The programme, produced by the LGBT Foundation and funded by the Government Equalities Office, trains GPs and staff in primary care organisations to fully support LGBT patients.

PiP trains practitioners to meet the needs of their LGBT patients, from making a practice more welcoming to ensuring that patients are addressed in an appropriate way.

Armley Medical Practice was praised for being the first practice in Leeds to receive the Gold award, demonstrating a real commitment to providing excellent and appropriate care to their LGBT patients.

As part of the LGBT Action Plan, the Government Equalities Office launched a £1m health grant scheme to fund projects to ensure LGBT people get the right healthcare support.

Minister for Equalities, Baroness Williams, said:

“It is vital that LGBT people are able to access appropriate healthcare and are treated with respect.

“I would like to congratulate Armley Medical Practice on achieving the Gold Award for the Pride in Practice programme, showing a real commitment to ensuring they serve LGBT people in a supportive and respectful manner.”

Pride in Practice was originally developed in Manchester, and has been delivered to 398 primary care services since 2016. The GEO has funded the LGBT Foundation to pilot the scheme in NHS GP practices, dentists, pharmacies and optometrists outside of Manchester in London and more rural areas of England.

Background:

The Pride in Practice scheme includes:

• Access to training around LGBT inclusion, which provides information on how to provide appropriate services to LGBT people, support around Sexual Orientation and Trans Status Monitoring, myth busting, and confidence building with staff around terminology and appropriate language.
• Support to deliver effective active signposting and social prescribing for LGBT communities, linking services with a range of LGBT-affirmative local community assets to facilitate holistic approaches to care.
• Ongoing support from a dedicated Account Manager providing consultancy and support on a range of topics based on the needs of the service, identified through the supported assessment.
• Community Leaders volunteers who provide insight and lived experience to ensure patient voice, influence and greater public involvement.
• LGBT patient insight so that services can be proactive about meeting LGBT patients’ needs (i.e. access to research, focus group data and case studies sharing best practice), via involvement of Community Leader volunteers who we will support to ensure increased patient and public involvement in the programme.
• Practical support, guidance and confidence building for staff members on how to implement the Sexual Orientation Monitoring Information Standard.
• An accreditation award, including a wall plaque and Pride in Practice logos for letterheads and websites. This enables primary care services to promote their equality credentials, and demonstrates their commitment to ensuring a fully inclusive, patient-centred service. Awards are graded Bronze, Silver or Gold depending on assessment results. Assessments are carried out with the support of a dedicated Account Manager.

The work is part of the Competition and Markets Authority’s (CMA) wider digital strategy, which aims to co-ordinate the authority’s approach to tackling the new challenges of the rapidly developing digital economy. The CMA will now consult on the contents of today’s update ahead of publishing its final report next year.

In July 2019, the CMA set out to find out more about how major online platforms like Google and Facebook operate. Whilst the services these firms provide appear to be free, consumers pay for them indirectly through providing their attention and personal data, which platforms use to sell digital advertising. In the UK, people spend an average of 3 hours and 15 minutes online each day. More than a third of that time is spent on sites owned by either Google (including YouTube) or Facebook (including Instagram and WhatsApp). As a result, the digital advertising sector has grown massively and is now worth around £13 billion – much larger than any other form of advertising.

The CMA’s interim report has found that:

• Last year, Google accounted for more than 90% of all revenues earned from search advertising in the UK, with revenues of around £6 billion

• In the same year, Facebook accounted for almost half of all display advertising revenues in the UK, reaching more than £2 billion

‘Big’ is not necessarily ‘bad’ and these platforms have brought very innovative and valuable products and services to the market. But the CMA is concerned that their position may have become entrenched with negative consequences for the people and businesses who use these services every day.

A lack of real competition to Google and Facebook could mean people are already missing out on the next great new idea from a potential rival. It could also be resulting in a lack of proper choice for consumers and higher prices for advertisers that can mean cost rises for goods and services such as flights, electronics and insurance bought online. The market position of Google and Facebook may potentially be undermining the ability of newspapers and other publishers to produce valuable content as their share of revenues is squeezed by large platforms.

Through its market study, the CMA has used its statutory information gathering powers to build a better understanding of this complex market, the drivers behind the positions of Google and Facebook and the competition issues this might present. It has also been able to build a better picture of how these large platforms collect and use personal data to assess whether people have the right amount of control over their own information. All of this will help the CMA identify steps that could open up competition and contribute to the discussion about whether and how best to regulate this sector.

Each year, about 15% of queries on Google have never been searched for before. Other search engines like Bing will not have the same access to these queries, putting Google in a powerful position of being able to better train its algorithms and provide more accurate search results than its rivals.

The CMA has also found that the default settings people are faced with online have a profound effect on choice and the shape of competition. Last year in the UK, Google was willing to pay around £1 billion – 16% of all its search revenues – where it was the default search engine on mobile devices such as Apple phones.

Personal data collection also plays an important role in driving Google and Facebook’s powerful market position by allowing them to target their advertisements more effectively than others. Both for privacy and competition reasons, it is essential that people feel in control of their data. At the moment, the CMA is concerned that this is not always the case.

For example, social media platforms such as Facebook do not allow consumers to opt out of personalised advertising: rather, people are presented with a take-it-or-leave it offer, forcing them to share considerable amounts of personal data as a condition for using the service. And it is difficult to access privacy settings on these platforms, which are often only visible after navigating through multiple menus.

While there are examples of better practice, with search engines such as Google giving consumers better control, overall, we have found that consumer engagement with privacy settings and controls is low and, that, as a result, most consumers follow the default settings set by platforms – which may result in them giving up more data than they would like.

The CMA is also concerned about a lack of transparency in the way that business on these platforms works. Publishers, such as newspapers, who rely on Google and Facebook for about 40% of their traffic, have expressed concerns about unexplained dramatic changes in the number people visiting their websites due to changes in Google’s search and Facebook’s news algorithms. Different sorts of transparency concerns are particularly acute in the market for display adverts, where advertisers and publishers participate in a ‘black box’ process of real-time bidding but have limited ability to verify the effectiveness of their adverts.

CMA Chief Executive Andrea Coscelli said:

Most of us visit social media sites and search on the internet every day, but how these firms work can be a mystery.

So far in this study, we have used our legal powers to discover how major online platforms operate. Digital advertising fuels big businesses like Google and Facebook and we have been building a picture of how this complex new market works. We’ve looked especially at how these firms collect and use people’s data, how they monetise it and what this means for rival companies who want to compete, as well as the people and businesses using these services every day.

We’re now inviting comments on what we have found. At the end of the study, we’ll present our findings to the new Government as they decide whether and how to regulate what is an increasingly central sector in all our lives.

At this stage, the CMA agrees with Professor Furman and his colleagues who carried out a wide-ranging review of digital markets earlier this year, that there is a strong argument for the development of a new regulatory regime. This could include rules governing the behaviour of online platforms and giving people greater control over their own data. The most likely outcome at the end of this study will be recommendations to the new Government as it decides whether and how to regulate the digital sector. On the other hand, the CMA stands ready to act directly through any or all of its own powers if, ultimately, these issues are not addressed in other ways, whether domestically or internationally.

Many of the problems that the CMA has currently identified are international in nature. The Australian Government’s recent decision to create a digital markets unit and the new draft legislation in Germany on competition and digital markets demonstrates the international will to address what are shared challenges with new solutions. The CMA has taken a leading role in these global discussions for some time now and will continue to further the debate as part of its digital strategy.

While still early in its work, the CMA is also setting out proposals that it thinks are worth considering in order to address the issues it has identified. These reflect the ideas market participants have put to us and include: potential measures to open up the search market, such as access to click and query data and limiting Google’s ability to be the default search engine on devices and browsers; requiring Facebook to connect more seamlessly with rival social networking sites; measures to address the conflicts of interests and lack of transparency in digital advertising and requiring platforms to allow people to turn off personalised advertising.

The CMA is now consulting on its interim report and welcomes views by 12 February 2020. Find out more on the online platforms and digital advertising market study web page.

Notes to editors

1. The CMA is the UK’s primary competition and consumer authority. It is an independent non-ministerial government department with responsibility for carrying out investigations into mergers, markets and the regulated industries and enforcing competition and consumer law. For CMA updates, follow us on Twitter, LinkedIn and Facebook.

2. Media queries should be directed to: press@cma.gov.uk or 020 3738 6460.

Our Insolvency Enquiry line and Redundancy Payments Service helplines will be closing at 1pm on Christmas Eve and will reopen at 9am on Monday 30 December. Both helplines will close at 1pm on New Year’s Eve and will reopen at 9 am on Thursday 2 January 2020.

If you have a general enquiry about the insolvency process outside of these hours you can use our online contact form and we will respond when our offices are open.

If you have an enquiry about making a claim for redundancy you may find that this is answered by the guidance we have published.

We apologise for any inconvenience the temporary unavailability of our helplines may cause you and offer our best wishes for the festive season.

Published 18 December 2019

The UK welcomes this opportunity to interact with the High Commissioner on the situation of human rights in Venezuela, and we welcome the work and efforts of the High Commissioner and her office.

The UK remains seriously concerned at the deteriorating human rights situation in Venezuela. Actions of the Maduro regime have led to social and economic collapse, threatening regional stability and security. It is a man-made humanitarian crisis exacerbated by years of economic mismanagement, hyperinflation, shortages of food and medicine, and serious human rights violations.

The arrest and trial of National Assembly Deputy Juan Requesens is a clear violation of legal due process with regards to his parliamentary immunity.

As a member of the Human Rights Council, Venezuela has a duty to uphold the highest standards of human rights and cooperate with the Council and its mechanisms including Fact Finding Missions.

We welcome the establishment of an OHCHR office in Caracas; however, it is clear that the two members of OHCHR staff in Caracas face an enormous task. A situation of such gravity would normally demand a fully-fledged permanent OHCHR office (and we would be interested to know what plans OHCHR has to increase its presence/size in Venezuela).

Finally, we welcome the appointment of the members of the Fact Finding Mission, and would be interested to understand the parameters of their work. We urge the regime to cooperate with the FFM.

The Ministry of Defence (MOD) Education Support Fund (ESF) is open to publicly funded schools, Academies and free schools in the UK attended by service children, where schools have to mitigate the effects on those service children whose parents are subject to frequent mobility/deployment.

The bidding round for the 2020 ESF closed on 30 September 2019 and The Directorate Children and Young People (DCYP) received a total of 142 applications requesting just over £7-million. Funding Panels sat and scored applications, working hard to filter out applications which did not meet the criteria.

The full results are as follows:

Total amount awarded:

• England £1,131,747.68
• Scotland £373,061.00
• Wales £134,584.00
• Northern Ireland £360,607.32

In total, 87 applicants secured funding from the 2020 ESF (16 full, 71 partial) and the funding will benefit approximately 25,000 service children across England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland.

A large number of applications did not meet the eligibility criteria and therefore didn’t qualify for a grant from the ESF. The criteria had to be tightened up for this round of funding because only £2-million were available to award. To qualify, applicants had to show evidence of exceptional mobility/deployment and how the funding would help mitigate the effects on the service children and the school.

The good news is that on this occasion DCYP didn’t have to apply a funding or quality line. This means that all applications identified by Funding Panels to receive either full or partial funding will be funded from the 2020 ESF.

Result letters will be circulated by the end of November 2019.

Email: DCYP–MOD–ESF-Mailbox@mod.gov.uk.