Paul Davies

The Government is investing £1.14 billion over 30 years (£38 million annually) towards West Yorkshire Mayoral Combined Authority’s local economic priorities, including business support. The UK Shared Prosperity Fund also provides £83 million for West Yorkshire, including support to businesses in Colne Valley.

For small businesses across the country, we will deliver on commitments to boost exports, improve access to finance, stamp out late payment practices and open up competition for public procurement contracts. The department also provides support through Help to Grow Management, the Business Support Service and a network of Growth Hubs – including the West Yorkshire Business Support Service.

The Government is determined to deliver a genuine living wage for working people and has asked the Low Pay Commission to make progress on extending the National Living Wage to all adults.

HMRC enforces the minimum wage, and they investigate where they believe an employer is not paying the minimum wage. This includes considering all complaints from workers, conducting proactive enforcement activities and delivering educational activity to support employer compliance.

The National Minimum Wage Naming Scheme sends a clear message to businesses that they must pay their workers at least the National Minimum Wage where required, or we will publicly name them for having failed to meet their legal obligations.

The Department for Business and Trade is committed to boosting UK exports to the EU. UK businesses, including those in Colne Valley & West Yorkshire, can access our export support via Great.gov.uk. This comprises a digital self-serve offer and our wider network of support, including Export Champions, the Export Academy, our International Markets network, and UK Export Finance. Alongside this, our international trade advisers provide one-to-one tailored support to businesses across the UK.

We will also continue work with the EU to improve the UK’s trade and investment relationship and reduce unnecessary barriers to trade, in order to help British and EU businesses thrive.

Sport is a huge part of our national story. Team GB has won a gold medal at every Summer Olympics since 1896 and the 14 gold medals at the Paris 2024 Games continues this record. Not only is success on the world stage a huge source of national pride, but it also inspires people of all ages to get involved in sport and physical activity.

The Government is committed to a legacy of the Paris Games that is measured not just in medals, but also in ensuring that everyone, everywhere, has access to and benefits from quality sport and physical activity opportunities.

The Government provides the majority of funding for grassroots sport through our arm’s-length body, Sport England - which annually invests over £250 million in Exchequer and Lottery funding in areas of greatest need to tackle inactivity levels through community-led solutions. Sport England’s Movement Fund offers crowdfunding pledges, grants and resources to improve physical activity opportunities for the people and communities who need it the most.

Funding from the Multi-Sport Grassroots Facilities Programme continues to be invested in England through Sport England and our delivery partner, the Football Foundation. As it has to date, this will continue to deliver high-quality, inclusive grassroots facilities that help more people access sport in Colne Valley.

The government has established an independent Curriculum and Assessment Review, covering ages 5 to 18, which will be chaired by Professor Becky Francis CBE.

The review will seek to deliver a curriculum that ensures children and young people leave compulsory education ready for life and ready for work, and one that builds the knowledge, skills and attributes young people need to seize opportunity and to thrive in the changing workplace. This includes weaving speaking and listening skills, as well as digital and other life skills, into their learning.

The review will be undertaken in close partnership with stakeholders, including employers. A call for evidence will be launched in the coming weeks, which will set out the areas where the review group would particularly welcome input.

This government is transforming the Apprenticeship Levy into a new Growth and Skills Levy to create opportunities for learners of all ages, including young people at the start of their careers, and to give employers greater flexibility to train and upskill their workforce.

The department is working across government to develop the design of the Growth and Skills Levy and will set out more detail in due course. This will include further information on the role of Skills England in identifying the training for which the Growth and Skills Levy will be accessible and ensuring that those training programmes, including apprenticeships, are well designed and delivered to meet the needs of both learners and businesses.

We are committed to protecting our nature-rich habitats, including our moorlands, through promoting sustainable land management and restoration practices. Wetter, healthy-functioning peatlands are more resilient to the impacts of fire.

My Department is committed to improving transport links in West Yorkshire, and across the country. West Yorkshire Combined Authority (WYCA) has been allocated £830m of City Region Sustainable Transport Settlements funding over a five-year period, to help transform local transport into an integrated and inclusive network. Included in the investment is £160m set aside for mass transit development in West Yorkshire.

WYCA has also received £13.373m of additional Bus Service Improvement Plan (BSIP) funding for 2024/2025, helping deliver their vision for better buses in West Yorkshire. The Department’s Buses Bill will support WYCA in their vision to bring buses back under local control, ensuring their networks can meet the needs of the communities who rely on them.

Additionally, as part of improving rail connectivity in West Yorkshire and the rest of the country, we have established Shadow Great British Railways to bring a major overhaul of the rail network, putting passengers first and driving up performance.

The NHS England Cancer Programme commissions clinical cancer audits, which provide timely evidence for cancer service providers of where patterns of care in England may vary, increase the consistency of access to treatments, and help stimulate improvements in cancer treatment and outcomes for patients. Rather than a single audit, NHS England commissions ten audits, by tumour type, and are unaware of any intention to commission an audit into those over 70 years old.

For all patients in England, the National Cancer Registration and Analysis Service provides near-real time, comprehensive, quality-assured data covering the entire cancer pathway. The service collects data about all 500,000 patients diagnosed with cancer in England each year, and produces a variety of reports and publications using cancer registration data.

There are currently no plans to reinstate the National Cancer Equality Initiative. Making improvements across different cancer types is critical to reducing inequalities in cancer survival. Early cancer diagnosis is also a specific priority within the National Health Service’s wider Core20Plus5 approach to reducing healthcare inequalities.

We recognise there are particular challenges for a number of different populations, particularly for people living in the most deprived areas of the country. As part of our wider strategy on early diagnosis, we are directly targeting our activity at areas we know will make a difference. This includes awareness raising campaigns such as the NHS Help Us, Help You campaign, to increase awareness of cancer symptoms and encourage people to get checked.

The Government is committed to building a fairer Britain by tackling the structural inequalities that contribute to poor health, particularly for disadvantaged groups. We are dedicated to ensuring that people live well for longer, spending less time in ill health, regardless of where they are born or their financial circumstances.

Our health mission in England will focus on addressing the social determinants of health, with the goal of halving the gap in healthy life expectancy between the richest and poorest regions.

We will work across the Government to address the root causes of health inequalities, including barriers to access to health and care services. We will prioritise prevention, shift more care into the community, and intervene earlier in life to raise the healthiest generation of children in our history.

As of 4 September 2024, there were nine National Health Service dentist practices in the Colne Valley constituency, and none of them were showing as ‘accepting new adult patients when availability allows’. This data is sourced from the Find a Dentist website and is matched to constituencies based on the postcode data shown on the website, which is available at the following link:

https://www.nhs.uk/service-search/find-a-Dentist

NHS dentists are required to update their NHS website profiles at least every 90 days, to ensure patients have up-to-date information on where they can access care.

People with mental health issues in the Colne Valley constituency and across the country are not getting the support or care they deserve, which is why we will fix the broken system to ensure that mental health is given the same attention and focus as physical health, so that people can be confident in accessing high quality mental health support when they need it.

We will recruit an additional 8,500 mental health workers to reduce delays and provide faster treatment, which will also help ease pressure on hospitals. By cutting mental health waiting lists and intervening earlier with more timely mental health support, we can get this country back to good health.

The Government is committed to delivering the biggest increase in social and affordable housebuilding in a generation and ensuring that every part of the country benefits from it.

We will set out further details in due course.