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19 July 2006 : Column WS89
Written Statements
Wednesday 19 July 2006
Airports: Heathrow Air Quality Report
Lord Davies of Oldham: My right honourable friend the Secretary of State for Transport (Douglas Alexander) has made the following Ministerial Statement.
I have today published the technical report of the air quality technical panels instituted after the 2003 air transport White Paper to review the basis on which air quality assessments should be carried out for Heathrow airport.
We continue to support further development at Heathrow, including the addition of a short, third runway in the 2015 to 2020 period, after a new runway at Stansted, but only if we can be confident that the conditions set out in the White Paper can be met. Publishing this report is a significant milestone in the programme of work to review the scope for meeting those conditions. I am grateful to the panel members who have devoted their energies over the past two years to a very full review of the issues and who have produced a detailed and comprehensive report.
The report has been peer reviewed and I amhappy to accept its recommendations. It isprimarily concerned with methodology—how future assessments of air quality around Heathrow should be conducted. It does not attempt to prejudge the question of whether development at Heathrow is more or less likely to be achievable within the critical air quality limits. But, importantly, it provides a sound scientific basis on which we can now proceed to carry out the remaining stages of the work to address that question in the coming months, building on the panels’ recommendations.
Copies of the report are available in the Library and full details will be available on the department’s website.
Benefit Fraud Inspectorate Reports
The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State, Department for Work and Pensions (Lord Hunt of Kings Heath): My honourable friend the Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Work and Pensions (James Plaskitt) has made the following Statement.
On behalf of my right honourable friend the Secretary of State for Work and Pensions, the BFI inspection reports on the following councils were published today: Bath and North East Somerset Council, Elmbridge Borough Council, Exeter City Council, Gateshead Borough Council, Reading Borough Council, Shepway District Council, Stevenage Borough Council and Walsall Metropolitan Borough Council. Copies have been placed in the Library.
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The BFI reports detail a range of strengths and weaknesses in the housing benefit services provided by councils and make recommendations to improve the security and efficiency of benefit delivery. My right honourable friend the Secretary of State is considering the reports and may ask the councils for proposals in response to the BFI's findings.
Defence Industrial Strategy and Procurement
The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State, Ministry of Defence (Lord Drayson): My right honourable friend the Minister of State for the Armed Forces (Adam Ingram) has made the following Written Ministerial Statement.
I am pleased to announce progress on the complex weapons sector of the defence industrial strategy (DIS). This sector provides key missile development capabilities to our Armed Forces.
The DIS identified that maintaining the industrial capability that we wished to retain onshore represented a substantial challenge given that we expect investment in new systems to decrease in the next five years from the current level due to a sharp decline in market size. We undertook to work with UK industry to meet this challenge and can now announce that we are forming a “Team Complex Weapons”. “Team CW” is led by MBDA and is centred around QinetiQ, Thales Air Defence Limited, Thales Missile Electronics and Roxel. “Team CW” will enable the UK to maintain key skills and technologies through a mixture of directed procurements and open competition, enabling controlled restructuring to take place while maintaining onshore access to the capabilities that our Armed Forces require.
Together, we will develop “Team CW” during the second half of this year. We intend to agree a strategic partnering agreement in 2006. This will require contractually binding measures focused on business transformation both within the Ministry of Defence and within industry, allowing better-informed through-life decisions to be made and a more incremental approach to technology insertion to be adopted.
We intend to use a range of programmesto incentivise the restructuring process. Most significantly, we have changed our procurement strategy for the loitering munition demonstration and manufacture programme, potentially worth more than £500 million. It will be single-sourced to the MBDA-led “Team CW”, subject to an enduring requirement for this technology, to affordability and to the ability to clearly demonstrate value for money.
We are also announcing four contracts for the development of technologies to contribute to the enhancement of Storm Shadow, and the future anti-surface and future rapid effects programmes, which will offer significant opportunities for collaboration. In the support area, we have placed a contract for availability known as PROJECT RevISE, which covers air-launched weapons designed by MBDA.
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Our joint approach with industry will enable usto develop a globally competitive industry that will deliver the technologically advanced missiles that our Armed Forces will need in the future.
Disability Rights Commission: Annual Report
The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State, Department for Work and Pensions (Lord Hunt of Kings Heath): My honourable friend the Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Work and Pensions (Anne McGuire) has made the following Statement.
The Disability Rights Commission's annual report and accounts 2005-06 have been published todayand laid before Parliament. The annual report demonstrates the DRC's continuing success in its important work to eliminate discrimination against disabled people, promote equal opportunities, encourage good practice and keep the working of the Disability Discrimination Act and the DRC Act under review.
Disability: Remploy
The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State, Department for Work and Pensions (Lord Hunt of Kings Heath): My honourable friend the Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Work and Pensions(Mrs Anne McGuire) has made the following Statement.
Increasing the number of disabled people whom we support into work is a core part of our welfare reform agenda. This is central to meeting the department's aim of an 80 per cent employment rate and central to ensuring equality of opportunity for disabled people.
Remploy was set up after the Second World War to provide employment to facilitate rehabilitation and progression to open employment. Employing around 5,000 disabled people, the Remploy factories are engaged in a wide range of sectors ranging from office furniture through textiles to electronics. These industry sectors have experienced significant change over the past 60 years, not least through increased international competition.
In addition, the way in which we support disabled people into work has evolved. Strengthened disability rights mean that we are now in a stronger position to support people in a mainstream environment. This is why Remploy developed its Interwork business, which supported 4,300 people into jobs in 2005.
These changes have raised significant questions about the future strategy for Remploy. That is why in March I commissioned PricewaterhouseCoopers and Stephen Duckworth, a disability expert with wide experience of disability rights and employment issues, to conduct a strategic review of the future business options for the company.
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Today, I have published the findings of the review. Copies of the PricewaterhouseCoopers report have been made available in the Libraries, Vote and Printed Paper Offices and on the DWP website, http://www.dwp.gov.uk/publications/dwp/2006/remploy.
The report delivers a hard-hitting financial assessment of the challenges facing Remploy. Factories are facing growing cost pressures as aresult of increased international competition and technological development. The average cost per employee is £18,000 per year and over £48,000 in the household and toiletries factory—far greater than, say, the £5,000 cost per head of other Workstep providers.
The report sets out a range of possible scenarios for the business, from no change to complete closure of the factory network. I am ruling out both these options.
It is clear from both this report and that of the National Audit Office that doing nothing is not an option. This view is shared by the Remploy board, its management and the trade unions. The necessity for change is clear, but I believe that there is still a role for sheltered employment in the future.
We recognise that change will have an inevitable impact on the disabled people whom Remploy employs. We want to give Remploy the time and support to determine the best way to modernise and restructure its business. We intend, therefore, to provide the necessary funding to enable this to happen—in particular, so that there is sufficient time to consider factory reorganisation as part of an overall restructuring package. This is not a cuts package for Remploy; on the contrary, we will be maintaining the baseline funding and investing more this year to help to deal with the short-term issues.
I will be asking the board of Remploy to undertake the preliminary work to bring forward later next year a five-year restructuring plan with proposals both to modernise the business and to support substantially larger numbers of disabled people into work. Full consultation will take place with the trade unions and employees in developing this strategy. I will be making it clear that any such proposals must protect Remploy's disabled employees from compulsory redundancy. Once this plan is brought forward, we will consider whether we are able to offer the board additional funding for modernisation; we will also consider at that stage with the chair whether we need to enhance the range of skills on the board to help it to do this.
Currently, Remploy
supports around 9,000 disabled people in factory employment, Interwork
and managed services. In the longer term, our ambition is that any
restructuring should enable us to help significantly more disabled
people in work than
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The efforts of Remploy's existing workforce, its chair, current board and supporters must not be underestimated or taken for granted. They have much to be proud of. But Remploy cannot stand still and we need to examine how the ideals that lay behind its creation 60 years ago can fit the world that it now faces.
Housing: Supporting People Programme
The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State, Department for Communities and Local Government (Baroness Andrews): My honourable friend the Minister for Local Government (Phil Woolas) has made the following Written Ministerial Statement.
The Government are today confirming individual grant allocations to administering authorities for the Supporting People programme in 2007-08, which will fund housing-related support services for over1 million vulnerable people—including victims of domestic violence, teenage parents, older people and those with mental health problems—to help them to live independently in their accommodation.
As part of the two-year local government funding settlement in December 2005, minimum allocations for 2007-08 were announced guaranteeing 95 per cent of the total available. Five per cent of the funding was held back pending consultation on the draft Supporting People distribution formula, with a commitment to confirming full Supporting People allocations for 2007-08 before the Summer Recess.
The consultation on the Supporting People distribution formula is now complete and responses to this exercise have been assessed. Following consideration of the available options, a decision has been taken to target the remaining funding in 2007-08 to help to address some of the inherited uneven distribution of grant between authorities by increasing Supporting People funding to over half of all Supporting People local authorities.
This decision is consistent with the approach taken to determining allocations in both 2005-06 and 2006-07, when an earlier version of the formula was used to inform the grant allocations to those authorities furthest from their correct relative share of the budget. Further work will be carried out on the analysis of responses to the consultation with a view to taking forward work on how we can distribute future funding based on need. All Supporting People grant allocations are listed below.
The Government are also targeting funding from the Supporting People programme to assist linked programmes of national importance.
This early announcement of funding for 2007-08 will help to provide the stability required by local authorities and the sector in order to plan for the future.
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| Local Authority | 2007-08 grants allocation ( £ ) |
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