King’s Speech at a glance: Which Bills were announced by the Government?
Labour has unveiled its legislative agenda for the coming parliamentary session.
It is the first King’s Speech under a Labour Government for 14 years.
In all, the chunky package features 40 pieces of proposed legislation.
Here is a whistle-stop tour of each one:
– Budget Responsibility Bill
This will introduce a “fiscal lock” which will ensure the economic watchdog, the Office of Budget Responsibility, assesses any major tax or spending changes by the Government.
– National Wealth Fund Bill
This will put the national wealth fund, announced last week with the aim of attracting billions in private sector investment to support UK growth, on a permanent statutory footing.
– Pension Schemes Bill
Measures in this Bill include consolidating defined contribution individual deferred small pension pots; introducing a value for money framework for defined contribution schemes; and requiring pension schemes to offer a range of retirement products.
– Planning and Infrastructure Bill
This will accelerate the building of homes and infrastructure by simplifying the approval process for critical infrastructure projects; ensuring compulsory purchase compensation paid to landowners is not excessive to free up more sites for development; and modernising local planning committees and improving planning authorities’ capacity.
– Employment Rights Bill
Measures include a ban on zero-hours contracts and fire and rehire policies; improvements to statutory sick pay; day-one rights to flexible working and protection from unfair dismissal; establishing a fair pay agreement in the social care sector; updating trade union legislation and simplifying the process of statutory union recognition.
– English Devolution Bill
This will transfer more power away from Westminster, giving local leaders greater powers over planning and local transport and local communities new right-to-buy powers for empty shops and pubs.
– Passenger Railway Services (Public Ownership) Bill
This helps deliver Labour’s pledge to renationalise rail services by transferring train operations to a public-sector operator as existing contracts expire or operators fail to meet their commitments and making public ownership the default position.
– Better Buses Bill
This allows local leaders to take control of their local bus services and supports public ownership.
– Railways Bill
This sets up a new public body, Great British Railways, to oversee track and trains and planning services, simplify the ticketing system and promote the use of rail freight. It also paves the way for a new watchdog, the Passenger Standards Authority.
– Bank Resolution (Recapitalisation) Bill
The Bank of England will be allowed to use funds provided by the banking sector – not the taxpayer – to cover some costs of resolving failing small banks under this legislation.
– Arbitration Bill
This Bill is designed to support more efficient dispute resolution, attract international legal business and promote economic growth.
– Product Safety and Metrology Bill
This provides new powers to regulate new high-risk products such as lithium-ion batteries and suppliers such as online marketplaces.
– Digital Information and Smart Data Bill
This is aimed at boosting innovative uses of data, including by establishing digital verification services, a new digital map for underground infrastructure and smart data schemes.
– High Speed Rail (Crewe to Manchester) Bill
The Labour Government will not reverse Rishi Sunak’s decision to cancel the northern leg of the HS2 rail line, but will improve east to west rail connectivity across the north of England.
– Draft Audit Reform and Corporate Governance Bill
A revamped regulator, the Audit, Reporting and Governance Authority, will improve businesses’ financial reporting.
– Great British Energy Bill
This will set up GB Energy, a new state-owned energy company which will invest alongside the private sector in big projects facilitating the decarbonisation of the electricity grid.
– The Crown Estate Bill
The Crown Estate will be granted wider investment powers and the ability to borrow so it can rapidly invest in new infrastructure projects such as offshore wind.
– Sustainable Aviation Fuel (Revenue Support Mechanism) Bill
This provides revenue certainty to encourage investment in the construction of sustainable aviation fuel plants across the UK.
– Water (Special Measures) Bill
This puts polluting water companies under special measures, with bosses facing criminal liability for lawbreaking and a ban on their bonuses and severe fines.
– Border Security, Asylum and Immigration Bill
This gives the new UK Border Security Command the powers needed to crack down on criminal gangs, introduces stronger penalties for organised immigration crime and modernises the asylum system to clear the backlog.
– Crime and Policing Bill
Measures include strengthening neighbourhood policing; cracking down on antisocial behaviour with new “respect orders” for persistent adult offenders; introducing stronger measures against shoplifting; banning ninja swords and lethal knives; and ensuring an improved police response to violence against women and girls and spiking.
– Terrorism (Protection of Premises) Bill
This delivers Labour’s manifesto pledge to bring in Martyn’s Law named after 2017 Manchester Arena bombing victim, Martyn Hett. It is focused on improving security at public venues and better protecting the public from terror attacks.
– Victims, Courts and Public Protection Bill
Measures include improving support for victims of crime and antisocial behaviour and protections from sex offenders, strengthening the Victims’ Commissioner’s powers and forcing offenders to attend their sentencing hearings.
– Children’s Wellbeing Bill
This includes forcing councils to maintain registers of children not in school; requiring all schools to teach the national curriculum; and cracking down on unregistered independent schools. Free breakfast clubs in every primary school and a limit on the branded items of uniform and PE kits a school can require are also included in this Bill.
– Skills England Bill
This paves the way for the establishment of Skills England to assess the skills needed in the workforce and reform of the apprenticeship levy.
– Renters’ Rights Bill
This wide-ranging Bill’s measures include a ban on so-called no-fault evictions; empowering tenants to challenge rent increases and to request a pet; setting rules around the timeframes within which landlords must make homes safer for private renters, known as Awaab’s Law, and applying a “decent homes standard” to the sector.
– Football Governance Bill
This includes establishing an independent football regulator to address clubs’ financial sustainability and approve stadium sales or relocation; requiring clubs to get fan approval for changes to shirt colours; and preventing clubs from joining break-away leagues.
– Draft Leasehold and Commonhold Reform Bill
This draft legislation will bolster leaseholders’ rights to extend their lease and buy their freehold; restrict the sale of new leasehold flats; regulate extortionate ground rents; and end the “fleecehold” system, whereby people who own freehold properties are locked into contracts to maintain the communal areas around them.
– Draft Equality (Race and Disability) Bill
This enshrines in law the full right to equal pay for ethnic minorities and disabled people and introduces mandatory ethnicity and disability pay reporting.
– Draft Conversion Practices Bill
This aims to ban practices that aim to change someone’s sexual orientation or gender identity by creating new offences to target acts not covered by existing law.
– Tobacco and Vapes Bill
This reintroduces Mr Sunak’s proposed smoking ban, gradually lifting the age at which people can buy cigarettes, and it will impose limits on selling and marketing vapes.
– Mental Health Bill
This will modernise the Mental Health Act to shift the balance of power from the system to the patient with the aim of putting service users at the centre of decisions about their own care.
– Hillsborough Law
This will introduce a “legal duty of candour” for public servants in an effort to tackle the “defensive culture” highlighted in the Hillsborough and Infected Blood inquiries.
– Armed Forces Commissioner Bill
This will establish a statutory commissioner for the armed forces to act as an “independent champion” for service personnel and their families and be fully empowered to investigate and highlight issues.
– Northern Ireland Legacy Legislation
The Government plans to repeal the Northern Ireland Troubles (Legacy and Reconciliation) Act 2023 and replace it with new legislation that changes the sections most vehemently opposed by victims and survivors and those found deficient by Northern Ireland’s High Court.
– House of Lords (Hereditary Peers) Bill
This will take a first step to modernising the upper house of Parliament by removing the right of the almost 100 remaining hereditary peers to sit and vote in the House of Lords.
– Cyber Security and Resilience Bill
This aims to boost the country’s defences against cyber attacks that have affected the NHS and Ministry of Defence by strengthening regulators and increasing reporting requirements.
– Commonwealth Parliamentary Association and International Committee of the Red Cross (Status) Bill
This will enable the Commonwealth Parliamentary Association and the International Committee of the Red Cross to continue to operate fully in the UK.
– Lords Spiritual (Women) Act 2015 (Extension) Bill
This will support efforts to increase the number of female bishops in the House of Lords by extending a provision from 2015 that prioritises female diocesan bishops to fill vacancies among the 21 House of Lords bishops aside from the Archbishop of Canterbury, the Archbishop of York, and the Bishops of London, Durham and Winchester.
– Holocaust Memorial Bill
This will enable the Government to build the planned Holocaust Memorial and Learning Centre next to the Houses of Parliament.
