Tag Archives: HM Government

Good afternoon everyone, it’s great to see you all here today.

As it’s Halloween I’m sure that, like my kids, you’d rather be out, cap in hand, demanding treats and threatening unpleasant consequences if you don’t get them.

Or as I like to call it, “Negotiating the local government finance settlement”.

When I arrived at No 10 today for Cabinet, the Prime Minister complimented me on my scary Halloween mask.

I had to say “No, Prime Minister, this is just my face.”

Perhaps she thought I had come as ‘Uncle Fester’!

Before I go any further, let me congratulate NALC on reaching its 70th birthday.

I’d like to thank Sue Baxter, in particular, for all her work as chair.

She’s a leader you should all be very proud of.

And I’m not just saying that because she’s one of my constituents!

You did vote for me Sue, right?

In this special anniversary year it’s great to see that more people than ever before have turned out for your annual conference.

Someone was telling me you’ve literally outgrown your previous home.

I’d like to think you’re all here to see me, although I know the real draw is Angela Rippon…

The growth of your conference is no accident.

It mirrors the growing role, profile and importance of parish and town councils.

It shows that the sector is in robust health, that it is ambitious, keen to do more, looking to the future.

I often talk about councils and councillors being the front line of our democracy.

And that’s particularly true of the kind of councils represented here this afternoon.

Just look at the town we’ve gathered in, a town that is also celebrating a significant birthday this year.

The MP for Milton Keynes South, the wonderful Iain Stewart, he represents more than 130,000 people.

That’s not just registered voters, but everyone who lives in his constituency.

On the borough council, this hotel is in Bletchley Park ward.

That has three councillors and is home to about 15,000 people.

So between them they can engage with about 5,000 people each.

But on Bletchley and Fenny Stratford town council, the two councillors responsible for this ward, Queensway & Denbigh North, they represent only about 2,000 people between them.

Let’s say a thousand each.

That gives them an extremely strong connection to the individual men, women and children they serve.

The kind of local insight that even the most well-meaning MP or Minister could never hope to match.

And that’s why local councils are so important.

You truly are a part of the communities you serve.

Your parish’s priorities are your priorities.

Its problems are your problems.

Of course, it’s a hugely diverse sector too.

Big and small.

Rural and urban.

Parish and town.

Two-thirds of you spend less than £25,000 a year, but 30 have a precept worth over a million pounds.

In this year’s LGC survey, local priorities ranged from provision of car parking to – my personal favourite – the problem of “feral boar and free-roaming sheep”.

But some issues are universal.

Just look at housing.

I’ve made no secret of the fact that fixing our broken housing market is my number-one priority in this role, the measure on which I expect to be judged.

And you have a massive role to play in that.

Neighbourhood Planning has revolutionised community involvement in the planning process, giving people a whole new voice in the big decisions that affect their lives.

Far from being the “NIMBY’s charter” that some predicted, we’ve found that neighbour plans actually lead to MORE new homes getting built than would otherwise be the case.

And in nine out of 10 cases, the development of those plans has been parish-led.

It’s a great example of the value of that bond between local councils and local people.

With your ear to the ground and your finger on the pulse, you know what your community will need in order to make new housing work.

It’s a great example of the most local tier of government helping Westminster to get things done.

You don’t just help to implement neighbourhood planning – you helped to shape it too.

NALC worked extremely closely with my department to make sure the Neighbourhood Planning Act really worked for the people it was meant to serve.

So thank you – on behalf of the whole government, but also on behalf of the countless families who will finally be able get a home of their own as a result.

It’s local councils delivering for local people.

And that’s something I want to see more of in the months and years ahead.

Because let me get one thing absolutely clear.

Both myself and government remain absolutely, 100 per cent committed to localism and devolution.

Last June, the people of Britain told us that they wanted to take back control.

That they wanted more influence over their lives.

That they didn’t want to be governed by some remote legislature and executive over which they felt they had little influence.

Yes, the referendum was about Europe.

But the message, the lessons, go much deeper.

Ask most British people where they live and they won’t name their principal local authority area.

They’ll tell you about their town, their village, their neighbourhood.

Local identity isn’t about lines on a map, it’s about community.

People are more attached to their town or village than to their district or borough.

By their very nature, a top-tier authority has to act in the interests of tens or even hundreds of thousands of people.

And on such a crowded stage, a single community can struggle to make its voice heard.

That’s not a criticism of principal authorities.

It’s just the way it is.

So among the public the appetite for greater localism, the desire for communities to take back control, is clearly there.

National government is eager to see it happen too.

Principal authorities are looking for ways to delegate delivery of some services.

And, together, that makes this a truly exciting time for ambitious parish and town councils.

That ambition is already bearing fruit, right across the country.

We’ve seen parishes setting up business improvement districts, driving economic growth locally.

You’ve taken on responsibility for running libraries, maintaining green spaces, delivering youth services and more…

…all of it tailored to meet the needs of your community, not the needs of a distant bureaucrat.

I’m particularly pleased to see so many of you getting involved in health and wellbeing, one of the themes of this conference.

Whether it’s through social prescribing, tackling isolation, or helping communities become dementia-friendly, you’re your local connections mean you can deal with small challenges before they become big problems.

That takes the pressure off local health services, and helps us in in Whitehall to deliver on national priorities.

So you’re already doing so much more than just caring for allotments.

And I see no reason why, if you have the capacity and the will, you can’t continue to expand your responsibilities.

I want you to think big, I want you to innovate.

The general power of competence has given you a great tool with which to do.

But if there’s still a barrier that is stopping you from improving services I want you to tell me so I can help you tear it down.

A perennial obstacle is, of course, finance.

I know many of you have found new, innovative ways to raise money, that’s great to see.

Others have used your reserves to help maintain services and keep the cost to local taxpayers as low as possible.

But I also know that not enough cash from the principal support grant is finding its way down to your level.

And that’s just not right.

Principal authorities should be devolving responsibilities to local councils because you best placed to deliver more tailored services…

…not so that they can save a few pounds and get important work done on the cheap.

They certainly shouldn’t be using parish precepts as a means of avoiding their own cap on council tax increases.

Doing more with less is one thing.

Doing something for nothing is quite another.

The government has previously issued guidance to billing authorities on this, making clear that they should work with parish and town councils to pass down appropriate levels of funding.

But from my conversations with you, it’s clear that too many top-tier councils aren’t following that guidance closely enough.

So let me promise you all today that I’ll be exploring ways in which I can strengthen the requirement for principal authorities to pass a share of local council tax support to their towns and parishes.

It’s the least you deserve.

As you do more for your residents, so their interest in your work is likely to increase.

If you’re going to maintain the incredible trust and close relationship that you currently enjoy with the communities you serve, then you’re also going to have to deliver equally high standards of transparency and openness.

It’s two-and-a-half years since the transparency code for smaller authorities became mandatory for the very smallest councils, ending the need for complicated external audits.

I know that complying with it hasn’t been straightforward for many of you.

You’re running very small operations, some of you didn’t have the in-house expertise needed to get material online in an appropriate manner.

Some of you didn’t even have websites!

That’s why my department invested £4.7 million in the transparency fund to help you meet the new standards.

NALC know more about local councils than anyone, which is why we asked you to manage the fund through your county associations.

And you’ve done a great job.

Last time I checked, the grants team had approved well over 3,000 applications worth millions of pounds.

That translates into hundreds of thousands of people gaining a greater insight into and understanding of the work that their councillors do.

And that means they will trust you more, support you more, and encourage you to do more.

Of course, the code is only mandatory for the smallest of councils.

That means, for a significant number of you here today, it is merely best practice – a guide you should follow, but can choose not to.

I’m not going to stand here today and say I’ll force all you to follow its principles.

But I think it’s in your own interests to do so.

As larger councils, you’re far more likely to be taking on the delivery of more local services.

And if you do that, your taxpayers will, quite rightly, expect a greater degree of transparency about where their money is being spent.

Yes, there will be audited accounts and annual meetings and so on.

But in 2017, people expect that data and details about the services they pay for will be easily available to all.

Making sure that happens is vital to maintaining the trust that you have built up over so many years.

Basketball coach John Wooden once said that “the little things make big things happen”.

That’s a mantra that should be carved into the wall of every local council office in England.

Because what you do matters.

It always has done.

But in 2017, 70 years after the NALC first met, it matters more than ever.

With a national government committed to localism…

…top-tier councils eager to devolve service provision…

… and a population clamouring to take back control of their lives, your role on the front line of democracy has never been more important. Yes, the areas you’re responsible for may seem small in the grand scheme of things.

Maintaining a small park seems insignificant when compared to running the social care system, negotiating Brexit, or tackling nuclear proliferation.

But the little things make the big things happen.

You hold our communities together.

You make our towns and villages places that people want to live and work.

You provide the solid local foundations on which we can build an outward-facing global Britain.

And now is the time for the little guys to think big.

To innovate.

To show ambition.

Now is the time for local councils to build on their unique experience and insight, to step up and show what they are capable of.

There has never been a more exciting time to be in local government.

There have never been more opportunities ahead of you.

Making the most of them won’t be easy, there will be challenges ahead.

But know this.

If you show ambition, if you stand up, if you want to do more, I will support you every step of the way.

Thank you.

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Agreed by Michel Barnier, the European Commission’s Chief Negotiator and David Davis, Secretary of State for Exiting the European Union

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The UK has today secured important progress at the Development Assistance Committee (DAC) meetings in Paris to change the international aid rules and ensure they remain relevant for the modern world.

The DAC – part of the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) – is the group of 30 leading donor nations which set international aid rules, known as Official Development Assistance (ODA).

As a result of UK leadership, donor countries at the DAC meetings in Paris today agreed to work on a process which could allow previous aid recipients to receive short-term ODA support in the event of catastrophic humanitarian crises, such as the recent hurricanes in the Caribbean, even where their Gross National Income per capita would normally rule them out of receiving ODA. This is a significant decision.

Anguilla, British Virgin Islands and Turks and Caicos are all previous recipients of ODA. The DAC has also agreed to work to create a new mechanism to re-admit countries that had graduated from being eligible for ODA back to the list of ODA-eligible countries, if their income per capita falls low enough, for example as a result of a catastrophic natural disaster or other crisis.

International Development Secretary Priti Patel said:

UK leadership has secured significant and important progress in changing the international aid rules, as we committed to in our manifesto. As a result of our influence, we’ve made huge progress on ensuring official development assistance can be used when vulnerable nations are struck by crises or natural disasters.

Today’s agreement is a real step forward. Progress on this, and the other reforms we have confirmed today – including boosting aid for UN peacekeeping missions – show that by working patiently and constructively with our partners we are able to drive through change and modernise the rules.

This is significant and welcome progress and the head of the OECD has backed the UK’s efforts on reform. The DAC has also shown leadership and demonstrated that it can be agile, politically-relevant and deliver for the most vulnerable.

British leadership has today also delivered an important set of wider reforms to the international aid rules – including more than doubling the percentage of contributions to UN peacekeeping missions that count as aid, from 7% to 15%, and confirmation that 85% of UK core funding to the Asian Infrastructure Development Bank will count as aid. Together these changes mean that we have confirmed over £100 million of aid spending this year can be counted as aid and contribute to the 0.7 budget.

These successes are in addition to the important reforms which were agreed last year, on making more security and counter-extremism spending eligible to count as ODA.

Today has shown that reform of the ODA rules is possible and demonstrates how the UK has driven through much-needed change.

The UK is a firm champion of the rules-based international system. As one of the few leading countries to honour our promise to invest 0.7% of national income as aid, it is in our interests to ensure that the quality, poverty-focus and value for money of other countries’ aid investments match our own high standards.

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It’s a great pleasure to be here today at the North Academies Conference.

It’s also great to be back at the DfE. I feel a bit like an old football manager who has been dusted down and brought back onto the pitch.

An event like this is a great opportunity to celebrate your successes, share what works and what you have learnt through your journeys. You are on the front line of what this government is trying to achieve in education. I would like to take this opportunity to thank you all for the incredible work that you do.

This is the first academies conference I have attended since being appointed minister and I’m delighted that one of my first official speaking engagement is in the North. As an ex-chair of a trust I’m excited to be able to continue work to improve schools but on larger scale.

I am enthused to hear about the work being done to drive up standards and would like to thank MATs and sponsors that are taking on struggling schools into their trusts and turning them around.

This is hard work. I know that having taken on seven schools in Special Measures and two with Requires Improvement myself. Five years ago I had a full head of dark hair and weighed four stone more than I weigh today!

It also drives our Secretary of State for Education – the first Secretary of State for Education ever to go to a comprehensive school, and that’s probably why she is so passionate about social mobility.

In 2010 the academies programme was built on the principle of contributing to the school-led system through increased autonomy, independence from local authority control and the freedom to set your own curriculum, as well as a greater opportunity for collaboration.

Sharing ideas is powerful; indeed, I’m a bit of a magpie here! On that point, consider putting good local MAT CEOs or chairs onto your own boards. This is something I did with my trust. I managed to persuade Cathie Paine, Deputy CEO of Reach 2, and David Earnshaw, Chair of Outwood Grange, to join us. They gave us a really hard time, which was just what we needed.

I am delighted to see the great progress achieved by Maura Regan and her team at Carmel Education Trust, with over 100 Grade 9s in Maths and English in this year’s GCSEs and a former sponsored academy (St Michael’s) now showing a KS4 Progress 8 comfortably above the national average. I remember exhorting her to expand from her original school three or four years ago and now we see the educational power of her original school spreading across the region.

From my personal experience as an academy sponsor, I have seen at first-hand how one can harness the energy of individual teachers and deploy them across several schools. This is because they are seeking career advancement not readily available in an individual school, or because they have such strong skills that we have wanted to share their best practice with others.

In your region there are 66 MATs of two or fewer schools and 86 SATs. I want to encourage any of you here today to think seriously about teaming up to create bigger MATs. I speak as someone who has gone from one school to 14 and I can say, without hesitation, that the collective firepower of a bigger group makes a huge difference.

I believe the sweet spot is perhaps somewhere between 12 and 20 schools, or something like 5,000 to 10,000 pupils. I know this means a certain loss of autonomy but I am certain it is the way to strengthen educational provision. Using my own experience again, by doing this we have created a full time director of music, six specialist subject leads who we have used to develop our own curriculum, and we have extended the school by three hours per week. I don’t believe these things would have been possible as a small trust.

At its best, the MAT model has the potential to be the most powerful vehicle for improving schools quickly. Great examples of rapid school improvement here in the North include Zoe Carr of WISE Academies, and Rob Tarn, CEO of Northern Education Trust.

In Zoe’s case, Bexhill Academy’s primary pupil outcomes have increased year on year over the last four years, from 22 percentage points below the national average to 11 percentage points above the national average. I am challenging all the RSCs to give me many more examples like this.

I know that Jan has mentioned the Strategic School Improvement Fund and the MAT Development and Improvement Fund. I want to make two points on these: whoever is bidding for the funding must prove that they have a strong track record in school improvement; secondly, you must prove that the school receiving the support will be able to carry on this work when the funding ends.

These are specific funds that the Department has created to help support the great work trusts are doing in school improvement. With your local knowledge, you are the people best placed to address the regional and local disparities which exist across the country.

The North is a unique region. It is geographically large and covers a very diverse school landscape. This region has an interesting mix of urban, coastal, and rural communities – not unlike my own area, Norfolk – which each bring their own unique strengths and challenges that affect how national policy can be delivered.

It was fascinating to hear from Jan in my first week in the job about the characteristics of this region and how the programme has grown over the last few years – from the challenges faced by small faith schools in the rural areas of the region, to the work that is being done in the North Yorkshire Coast Opportunity Area.

By working together we can achieve so much more. And ultimately, this helps every young person to realise their full potential. So thank you again for all that you’re doing.

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Thank you for the invitation to join you here today.

Whenever I’m with techUK, I feel I’m among like minds. Because my roots are in business, and my roots are in tech.

Both my parents started businesses, and all my siblings have started their own, and it might have seemed natural for me to learn from their example and take that route too – and to go into tech.

But what I also came to learn is that business needs the right environment to thrive. How can the whole system work against, or work for, the hardworking, enterprising, entrepreneurial founder?

This is a question I first asked for very personal reasons. When I was growing up, the business that my parents ran – my stepfather wrote the code, my mum was in charge – was all around me and the main subject even at our dinner table. My first job was in the company, solving the Y2K bug in COBOL.

When I was a teenager, in the early 1990s, recession hit. If our customers struggled, if they couldn’t pay their bills, then our business struggled along with them, and that impacted the twenty or so people we employed. Friends, I should say, as much as colleagues. At one point, in the worst of the recession, we came close to losing everything. My mum, my stepdad and all the people who worked in the business would have lost their jobs. All through no fault of our own, all through outside factors.

We got through it. In fact the software became a big hit. And now every time you type your postcode into the internet and it brings up your address, you can thank my stepdad Bob. I hope we’ve helped you with your christmas shopping over the years.

But what those early experiences taught me was that it isn’t ever enough to have a good idea and the will to drive it through. To go from concept to reality – and then to ubiquity – requires a strong environment for enterprise.

And that environment, while best not entirely determined by Government policy, can certainly be shaped and guided by it.

Because while I did go on to work for the business, I then went to the Bank of England as an economist, and that’s where I discovered all the big decisions are made in Westminster. So here I am, and in a job directly concerned with improving the environment for tech businesses.

So I really feel it when I say it is an honour and a privilege to be the UK’s first ever Minister for Digital, working to give others the opportunities we had, to – wherever we can – help you take those ideas, those sparks of hope and make something real and successful.

But what does that mean, in this time of digital revolution?

It means harnessing this amazing new technology, so that it works for the benefit of everyone and not only an interested few. It means mitigating the risks, and ensuring the benefits can be accessed by all. It means supporting a thriving digital sector, and a digital infrastructure that is not only fit for the present but the future, with easy and ubiquitous access for everyone in this country to the growing opportunities digital technology offers.

Our Digital Strategy, published in March of this year, set out how we intend to make the UK the best place to establish and grow a digital business and the safest place for citizens to be online.

I’m pleased to tell you that, only six months since the launch, we are making great progress. Today, I would like to update you now on how we are making the UK the best place in the world to start and grow a digital business, and how we are set to continue these developments in the very near future.

We understand that in order to have a thriving digital economy, we need to support tech businesses at every level, from startup to scaleup.

Over the past year we have seen investments in UK tech, including from Microsoft, Amazon, Apple, IBM and Google, and into British stars like Zopa, Monzo, and ARM.

We’ve significantly expanded the British Business Bank’s capacity in scale up capital, and actively support the opening of incubators across the country.

Preparing Britain for success in the rest of the twenty first century, in the face of the fastest advance in technology in history, means making sure everyone has the skills they need to thrive in the digital world.

Britain needs stronger digital skills at every level, from getting people online for the first time, to attracting and training the world’s top coding talent.

Again, this isn’t something we in Government can do on our own. So when we launched the Digital Strategy in March, we committed to establish a new Digital Skills Partnership, to both bring greater coherence to provision of digital skills training at a national level, and to increase the digital capability needed to build thriving local economies throughout the country. ​ Our partners in industry ​pledged​ more than four million free digital skills training opportunities​. Since then, we have made great progress, through companies like Barclays, Lloyds, Google, and many others.

On top of that, we have put coding in the curriculum from age 8, and recently announced that one of our first new T-level technical qualifications will be in Digital.

We want all these opportunities to be open to as wide a range of people as possible. We firmly believe that digital skills are essential, for everyone, to thrive in this digital age and that training in such skills should be an entitlement for all our citizens. So we legislated for Digital Skills Entitlement in the Digital Economy Act and are now developing the detail of the policy with the Department of Education. My friend and colleague Karen Bradley, Secretary of State for DCMS, and I are working to deliver this entitlement, so that everyone can get the basic skills they need.

We’re not stopping at digital skills, we are also looking at technologies of the future.

The Industrial Strategy Green Paper, published in January, identified AI as a major opportunity for the UK, with real potential to boost our future economy. We already have some of the best minds in the world working on AI, and many areas of the UK economy – health, education, finance, to name just three – have already embraced innovation through AI.

The challenge now for Government is to build a strong partnership with industry and academia to cement our position as the best place in the world to base and develop this new technology.

So in March we launched an independent review – Growing The Artificial Intelligence Industry – led by Jérôme Pesenti and Dame Wendy Hall. The final report was published just a couple of weeks ago and sets out what we must do to support the enormous potential of AI – from smarter scheduling of operations in health care, to hiring on-demand self-driving cars – while mitigating its risks. My thanks to Dame Wendy, Jérôme and team for their excellent work.

Now I look forward to working with all of you, and with the wider industry, to deliver its proposals. Together we can make the UK a world leader in this amazing new technology, and can make sure all our citizens benefit from its use.

We are also endeavouring to make the UK the safest place in the world to live and work online, as set out in detail in our Digital Charter, which sets out to balance the freedom of the internet whilst mitigating potential harms.

We want to work closely with all of you to develop solutions to the issues at hand. We will make sure that the Charter is underpinned by an effective regulatory framework, but will only use regulation where other options are not working. Where regulation is necessary, we will ensure it supports rather than stifles innovation and growth, by providing clarity for innovators and building confidence amongst users.

So there we are. Just over six months on from our Digital Strategy and we have been consistently working on making the UK the best place in the world to start and grow a digital business.

But coming from small business myself, I know there are more good ideas out there. So I want to hear from you, I want to know what we’re getting right, what we’re getting wrong, what amazing innovations you’re developing, and how we can make it easier for you to grow your businesses here in the UK.

We have a big agenda and much to do, and I look forward to working with you to deliver it.

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