Mr Speaker, I would like to make a statement on this week’s heatwave.

Coningsby, in Lincolnshire, broke records yesterday when it registered a provisional reading of 40.3 degrees Celsius.

According to the Met Office, no fewer than 34 locations around the United Kingdom exceeded the country’s previous highest temperature of 37.8 Celsius, set in 2019.

We have seen a collective national endeavour to prepare for and manage the effects of the heat – from town hall to Whitehall and across various industries, to keep people safe and infrastructure functioning.

From water companies and rail engineers to public servants right across the land, everyone has pulled together –  with members of the public responding in a way that was responsible, and took the pressure off vital public services.

Our national resolve has been exemplified by our Fire & Rescue Services – for many of whom, yesterday was their busiest day since World War 2. They were undoubtedly stretched but coped magnificently and the systems put in place to make sure that the fire service can operate on a national basis as well as locally worked well.

In tinderbox conditions they have dealt with dozens of wildfires around the country over the past 24 hours. Fifteen Fire & Rescue Services declared Major Incidents and handled emergency calls the length and breadth of the country.

Sadly, at least 41 properties have been destroyed in London, 14 in Norfolk, five in Lincolnshire, and smaller numbers elsewhere. On behalf of the Prime Minister and the Cabinet, I would like to pass on our sincere condolences to those who have lost their homes or business premises and I know my Right Honourable friend the Secretary of State is working closely with local authorities on this.

Throughout recent days, the Prime Minister has monitored our work and has been specifically briefed on a number of occasions – we did so again this morning.  The Prime Minister was briefed during the wildfires by Mark Hardingham, Chair of the National Fire Chiefs Council, and the Civil Contingencies Secretariat; and he has passed on his thanks to all the brave firefighters who have sought to control the flames in such debilitating conditions.

I would also like to pay tribute to the fire control staff, officers and support teams for their essential work; and the other agencies that have made such tremendous efforts in recent days – the NHS, our emergency call handlers, Police and Maritime & Coastguard Agency among many others.

Honourable Members will be relieved to know that some pressure on services will ease now that the fiercest heat has subsided. Many incidents are now being scaled back.

Thunderstorms are likely this afternoon but for much of the country, more clement dry conditions are the pattern in coming days. The Met Office, however, stresses that the summer is likely to bring further hot weather and wildfire risk will remain elevated.

That is why we are treating this heatwave as an exacting test of our national resilience and contingency planning.

As always, there is no room for complacency.

Mr Speaker, we have seen what you can achieve when you prepare properly and then work  closely together.

Owing to the technical expertise of the weather forecasters, who predicted with admirable precision the peak of the heatwave and how high the temperatures would be, the Government was able to launch an advance campaign of comprehensive public advice.

And our early data shows how, well before the heatwave arrived, people were taking on board this advice from the UK Health Security Agency, the NHS, the chief and deputy chief medical officer, emergency services,and key agencies on the ground.

And because of our established local networks and colleagues in the Devolved Administrations, we had people spread across the UK ready to step in when it mattered.

I am particularly grateful to the cooperation and support we received from the Scottish Government, Welsh Government and Northern Ireland Executive. We need to manage these national events together.

Mr Speaker, I would like now to give some examples of how people taking the right action helped to mitigate the effects of the extreme weather.

Starting with heeding advice: fully five times as many people accessed NHS England internet pages on how to manage the symptoms of heat exhaustion, in the critical week beginning July 11.

Moving on to our vital 999 call services, we had feared that they would come under untold pressure. Yet as the mercury climbed inexorably on July 18, fewer 999 calls were made than the week before;  and more 111 calls – again suggesting the public had heeded the advice, this time to avoid using 999 unless in emergencies.

On to travel, and once again people were playing for the team. The public stayed at home to avoid the heat, not venturing far.  The data bears this out: on Monday, footfall at major London stations was around 35% of normal post-pandemic levels. Yesterday [TUES], Network Rail reports, passenger train numbers were around 40% down on the previous week.

We did not forget those who cannot easily leave their homes, asking people to look out for elderly and vulnerable family members and neighbours.

Tragically however, 13 people are believed to have lost their lives after getting into difficulty in rivers, reservoirs and lakes while swimming in recent days – seven of them teenage boys. I would like to pass on our sincere condolences to the families of the victims for their terrible loss.

Of course we still have to work through the longer-term consequences of the heatwave.

The true picture will not come until all incidents are analysed, all emergency teams are debriefed, and all incident logs and data reconciled.

There is a great deal of data yet to come in from colleagues in the devolved administrations, and from the local authorities and agencies around the country.

We do recognise that we are likely to experience more of these incidents: and that we should not underestimate their speed, scope and severity.

Britain may be unaccustomed to such high temperatures but the UK, along with our European neighbours, must learn to live with extreme events such as these.

The Government has been at the forefront of international efforts to reach Net Zero, but the impacts of climate change are with us now. This is why we have a National Adaptation Programme under the leadership of the Environment Department.

As we have seen in recent days, we will continue to face acute events driven by climate change. It is the responsibility of Cabinet Office Ministers to coordinate work across Government when these events take place.

This government will continue to build our collective resilience. To this end, the National Resilience Strategy about which I was asked about on Monday, will be launched at the earliest possible opportunity by the incoming administration.

In the meantime, I will continue to coordinate work of teams across government in building resilience, to make sure the country is ready to meet the challenges of the autumn, the winter and beyond  – and it is in that spirit that I commend this Statement to the House.

The 15 percent fee increase will see a typical criminal barrister earn £7,000 more a year while criminal solicitors will also receive a 15 percent fee rise across a range of their work, including that undertaken in police stations, magistrates’ courts and youth courts.

The legislation has been fast-tracked so legal professionals can see the pay rise before the end of the year with the new fees introduced at the end of September.

Justice Minister Sarah Dines said:

We are creating a sustainable legal aid system that is fit for the future and the typical criminal barrister will get a generous pay rise of £7,000 following a 15 percent fee increase.

The £135 million extra investment in legal aid will also help ensure that solicitors and other legal professionals are better paid for the important work they do to ensure victims get timely justice.

The remaining proposals in the recent consultation on criminal legal aid will be responded to later this year, with potential further increases for solicitors and other legal professionals as part of longer-term reforms, with £20 million set aside for this work.

Up to £74 million extra has been allocated to criminal legal aid per year over the last 4 years and the proposal to increase investment by £135 million a year is the biggest rise in a decade.

The Independent Review of Criminal Legal Aid found that, before expenses, the median fee of a criminal barrister in 2019-20 was £79,800 and that 80 percent earn at least £45,000 after expenses. While junior barristers earn much less in their first couple of years of practice, by their third year of practice the average criminal barrister will earn £65,000 before expenses.

The government is also investing £477 million into the justice system to reduce backlogs in the courts caused by the pandemic and has also removed the cap on how many days courts can sit for a second year. The investment means more trials can take place and the same decision last year meant that nearly 17,000 more days were sat in the Crown Court than the year prior to the pandemic.

Video technology has been rolled out to over 70 percent of all courtrooms and 3,265 virtual court rooms have been opened so that more hearings can take place.

Since May, magistrates have been able to sentence offenders to up to a year in prison, doubling their previous powers, helping to free up an estimated 1,700 extra sitting days of Crown Court time each year.

Today, the UK and US governments launched a set of prize challenges to unleash the potential of privacy-enhancing technologies (PETs) to combat global societal challenges. Announced at the Summit for Democracy last year, innovators from academia, industry, and the broader public will have the opportunity to participate in up to two separate tracks (improving detection of financial crime and forecasting an individual’s risk of infection during a pandemic) as well as the option to design one generalised solution that works for both scenarios for broader applicability.

Competing for cash prizes from a combined UK-US prize pool of $1.6 million (£1.3 million), innovators will develop privacy-preserving federated learning solutions that enable artificial intelligence models to be trained on sensitive data without organisations having to reveal, share, or combine their raw data. Winning challenge solutions will be showcased at the second Summit for Democracy, which President Biden plans to convene in the first half of 2023.

The first track – aimed at transforming financial crime prevention – will spur technological innovation to tackle the challenge of international money laundering. According to United Nations’ (UN) estimates, money laundering costs up to $2 trillion each year, undermining economic prosperity and financing organised crime. PETs can be harnessed to facilitate privacy-preserving financial information sharing and collaborative analytics, allowing anomalous payments to be identified without compromising the privacy of individuals.

Innovators will work with synthetic global transaction data created by SWIFT, the global provider of secure financial messaging services. Registered challenge participants will receive access to data that is realistic, but artificial, and therefore does not run the risk of revealing private information.

To provide regulatory context important for understanding the potential of these maturing technologies to counter illicit financial activity, the prize challenges will provide opportunities for innovators to engage with regulators on both sides of the Atlantic, including the UK’s Financial Conduct Authority (FCA) and Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO), and the U.S. Financial Crimes Enforcement Network (FinCEN). Innovators will also engage with the UK National Economic Crime Centre.

The second track of the challenges – aimed at bolstering pandemic response capabilities – will strengthen global readiness for ongoing and future public health emergencies by developing privacy-preserving solutions that can forecast an individual’s risk of infection. Innovators will have access to a synthetic dataset created by the University of Virginia’s Biocomplexity Institute, which represents a digital twin of a regional population. As with the financial dataset, the pandemic response dataset is synthetic and will not reveal private information. Challenge participants will be able to engage with staff from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), NHS England, and the UK Research and Innovation DARE UK (Data and Analytics Research Environments UK) programme.

Nadine Dorries, Secretary of State for the U.K. Department for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport, said:

I’m delighted that we are today launching joint UK-US prize challenges to accelerate the adoption of privacy-enhancing technologies (PETs). These cutting-edge technologies can help us to harness the power of data to tackle global challenges like international money laundering and to plan for subsequent public health emergencies, while respecting citizens’ rights. This partnership demonstrates the UK and US’ commitment to working together to address transnational challenges, as well as to ensuring that our vision of the tech revolution – one that is open and democratic – prevails.

Dr. Alondra Nelson, head of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy, said:

These prize challenges will catalyze talent and ingenuity on both sides of the Atlantic to advance privacy-enhancing technology solutions and enable their potential  to tackle global challenges like those of cross-border financial crime and pandemic response.

This important initiative reflects our common purpose of developing  technologies and driving innovation in a manner that reinforces our commitment to and expression of democratic values and the fundamental right to privacy.

Dr. Sethuraman Panchanathan, Director of the National Science Foundation (NSF), said:

Building on decades of NSF research investment in the field, these prize challenges will accelerate the translation of game-changing privacy-enhancing technologies. In this way, these prize challenges – supported by NSF’s Directorate for Computer and Information Science and Engineering and the new Directorate for Technology, Innovation and Partnerships – illustrate the synergy of foundational research and translational activities in moving research to practice. By harnessing innovation across national lines and strengthening a transatlantic community of innovation, the US-UK prize challenges will demonstrate the value of international collaboration to develop technologies in ways that uphold our shared values.

U.S. Secretary of Commerce Gina Raimondo siad:

We are on the cusp of solving some of the world’s most intractable problems and improving our quality of life with the power of artificial intelligence, but we must do it responsibly by upholding our shared values around privacy,

I’m thrilled that we’re launching these joint UK-US privacy-enhancing technology prize challenges and motivating our best researchers in industry and academia to innovate on protecting privacy so that we can all reap the benefits.

John Edwards, UK Information Commissioner, said:

Bringing the Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO) into the start of these prize challenges ensures peoples’ privacy and trust are at the heart of the design process. People can have confidence in the power of personal data to save lives and stop financial crime.

Privacy-enhancing technologies allow for great innovation when used in the right way. We’re looking forward to supporting these solutions and the final outcomes that will ultimately help the public.

Planning for the challenges is being led by the U.K. Centre for Data Ethics and Innovation (CDEI) and Innovate UK, and the U.S. White House Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP), the U.S. National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), and the U.S. National Science Foundation (NSF). The U.S. challenge is funded and administered by the U.S. National Institute of Standards and Technology and the U.S. National Science Foundation.

Contact:

Victoria Fell

Tel: +44 7785 382608

Email: victoria.fell@cdei.gov.uk

Notes to editors:

• The multi-stage competition involves a white paper submission, prototype development, and a red-teaming phase. Innovators have until Monday 19 September to enter the competition. More information about the prize challenges can be found at petsprizechallenges.com.

• The UK-US collaboration on the prize challenges was first announced at the first Summit for Democracy in December 2021.

• PETs allow sensitive personal or commercial data to be shared and/or analysed, while protecting individuals’ privacy and proprietary information. PETs include maturing technologies, such as privacy-preserving federated learning, which allows machine learning models to be trained on high quality distributed datasets, without having to share the raw data.