This is the pot of money which helps Councils to close and narrow roads where they choose bad schemes:

The Department for Transport has provided the following answer to your written parliamentary question (15524):

Question:
To ask the Secretary of State for Transport, how much funding his Department plans to provide to local authorities for active travel plans in the (a) 2023-24 and (b) 2024-25 financial year. (15524)

Tabled on: 26 February 2024

Answer:
Guy Opperman:

The Department for Transport is currently providing £70 million of dedicated funding to local authorities in 2023-24, for developing and delivering local infrastructure schemes and to boost capability and enable higher levels of walking and cycling. Funding for local authorities in 2024-25 is subject to final Departmental business planning decisions.

The answer was submitted on 05 Mar 2024 at 09:28.

I asked this question to find out why speed is restricted for air quality reasons near Heathrow.No wish to engage.

The Department for Transport has provided the following answer to your written parliamentary question (15522):

Question:
To ask the Secretary of State for Transport, if he will make a comparative estimate of the average contribution to air pollution of (a) vehicles on the M4 and (b) air traffic at Heathrow. (15522)

Tabled on: 26 February 2024

Answer:
Anthony Browne:

The Department for Transport has no plans to make a comparative estimate of the average contribution to air pollution from vehicles on the M4 and from air traffic at Heathrow.

The answer was submitted on 05 Mar 2024 at 12:39.

There we have it. I will post my speech today in the House for tomorrow morning when it is available. Happy to read your thoughts.

I am glad they accepted advice that they need to rescue public services from the £30 bn hit to productivity I identified sometime ago on this site. The Chancellor said he would tackle £20bn of this hit. I will comment in a later post on the chosen methods and timetable.

There is an overall tax cut, mainly in the form of the NI reductions.

There are also a series of increased tax measures  including a new vape tax, increased tobacco duty, increased air passenger duty, higher tax on holiday lets and an extension of Windfall oil and gas tax. I did not propose any tax increases and am concerned about the holiday lets one in  particular.

I will add to my thoughts after the budget.

As readers will know I have done a lot of work on how to bring inflation down and grow the economy faster and put this to government in recent weeks.

Reform to deliver low inflation and faster growth has to start with a change of Bank of England policy. It needs to end its lurch to tight a money policy now inflation is falling. It must end its damaging sale of bonds. This would spare the Treasury large payments for the needless losses they are incurring and ease conditions a bit in the mortgage market.

Government policy must intensify to sort out labour market problems. They need to tighten the rules against low income migration further and do more to help people already legally  settled here into work. There will be substantial savings on public expenditure from this.

Tax cuts  need to be targeted on getting energy costs down to make the UK more competitive and ease the squeeze on the cost of living.  There need to be cuts in tax for small business and self employed, and some increases in the Income Tax thresholds as too many people are paying higher rate tax.

The absurd policy control based on the 5 year out forecast of the OBR needs replacing with a control based on a target of 2% inflation and 2% growth.

John Redwood (Wokingham) (Con):

I am a strong supporter of the recent initiatives of the Secretary of State and the Prime Minister to make food growing far more important. What are the targets for getting much more self-sufficient in food, and will it not need further reorientation of the money away from the environmental land management scheme and wilding, and towards proper food promotion schemes?

Fay Jones:

My right hon. Friend pre-empts me. I will certainly come to talk about that point in just a few moments, but let me first talk about further reforms that the Government are introducing, particularly in the field of farming mental health.

We will make up to £500,000 available to charities to deliver projects that support mental health in the farming sector, building on the support already on offer through our farming resilience fund, which has benefited more than 19,000 farmers to date. Mental health in agriculture is a key concern for the Department, so much so that my right hon. Friend the Farming Minister regrets that he is unable to be with us at present, as he is hosting a roundtable on mental health in agriculture. I know that shadow Ministers will agree that that is a commendable thing to be doing. Altogether, the work to change our approach will build a better and more supportive system around farmers, so that they can get on and do what only they do best.

Before I talk about our final strand of work, I want to congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for Bosworth (Dr Evans). Today his campaign for online retailers to carry a specific “buy British” button has achieved another success, as Ocado has become the latest retailer to adopt the tool, joining Morrisons, Aldi and Sainsbury’s. I congratulate him on his campaign.

Food security is a vital part of our national security. The primary role of farmers is to produce the nation’s food, and they deserve our gratitude for that—a point echoed to me on many occasions by the Chair of the Environment, Food and Rural Affairs Committee, my right hon. Friend the Member for Scarborough and Whitby (Sir Robert Goodwill), who is away on a Select Committee visit and unable to join today’s debate. Recent years have brought home the truth of that, particularly in an age of climate change, instability and increasingly volatile global food production.

Uncertain times require us to double down on the certainty of our food system. In the Government’s food strategy, we set a clear commitment to maintaining domestic food production at the current level at least, which is around 60% of what we consume. The importance of food security is why we brought in the three-times-a-year food security report through the Agriculture Act 2020. Going further, the Prime Minister announced a fortnight ago that, given the context of the last three years, we will significantly strengthen this work through a new annual food security index. Climate change is increasingly likely to impact on the sector, with more extreme weather events, so it is only right that we step up our monitoring of food security to ensure that we can act swiftly and decisively against any in-year shocks. We expect the work to be UK-wide and will work to achieve that, strengthening accountability across England, Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland.