Asked by: Stuart Anderson (Conservative - Wolverhampton South West)
Question to the Department for Education:
To ask the Secretary of State for Education, what recent assessment he has made of the adequacy of the provision of services for children with special educational needs and disabilities in (a) Wolverhampton and (b) the West Midlands.
Answered by Will Quince
In Wolverhampton, Ofsted and the Care Quality Commission conducted a special educational needs and disabilities (SEND) inspection in September 2021. Inspectors identified six areas of significant weakness. As a result, Wolverhampton was required to produce and publish a Written Statement of Action (WSoA) which sets out how they intend to address these areas of concern. The WSoA is published on the local authority website.
We are committed to supporting and monitoring progress of the identified areas for improvement and have put in place regular monitoring and challenge meetings with SEND advisers from the department and NHS England.
In the West Midlands the SEND inspection framework assesses at a local authority level so there is no single assessment for West Midlands. However, as highlighted in the SEND and Alternative Provision Green Paper, there is inconsistency in the standard of services for children and young people with SEND and their parents in the West Midlands as there is across the country. The Green Paper, published on 29 March 2022, sets out a suite of proposed reforms that seek to create a coherent education, health and care system that works in the interests of all children in England and levels up opportunities.
The department is providing opportunities for children, parents, carers and those working across the SEND system to provide feedback during the 13-week consultation period which runs to 1 July 2022.
Asked by: Stuart Anderson (Conservative - Wolverhampton South West)
Question to the Department for Levelling Up, Housing & Communities:
To ask the Secretary of State for Levelling Up, Housing and Communities, what steps he is taking to help ensure that new housing developments deliver the infrastructure that communities require.
Answered by Stuart Andrew - Parliamentary Under Secretary of State (Department for Culture, Media and Sport)
It is important that new housing development is supported by the provision of infrastructure and appropriate services. Local authorities have responsibilities for planning for local development and the infrastructure to support it.
Where new development is proposed, contributions from developers play an important role in delivering the infrastructure to support communities and local economies. Local planning authorities can use the Community Infrastructure Levy (CIL) and Section 106 planning obligations (together called ‘developer contributions’) to secure funding from new development to contribute towards the delivery of infrastructure.
However, the existing developer contributions regime is discretionary, subject to negotiation and renegotiations based on developers’ viability assessment.
The Government has proposed to introduce a new ‘Infrastructure Levy’, to replace the existing system of developer contributions, which aims to capture a greater share of the uplift in land value that comes with development. Through the Levy, local authorities will have greater flexibility to determine how contributions are spent to shape and support both existing and new communities.
Asked by: Stuart Anderson (Conservative - Wolverhampton South West)
Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:
To ask the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, what steps his Department is taking to minimise the number of stillbirths in (a) the West Midlands and (b) England.
Answered by Maria Caulfield - Parliamentary Under Secretary of State (Department for Business and Trade) (Minister for Women)
In the West Midlands, there has been progress towards full implementation of the Saving Babies Lives Care Bundle version 2 (SBLCBv2) to reduce perinatal mortality. This aims to support the national ambition to halve the rates of stillbirths, neonatal and maternal deaths and intrapartum brain injuries by 2025. This ambition was extended to include reducing the rate of preterm births from 8% to 6% by 2025. Integrated care boards in the Midlands are being supported by the Midlands Perinatal Team to achieve full implementation by March 2023. In addition, a Midlands preterm birth strategy is in development with collaboration from clinical leads to reduce preterm births across the region.
In England, the Government's ambition is to halve the rate of stillbirths at 2010 levels by 2025, with a 20% reduction by 2020. The Office of National Statistics’ data published on 17 February 2022 shows that between 2010 and 2020, the stillbirth rate reduced from 5.1 per 1000 births to 3.8 per 1000 births, or a reduction of 25.2%. In the West Midlands Government Office Region, stillbirth rates reduced by 17.0%. We continue to work with all regions, including the West Midlands, to meet the national ambition.
Asked by: Stuart Anderson (Conservative - Wolverhampton South West)
Question to the Department for Transport:
To ask the Secretary of State for Transport, what progress the Government has made in improving the connectivity of the Wolverhampton South West constituency to the rest of the rail network.
Answered by Wendy Morton
The recently awarded £1.05 billion City Region Sustainable Transport Settlement will enable West Midlands Combined Authority to review its priorities and the value of commencing early business case development for schemes such as the new railway station proposed at Tettenhall.
Asked by: Stuart Anderson (Conservative - Wolverhampton South West)
Question to the Foreign, Commonwealth & Development Office:
To ask the Secretary of State for Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Affairs, what recent progress she has made with her international counterparts on tackling human rights abuses in human rights priority countries.
Answered by Vicky Ford
The UK works to promote human rights across all 31 human rights priority countries, drawing on the range of diplomatic and development levers available to encourage States to meet their international human rights obligations. The forthcoming 2021 FCDO Annual Human Rights and Democracy Report will set out recent engagement and work on human rights across all human rights priority countries. Examples include Myanmar, where we continue to use all available multilateral fora to condemn human rights violations committed by the military regime. Most recently in February we secured a UN Security Council Press Statement which called for an end to the violence and respect for human rights.
Asked by: Stuart Anderson (Conservative - Wolverhampton South West)
Question to the HM Treasury:
To ask the Chancellor of the Exchequer, what fiscal steps he plans to take to (a) support the future of independent shops on high streets and (b) encourage more local businesses to set up high street stores.
Answered by Lucy Frazer - Secretary of State for Culture, Media and Sport
In July 2021, the Prime Minister launched a strategy for the high street to transform town centres into vibrant places to live, work, and visit, and confirmed 15 Town Deals worth £335 million to revitalise towns across England.
Alongside this funding, the Government is providing a new temporary relief worth almost £1.7 billion for eligible retail, hospitality, and leisure businesses, resulting in over 90 per cent of retail, hospitality, and leisure businesses receiving at least a 50 per cent reduction in their business rates bills in 2022-23, when taken together with Small Business Rates Relief.
Asked by: Stuart Anderson (Conservative - Wolverhampton South West)
Question to the Home Office:
To ask the Secretary of State for the Home Department, what assessment she has made of the effectiveness of Action Fraud.
Answered by Damian Hinds - Minister of State (Education)
Based out of the City of London Police, Action Fraud is the UK’s national reporting centre for fraud and cyber crime and works alongside the National Fraud Intelligence Bureau who are responsible for the assessment of the reports.
In light of advances in technology and growing demand on the service, as well as reports such as Sir Craig Mackey’s independent review of Action Fraud (https://www.cityoflondon.gov.uk/assets/About-us/action-fraud-report.pdf), we are working with the City of London Police on plans to refresh and upgrade the current Action Fraud service. We are working to make continuous improvements to the service to make it easier for victims to report fraud, including increasing the number of staff in the call centre.
At the same time City of London Police have launched a competitive procurement for a new service, to be operational by 2024. This will improve the service to victims, provide greater intelligence and insight to policing on fraud and cybercrime affecting communities, and allow for greater prevention and disruption at scale.
We are spending an additional £400 million over the next three years to tackle economic crime including fraud, which follows the extra £63m investment prioritised in 2021. Some of this funding will be used in the programme to refresh and upgrade the Action Fraud service.
Asked by: Stuart Anderson (Conservative - Wolverhampton South West)
Question to the Cabinet Office:
To ask the Minister for the Cabinet Office, what recent discussions he has had with Cabinet colleagues on the Government’s plans to tackle suicide among veterans.
Answered by Leo Docherty - Minister of State (Ministry of Defence) (Minister for the Armed Forces)
The Government is clear that any suicide is a tragedy and is fully committed to tackling suicide among veterans. In September 2021, we announced a new method for recording veteran suicide. We expect the first reports from this data to be available in 2023.
Concurrent to that work, the MOD, ONS and OVA are working collaboratively to publish a 10-year lookback on veteran deaths through suicide, alcohol misuse and drug abuse. Having a better understanding of the number of veterans taking their own lives will help inform future policy and interventions in support of veterans.
Our ambition is to ensure that no veteran’s request for help goes unanswered. The veterans' mental health and wellbeing service, Op COURAGE, was allocated £17.8million funding last year and an extra £2.7million over the next three years. Further, we are supporting veteran-friendly accreditation for GPs and veteran-aware training for social work teams.
Additional funding has been awarded to service charities involved in supporting the mental health of veterans, such as through the £5million Afghanistan Veterans Fund, as well as an additional £10 million to the Armed Forces Covenant Fund Trust.
Asked by: Stuart Anderson (Conservative - Wolverhampton South West)
Question to the Department for Digital, Culture, Media & Sport:
To ask the Secretary of State for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport, what steps she is taking to help ensure the long-term sustainability of the community radio sector.
Answered by Julia Lopez - Minister of State (Department for Science, Innovation and Technology)
The Government has for a number of years provided financial support to the community radio sector by way of the Community Radio Fund (CRF), which distributes £400,000 on an annual basis to help fund the core costs of running licensed community radio stations and enable the sector to move towards self-sustainability. Furthermore, in the last two financial years, we have supported the CRF to go beyond this core funding, with significant uplifts targeted on tackling loneliness and to reflect the sector’s important contribution to the government’s ambitions on levelling up.
We have also recently commissioned a full external evaluation of the CRF, the report of which will be published shortly. We will be working closely with Ofcom, as the administrators of the Fund, on potential improvements to the running of the Fund in the light of the findings of that evaluation, to ensure that it works as efficiently and effectively as possible.
In addition, we have in recent years worked to support the growth of small-scale Digital Audio Broadcasting (DAB), both through passing the necessary legislation and in working with sector stakeholders to support the rollout of licences. Small-scale DAB represents a low-cost route to broadcasting on a terrestrial digital platform, and we envisage it enabling a significant number of new community services to launch as well as allowing existing stations to move onto digital over the coming months and years.
Asked by: Stuart Anderson (Conservative - Wolverhampton South West)
Question to the Wales Office:
To ask the Secretary of State for Wales, what recent discussions he has had with Cabinet colleagues on the progress of the Places for Growth programme.
Answered by Simon Hart - Parliamentary Secretary to the Treasury (Chief Whip)
I have regular discussions with Cabinet colleagues on a range of issues, including the Places for Growth programme.
The Places for Growth programme is delivering the UK Government’s commitment to move 22,000 Civil Service roles and 50% of UK-based Senior Civil Service roles, out of Greater London by 2030. Wales has already benefitted from this work including the establishment of a Trade Hub for Wales and a dedicated DLUHC Wales area team based in the UK Government’s Cardiff Hub (Ty William Morgan). Furthermore, as detailed in the Levelling Up White Paper, Wales will benefit from the relocation of around 500 non-operational Ministry of Justice roles to sites including Cardiff, Swansea and Wrexham.