will help projects through every stage of the development process and develop a resilient pipeline of new builds. The Government is working with industry to scope its functions and has appointed Simon Bowen as industry advisory on the scoping of the organisation.

The Future Nuclear Enabling Fund was launched in May 2022, which will provide targeted support to address barriers to entry to the nuclear market.