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  • Barry Sheerman – 2014 Parliamentary Question to the Department of Health

    Barry Sheerman – 2014 Parliamentary Question to the Department of Health

    The below Parliamentary question was asked by Barry Sheerman on 2014-05-02.

    To ask the Secretary of State for Health, what the cost is of redundancies made by NHS England since January 2013; and what proportion of total expenditure that figure represents.

    Dr Daniel Poulter

    The Secretary of State meets regularly with NHS England to discuss a wide variety of issues. The Department is clear on the need to ensure that redundancy payments are made only in circumstances where it is appropriate to do so and has been working with NHS England to ensure that payments are tightly controlled, whilst meeting contractual obligations.

    Redundancies are subject to rigorous scrutiny and challenge before being approved. Additionally, any individual redundancy compensation payment in excess of £100,000 also requires Departmental approval. Where redundancies do occur, NHS England ensures that these are formally subject to national NHS provisions to claw back any redundancy payment received where an individual then goes on to be re-employed within the National Health Service, further ensuring better value for the tax payer.

    NHS England takes seriously its responsibilities to ensure that redundancy is a last resort and has implemented a system to seek to re-deploy any staff affected by such change to retain knowledge, skills and capability within the organisation, where at all possible.

    NHS England has a responsibility for ensuring that maximum value for money for taxpayers is delivered, whilst seeking to improve health outcomes for patients through effective commissioning arrangements. As a direct employer of 6,000 people, NHS England has a responsibility to continually improve the way it delivers both commissioning and the provision of the services for which it is directly accountable, which includes the regular review of its workforce arrangements.

    NHS England has advised that its redundancy costs for 2012-13 were £54,000, which represented 0.1% of total expenditure. For 2013-14 the costs were £1,017,000, which represented 0.003% of total expenditure.

  • Barry Sheerman – 2014 Parliamentary Question to the Department of Health

    Barry Sheerman – 2014 Parliamentary Question to the Department of Health

    The below Parliamentary question was asked by Barry Sheerman on 2014-05-02.

    To ask the Secretary of State for Health, if he will provide a breakdown of the transition costs in NHS England’s January finance report.

    Dr Daniel Poulter

    NHS England’s Financial Performance Report, which was included in the papers for its January Board meeting, gave a planned reserves/transition costs spend for 2013-14 of £110,600,000 in a table showing running costs at November 2013. NHS England has provided a breakdown shown in the following table.

    Transition – Estates Void Costs

    £35,000,000

    Transition – Primary Care Services Restructuring

    £35,000,000

    Corporate Reserves and Contingency

    £40,600,000

    Total

    £110,600,000

    The forecast figure of £91,000,000 for reserves/transition costs shown in the report was arrived at due to an anticipated underspend against the Primary Care Services Restructuring budget, based on forecast information from business plans for the project.

  • Barry Sheerman – 2014 Parliamentary Question to the Department of Health

    Barry Sheerman – 2014 Parliamentary Question to the Department of Health

    The below Parliamentary question was asked by Barry Sheerman on 2014-05-02.

    To ask the Secretary of State for Health, what guidance his Department provides to clinical commissioning groups about engagement with Local Safeguarding Children Boards.

    Dr Daniel Poulter

    Clinical commissioning groups (CCGs) are statutory members of Local Safeguarding Children Boards under section 13 of the Children Act 2004, as amended by the Health and Social Care Act 2012. The inter-agency statutory guidance Working Together to Safeguard Children, published by the Department for Education in 2013, describes the functions of Local Safeguarding Children Boards and the responsibilities of member organisations.

    NHS England published its Safeguarding Vulnerable People in the Reformed NHS: Accountability and Assurance Framework in 2013 to complement the statutory guidance and support CCGs and other National Health Service organisations in fulfilling their safeguarding responsibilities.

  • Kerry McCarthy – 2014 Parliamentary Question to the Prime Minister

    Kerry McCarthy – 2014 Parliamentary Question to the Prime Minister

    The below Parliamentary question was asked by Kerry McCarthy on 2014-05-02.

    To ask the Prime Minister, what recent discussions he has had with his Australian counterpart on (a) climate change and (b) the agenda for the G20 Leaders’ Summit to be held in Brisbane in November 2014.

    Mr David Cameron

    I discussed Climate Change policy with the Australian Prime Minister (Paul Abbott) in January this year, at the World Economic Forum meeting in Davos. We also discussed the G20 agenda and the need to use the G20 to secure continued and sustainable growth in the global economy.

  • Nicholas Brown – 2014 Parliamentary Question to the Department for Work and Pensions

    Nicholas Brown – 2014 Parliamentary Question to the Department for Work and Pensions

    The below Parliamentary question was asked by Nicholas Brown on 2014-05-02.

    To ask the Secretary of State for Work and Pensions, what assessment he has made of the effect of the under occupancy penalty on households where children have been removed by children’s services on a temporary basis under child protection regulations.

    Esther McVey

    Children who have been temporarily taken into care under child protection regulations are not assessed as part of the household with regards to the size criteria in both the social and private rented sectors.

    This means a bedroom will not be allocated for any children taken into protective care. However, a child can be treated as a member of the claimant’s household if they spend part of a benefit week in a claimant’s house and the local authority considers it reasonable to include them as part of that household.

    Where people are temporarily under occupying, they can apply for additional help through Discretionary Housing Payment (DHP) scheme for which we have provided funding of £345 million over the last 2 years. Guidance to Local Authorities on awarding a DHP covers circumstances where a child is temporarily away from home. Where appropriate, claimants could therefore apply for a DHP in child protection cases.

  • Nicholas Brown – 2014 Parliamentary Question to the Department for Communities and Local Government

    Nicholas Brown – 2014 Parliamentary Question to the Department for Communities and Local Government

    The below Parliamentary question was asked by Nicholas Brown on 2014-05-02.

    To ask the Secretary of State for Communities and Local Government, what criteria he will use to assess requests for extra powers from local enterprise partnerships and combined authorities.

    Kris Hopkins

    The Government is currently negotiating a ‘Growth Deal’ with every Local Enterprise Partnership, based on the Strategic Economic Plans they submitted in March 2014. The criteria being used to assess the plans are set out in the guidance published in July 2013. These are: ambition and rationale for intervention; value for money; and deliverability and risk. Combined authorities, where they exist, are represented in Local Enterprise Partnerships and will have been involved in the development of the Strategic Economic Plans.

    Notwithstanding, as I indicated to the rt. hon. Member in my answers to him of 3 April 2014, Official Report, Column 778W and 6 May 2014, Official Report, Column 24W, we should be cautious about any measure which had the effect of transferring power upwards away from elected local councils. Decentralisation should devolve power to the lowest appropriate level.

    Combined authorities are relatively new bodies. They now should focus on using the functions and powers that they currently have and prove themselves on delivering local growth; we do not intend to repeat the “function creep” mistakes of the Regional Development Agencies which just became unwieldy and unfocused, taking on too much and failing to deliver.

  • Nicholas Brown – 2014 Parliamentary Question to the Deputy Prime Minister

    Nicholas Brown – 2014 Parliamentary Question to the Deputy Prime Minister

    The below Parliamentary question was asked by Nicholas Brown on 2014-05-02.

    To ask the Deputy Prime Minister, what criteria he will use to assess local enterprise partnerships strategic economic plans for funding under the Local Growth Deal.

    Greg Clark

    The criteria the Government will be using to assess Strategic Economic Plans and bids for the Local Growth Fund were published in July 2013 and are available at: https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/growth-deals-initial-guidance-for-local-enterprise-partnerships

    “

  • Nicholas Brown – 2014 Parliamentary Question to the Deputy Prime Minister

    Nicholas Brown – 2014 Parliamentary Question to the Deputy Prime Minister

    The below Parliamentary question was asked by Nicholas Brown on 2014-05-02.

    To ask the Deputy Prime Minister, how much Local Growth Fund finance has been requested within all local enterprise partnerships’ strategic economic plans; what estimate he has made of private investment that will be leveraged through strategic economic plans; and what estimate he has made of European match-funding.

    Greg Clark

    Local Enterprise Partnerships (LEPs) have shown a high level of ambition in their proposals, and the Local Growth Fund (LGF) is between 3-4 times over-subscribed. The amount of private sector leverage put forward varies by LEP and by project, and this is part of the current discussions with LEPs.

    In addition to the competitive element, the Local Growth Fund contains £170m of resource funding to match against skills and employability activity supported by EU Structural Investment Funds. The amount of LGF match made available will depend on EU funding allocation agreed with each LEP.

  • Nicholas Brown – 2014 Parliamentary Question to the Department for Business, Innovation and Skills

    Nicholas Brown – 2014 Parliamentary Question to the Department for Business, Innovation and Skills

    The below Parliamentary question was asked by Nicholas Brown on 2014-05-02.

    To ask the Secretary of State for Business, Innovation and Skills, how many Regional Growth Fund bids were submitted by each local enterprise partnership area in the most recent bidding round; and how many of these were successful.

    Michael Fallon

    133 bids were submitted to Round 5 of the Regional Growth Fund. Three of these bids withdrew and one was for less than the £1 million bidding threshold.

    129 bids were therefore appraised, of which 98 were projects and 31 were programmes. Of these, 13 programmes and 37 projects were selected. Programmes may cover a number of Local Enterprise Partnership (LEP) areas and some are national in scope so are not represented in the following table.

    The following table shows the number of Round 5 project bids by LEP area with the number of bids that were selected for funding. Project bids originating from an area covered by more than one LEP are shown at the bottom of the table.

    LEP Round 5 Projects

    Applications

    Selected

    Black Country

    1

    0

    Cheshire and Warrington

    5

    1

    Coast to Capital

    2

    1

    Cornwall and the Isles of Scilly

    5

    0

    Coventry and Warwickshire

    2

    2

    Cumbria

    1

    0

    Enterprise M3

    1

    1

    Gloucestershire

    1

    1

    Greater Birmingham and Solihull

    6

    3

    Greater Cambridge & Greater Peterborough

    1

    0

    Greater Lincolnshire

    1

    0

    Greater Manchester

    5

    2

    Heart of the South West

    13

    3

    Hertfordshire

    1

    0

    Humber

    2

    1

    Lancashire

    4

    1

    Leeds City Region

    3

    2

    Leicester and Leicestershire

    2

    0

    Liverpool City Region

    5

    3

    London

    3

    0

    New Anglia

    1

    0

    North Eastern

    7

    5

    Sheffield City Region

    2

    0

    South East

    1

    0

    South East Midlands

    2

    2

    Stoke-on-Trent and Staffordshire

    1

    0

    Swindon and Wiltshire

    2

    1

    Tees Valley

    8

    6

    Thames Valley Berkshire

    1

    0

    West of England

    2

    0

    York and North Yorkshire

    1

    0

    Project bids from an area covered by more than one LEP:

    Derby, Derbyshire, Nottingham and Nottinghamshire, & Sheffield City Region

    1

    0

    Greater Birmingham and Solihull & Stoke-on-Trent and Staffordshire

    1

    1

    Greater Birmingham and Solihull & Worcestershire

    1

    0

    Greater Cambridge & Greater Peterborough & New Anglia

    1

    0

    Northamptonshire & South East Midlands

    2

    1

    Grand Total

    98

    37
  • Nicholas Brown – 2014 Parliamentary Question to the Foreign and Commonwealth Office

    Nicholas Brown – 2014 Parliamentary Question to the Foreign and Commonwealth Office

    The below Parliamentary question was asked by Nicholas Brown on 2014-05-02.

    To ask the Secretary of State for Foreign and Commonwealth Affairs, what representations the Government has made to the government of Qatar about working conditions for those constructing FIFA World Cup 2022 stadiums.

    Hugh Robertson

    I raised concerns about migrant workers’ conditions with the Qatari authorities during my visit to Doha on 8-9 January. Our Ambassador and other officials have raised the issue on previous occasions and will continue to do so.