The department engages regularly with National Highways on improving lorry parking provision and driver welfare facilities across England, including in the Midlands.

Through the HGV Parking and Driver Welfare Match Funding Grant Scheme and National Highways' Lorry Parking Facilities Improvements Scheme, 62 sites across the Midlands since 2022, have received funding to enhance parking capacity, strengthen security measures, and improve facilities for HGV drivers.

The National Highways Scheme remains open to eligible lorry parking operators to improve driver welfare facilities, site security and lorry parking capacity.

The NHS England Midlands region is implementing the Maternal Care Bundle. The bundle includes guidance to tackle the leading causes of maternal death including thrombosis, mental health, epilepsy, and haemorrhage. Maternal medicine networks have also been established across the Midlands, coordinating specialist care pathways for women with high-risk physical comorbidities, and delivering training and education.

National Health Service providers are also implementing the Enhanced Continuity of Midwifery Carer Model, which provides women from the most disadvantaged backgrounds with support throughout pregnancy from the same midwifery team.

Additionally, NHS providers in the region are increasing access to maternal mental health services, and select trusts are participating in a new programme to reduce inequality of outcome in maternity care for women from ethnic minority groups.

I met with representatives of the English Organic Forum at the Oxford Farming Conference in January this year. The English Organic Forum is a collection of organic-focused organisations that have come together to represent the organic sector across England, which includes the Midlands, and we discussed challenges and opportunities for the organic sector. Defra officials routinely meet with representatives of the organic sector which includes the English Organic Forum and other sector representatives, organic Control Bodies and organic businesses.

This Government is committed to removing barriers to growth for scaleups across the UK - ensuring the UK is one of the best places for tech to start, scale and stay.

We are strengthening regional tech ecosystems through the Regional Tech Booster, a programme supporting startups and accelerating tech clusters beyond London. Furthermore, £50 million funding has been earmarked to the West Midlands through the Local Innovation Partnerships Fund – our £500 million programme to grow regional innovation strengths. Regions across the UK, including the other Midlands regions, were able to bid for up to £20 million through the fund’s competition. UKRI are now independently assessing the quality of these bids.

More broadly, we are supporting the sector through venture capital schemes, R&D tax reliefs, targeted visa routes, the AI Opportunities Action Plan and streamlining regulation to support innovation. Through the Budget, we are investing in skills, compute, and designated AI Growth Zones; on R&D, we are committing £38.6bn to UKRI over five years; and powering entrepreneurship with the Entrepreneurship Prospectus, Enterprise Fellowships, and Innovate UK’s £130m Growth Catalyst. We are unlocking finance via pension and capital‑markets reforms, while the British Business Bank increases annual investment to £2.5bn and commits £5bn to growth‑stage funds.

Together, these measures set out a comprehensive, long‑term plan backed by record funding, to support growth across the whole UK.

The Government is taking a range of steps to increase awareness among young people in the Midlands about the diverse and rewarding career opportunities available in the tech sector. The Department for Work and Pensions (DWP) has developed partnerships with local colleges to provide routes into digital content creation, social media, and other in-demand skills. We are working closely with the region’s four main universities through initiatives such as the Graduate Retune and HLSM+, offering tailored employability support, sector workshops and paid placements with local businesses.

The East and West Midlands Combined Authorities are two of eight areas delivering Youth Guarantee Trailblazers. These Trailblazers are testing innovative approaches to identify and deliver localised support to young people who are Not in Employment, Education or Training (NEET) or at risk of becoming NEET. This includes specialist digital boot camps delivered by providers such as Generation UK, Althaus and Birmingham Open Media. The Trailblazers will provide learning to inform the role of local areas in delivering the Youth Guarantee in the future.

The Department for Science, Innovation and Technology (DSIT) has launched TechFirst, an £187 million programme designed to build the tech skills pipeline and drive local growth. TechFirst has also launched TechLocal to address the challenges SMEs and start-ups face in investing in early-stage career roles. By funding innovation in local recruitment, TechLocal will connect young people in the Midlands directly to the region's growing frontier technology sectors. Further details of the grant competition can be found at TechLocal - GOV.UK.

The Ministry of Justice Victim and Witness budget funds a variety of support services, both at a national and local level, which offer practical, emotional and therapeutic support to help victims cope and move forward in the aftermath of crime. This includes funding to Police and Crime Commissioners (PCCs), including West Midlands OPCC, and the Rape and Sexual Abuse Support Fund (RASASF), which funds local sexual violence support organisations.

The Victim Surcharge is not a standalone funding stream and instead provides a contribution to the overall Ministry of Justice Victim and Witness budget described above. Therefore, we are unable to say how much funding to the West Midlands area was specifically allocated from the Surcharge.

We have introduced new flexible season rail tickets across England this year, including the East and West Midlands. Tickets were launched on the 21 June and became available for use on the 28 June.

We are also working with local authorities and the bus and technology sectors on establishing a model for multi-operator bus ticketing and on further developing existing smart card ticketing offers.

Work Coaches refer suitable candidates to available vacancies, statistics on referrals is not currently available.

Revenue from the Victim Surcharge forms only one part of the Ministry of Justice’s Victim and Witness budget. This budget is used to fund support services that help victims to cope with and, as far as possible, recover from the effects of crime. The budget also funds services to help witnesses to give their best evidence in court. In 2018/19 the Victim and Witnesses budget was about £96m, of which £30.5m was revenue raised from the Victim Surcharge. Most of this money went to Police and Crime Commissioners (PCCs) to commission/deliver local services for victims of crime. The rest of the budget is used to nationally commission support services, including the National Homicide Service, the Court Based Witness Service and support for victims of rape and sexual violence. It is not possible to identify which services receive funding directly from the Victim Surcharge revenue. However, the table below sets out the value of grants covering the Midlands in 2018/19.

* The Government is funding rape support centres in this area from 2019/20

Across England, the Government is investing in protected sites, restoring wildlife-rich habitats and supporting species recovery.

Sites of Special Scientific Interest (SSSIs) provide legal protection for our most important wildlife and natural features in England. There are over 4000 SSSIs in England, covering around 7% of the land area in England. The East and West Midlands are home to some of the finest, with 848 of these sites covering an area of 190,205 hectares.

The Government also provides substantial public funding for managing protected sites and restoring wildlife habitats, spending £2.9 biilion on agri-environment schemes in England through our seven-year Rural Development Programme. Schemes are tailored to the specific biodiversity interests in the Midlands through our local targeting statements[1].

The Government supports species recovery through its agri-environment schemes and partnership projects. Natural England is working with conservation organisations and landowners on the Back from the Brink programme, a £7.7 million partnership funded by the Heritage Lottery Fund and others to put over 100 priority species on the road to recovery. Two Back from the Brink projects are in the Midlands, both led by Butterfly Conservation. The Limestone’s Living Legacies project is restoring a network of limestone grassland sites across the Cotswolds. A second project in Rockingham Forest, Northamptonshire, is restoring and managing woodland to aid the local recovery of vulnerable species and the reintroduction of the Chequered Skipper, which last year become the first previously extinct butterfly to have bred successfully in an English woodland for more than 40 years.

Our Bees’ Needs Champions Awards has recognised a number of councils and community groups from across the Midlands for their own exemplary work to support pollinators.

Our 25 Year Environment Plan marked a step-change in ambition for the natural environment and we are determined to build on these successes.

[1] https://www.gov.uk/government/collections/countryside-stewardship-statements-of-priorities

The government is committed to making the UK the best place to start and grow a digital business, and to ensuring the benefits of digital are felt across the country.

The Midlands is well-placed to make the most of the digital revolution, with its leading universities and strengths in advanced manufacturing and engineering. It is already home to more than 20,000 digital technology businesses.

We are driving further growth in the region’s digital economy through:

• The £250m Midlands Engine Investment Fund (MEIF), which enables effective collaboration between lenders, local bodies and the British Business Bank to help local firms access the investment they need to thrive. The MEIF complements other British Business Bank programmes to give small and medium-sized businesses increased flexibility in the types of funding available to them.
• A Skills deal with West Midlands Combined Authority, which will unlock up to £69m to boost digital and technical skills, job opportunities and productivity across the region.
• Committing over £20m for large-scale testing of new 5G applications in urban areas across the West Midlands, helping local people and businesses to benefit from new digital technologies. This builds on the £4.8m invested in the 5G testbed in Worcestershire, putting the Midlands at the forefront of 5G developments.

The region is also benefitting from:

• Our investment of £21m in Tech Nation’s regional network, which is helping tech entrepreneurs across the UK to scale their businesses.
• The government’s commitment since 2016 to invest an additional £7bn by 2022 in R&D – the largest increase on record and demonstrable progress towards our goal of increasing economy-wide R&D investment to 2.4% of GDP by 2027.
• Support for businesses through R&D tax reliefs, which has more than tripled overall since 2010 and totalled £4.4bn in 2016-17.