The Government's ambition is to support good growth across all parts of the United Kingdom. As set out in the Prime Minister's recent Machinery of Government Statement, No10 North will be responsible for driving good growth through devolution and working in close partnership with local leaders, businesses, and communities to strengthen place-based growth

The Government is considering how best to assess progress against its growth ambitions and will provide further details as policy development progresses.

The Government is switching £400 million of grant funding set aside for future international climate finance projects into loans, which could include projects such as the Tropical Forests Forever Facility. This provides more flexible ways to meet the Government’s international climate objectives.

The terms of any loan including the currency denomination and the treatment of any associated exchange rate risk, will depend on the final design of individual investments and will be considered in line with normal value for money and Official Development Assistance requirements.

The Government has announced a cut in VAT on electricity bills to give millions of households breathing space on the cost of living. These changes to VAT apply and are funded for this winter (from 1 October 2026 to 31 March 2027).

The Windsor Framework provides the legal basis and mechanism for changes to VAT on goods in Northern Ireland, and the Government has begun discussions about with the European Union on applying this mechanism for these changes.

To ensure that households in Northern Ireland receive the same support as quickly as the rest of the UK, the Northern Ireland Executive will receive comparable funding to enable it to support households in Northern Ireland with the cost of living this winter.

The Government takes this matter very seriously and welcomes both the independent review into whistleblowing allegations and the separate review into grid performance during the recent period of extreme heat. Transparency will be a central principle throughout.

The Minister for Energy wrote to the Chair of NESO urging the key findings of the independent report to be published once the investigation has concluded.

Separately, NESO's post-event analysis, and Ofgem's conclusions, will be published. This will be subject to limited redactions required to protect the anonymity of individual staff members, commercially sensitive information, national security matters, or other legitimate confidentiality considerations.

The Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office (FCDO) uses a combination of grants and other instruments, including loans, as most appropriate to deliver the intended outcomes and provide the best value for money. No existing FCDO International Climate Finance programmes have been switched from grants to loans linked with the recent announcement of £2 bus fares.

The Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office (FCDO) uses a combination of grants and other instruments, including loans, as most appropriate to deliver the intended outcomes and provide the best value for money. No existing FCDO International Climate Finance programmes have been switched from grants to loans linked with the recent announcement of £2 bus fares.

Currently 93.88 full time equivalents work for the Independent Case Examiner’s Office.

The overall costs for the 25/26 financial year were £4.8m.

In the Autumn Statement 2025 the then Chancellor announced three measures which will make operational improvements to health assessments to ensure people receive the right health or disability benefit, deal with the reassessment backlog for the Work Capability Assessment (WCA) and ensure the Personal Independence Payment (PIP) system is sustainable: increasing face to face assessments across health and disability benefits, increasing WCA reassessment capacity and changing the frequency of PIP award reviews (AR). Together, this package of measures were scored by the OBR at the last Budget as set to deliver around £2 billion in savings over the scorecard.

The Office for Nuclear Regulation was established under the Energy Act 2013 and will remain an independent public corporation. This change does not affect their statutory basis, legal powers or regulatory decisions.

Ministers do not intervene on matters of regulatory decision making. The extent to which Ministers can direct the ONR is set out in the Act and under Section 108 of that Act, any Ministerial direction is reported to Parliament on an annual basis.

I refer the noble lady to the answer given on 17 July 2026 to Question HL1623 (attached).

Since 2022/23, Homes England has supported the delivery of 17,014 homes on land owned by the Agency.

I refer the noble lady to the answer given on 17 July 2026 to Question HL1623 (attached).

Since 2022/23, Homes England has supported the delivery of 17,014 homes on land owned by the Agency.

Real household disposable income (RHDI) is reported by the ONS as part of the UK Economic Accounts, available here: UK Economic Accounts - Office for National Statistics. Due to quarterly volatility, RHDI per capita is best suited to annual comparisons. The previous response noted that RHDI per capita was £26,159 in 2019 (Q1 2019 to Q4 2019), compared to £26,187 in the year to Q1 2026 (Q2 2025 to Q1 2026).

The quarterly data is provided in the table below:

Notes on the data: RHDI per capita is calculated by dividing real household disposable income (ONS variable NRJR) by total population (ONS variable EBAQ).

The Senior Deputy Speaker has asked me, as Chair of the Services Committee, to respond on his behalf. Key stakeholders including the Clerks, both Speakers and the Chief Whips were advised that a full evacuation of the Palace of Westminster, including both Chambers while sitting, was necessary to test processes under realistic conditions and to assess the effectiveness of existing fire evacuation arrangements. The advice reflected a requirement identified by the Crown Premises Fire Safety Inspectorate following an inspection in November 2024 that a full test of the Palace’s evacuation procedures should be undertaken at a busy time and occupancy. Previous drills had taken place on a non-sitting day, when only minimal numbers of staff, members and visitors were present.

The exercise was intended to respond to the Crown Premises Fire Safety Inspectorate recommendation, familiarise Members and staff with evacuation procedures, test arrangements for disabled and other vulnerable people, evaluate the effectiveness of training and fire safety systems, and identify any lessons to strengthen future emergency preparedness.

The Restoration and Renewal (R&R) Client Board’s recent report, Delivering restoration and renewal of the Palace of Westminster: the costed proposals (HC Paper 1576), sets out the costs for the four delivery options in several different ways, for example total programme costs, average annual costs and net present cost (page 121). The report is available at https://committees.parliament.uk/publications/51442/documents/285576/default/.

The timing and budgeted costing of major investments on the R&R Programme is best illustrated through the estimated spend profiles for each delivery option. The table below shows the estimated proportion of total Programme costs (excluding inflation and VAT, including opportunities), as set out in page 121 of the R&R Client Board’s report, in each 10 year period for the four R&R delivery options. These proportions are based on the shortest estimated programme schedules (P50) set out in the report (P50 is a confidence that the estimate will not be exceeded 50% of the time).

Table: Estimate percentage of total R&R programme spend in 10 year tranches to programme completion (P50, excluding inflation and VAT, including opportunities)

The R&R Client Board’s costed proposals report also presents total programme costs including inflation. Inflation is calculated using the estimated spend profiles in the table above and the inflation rates used are based on the Bank of England’s Monetary Policy Report (November 2024):

• 2024/25: 2.25%

• 2025/26: 2.75%

• 2026/27: 2.25%

• 2027/28: 1.75%

• 2028/29 onwards: 2% (flat rate)

The R&R Client Board’s report also presents net present costs for each delivery option based on discounted cashflow analysis. To ensure comparability, the net present cost is calculated over the same time horizon - 100 years – for all the delivery options. The cashflows used to calculate the net present cost for each option include: (a) the total programme costs set out in the report (including risk and optimism bias and opportunities but excluding inflation) which are consistent with the spend profiles in the table above; and (b) the annual estimated operational and lifecycle cost savings once the R&R Programme is concluded (an average of circa £45m per annum).

The net present cost has been calculated using discount rates in real terms in line with HM Treasury’s Green Book Guidance: 3.5% for years 1 to 30; 3% for years 31 to 75; and 2.5% for years 76 to 100.

The Timms Review, the first ever full review of PIP, seeks to ensure we have a system that supports disabled people to achieve better health, higher living standards and greater independence, including through employment.

The Review is being co-produced with disabled people, the organisations that represent them, carers, clinicians, experts, MPs and other stakeholders, so a wide range of views and voices are heard. It has adopted a mix of approaches combining lived experience, expert insight, existing research, new quantitative data and workshops across the UK to gather evidence. The findings from this engagement will build a strong evidence base to inform policy analysis and the Review's recommendations.

The Timms Review Call for Evidence was open to anyone who wished to contribute and received over 38,000 responses. The response form did not ask participants to provide information about whether or not they currently received PIP. Therefore, we do not hold the data requested.

My Lords, the law is clear at the moment. The state pension age is now gradually rising from 66 to 67. That began in April 2026, and it will finish in March 2028. What I can say about the state pension age is that, as legislated by the previous Government, there is a requirement periodically to review it. The third government review of the state pension age was launched on 21 July last year. It has to be completed by the end of March 2029. Clearly, I cannot pre-empt what will come out there. Its job is to consider a wide range of evidence, including evidence on life expectancy, findings from the Government Actuary on the proportion of adult life spent in retirement and the independent report by Dr Suzy Morrissey that I mentioned earlier, as well as other evidence; for example, from the Pensions Commission. The Secretary of State will look at all that evidence and make a decision. For reasons the noble Baroness will know very well as a former Secretary of State having been in that kind of position, he will wait until he has all that evidence and make a decision.

The Secretary of State for Defra will publish guidance on the Nature Restoration Fund so that it is in place for when the first Environmental Delivery Plan becomes available for developers. Defra will keep the need for further areas of guidance under review.