DESNZ 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. The majority of UK ICF will continue to be provided through grants. No existing ICF programmes, including the REDD+ Early Movers programme, have been switched from grants to loans linked with the recent announcement of £2 bus fares.

The Northern Ireland Troubles Bill will ensure a fair and transparent framework that gives all communities confidence in legacy processes and will allow victims, survivors and their families, including service families to obtain the answers they have long sought. Alongside this, we are putting in place robust, deliverable protections specifically designed to support the welfare of veterans, including protection from duplicating investigations.

This measure will ensure that the Legacy Commission and coroners conducting inquests will be required not to duplicate the work of any previous investigation or inquest unless doing so is essential, which is a very high threshold in law.

DESNZ 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. The majority of UK ICF will continue to be provided through grants. No existing ICF programmes, including the REDD+ Early Movers programme in Colombia, have been switched from grants to loans linked with the recent announcement of £2 bus fares.

The Government remains committed to protecting Northern Ireland’s place in the UK internal market. The Independent Monitoring Panel’s insights play a vital role in evaluating this commitment in accordance with the UK internal market guarantee.

In accordance with the Panel’s recommendations in its first report, the Government is working to improve the quality of guidance and support to businesses through a ‘one stop shop’ advice service. The Government has also provided clear guidance on its approach to deforestation-free products and carbon pricing, which is relevant to businesses trading with Northern Ireland.

The Government looks forward to receiving the Panel’s report for its next monitoring period, from 1 July 2025 - 31 December 2025, in due course.

The Government has set out its assessment on numerous occasions, including in the Explanatory Memorandum that accompanied the Diego Garcia Treaty. Maintaining long-term operational control of the Diego Garcia base is the entire basis for the UK-Mauritius Treaty.

Great Britain has a highly resilient energy system. Government works closely with industry and regulators to improve and maintain the resilience and security of energy infrastructure and is confident the likelihood of a large-scale power outage remains low.

The National Energy System Operator (NESO) takes a holistic view of the changing energy landscape to assess the future operation of Britain's electricity networks and has tools available to manage the system under a wide range of scenarios.

Where localised power disruptions do occur, for example due to faults or severe weather, established response arrangements are in place to minimise impacts and restore supplies as quickly as possible.

Despite the recent disorder, and the security incidents in Belfast, Lurgan and Dunmurry, the Northern Ireland Related Terrorism (NIRT) in Northern Ireland threat level remains SUBSTANTIAL, following its reduction in March 2024.

The Joint Terrorism Analysis Centre keeps the Threat Level from Northern Ireland Related Terrorism in Northern Ireland under constant review and formally reviews it twice a year.

I wish to recognise the tremendous efforts of the PSNI and security partners, who work day in, day out to keep our communities safe.

Intertrade UK plays a vital role as an advisory body supporting intra-UK trade and strengthening the UK internal market. The Government continues to value Intertrade UK’s written advice on a wide range of internal market trade issues which it has provided consistently since becoming operational in 2025.

Intertrade UK was awarded £2.25m of funding to be split evenly over three financial years at the Autumn 2025 Budget, and is now implementing the first year of its work programme. The UK Government looks forward to seeing Intertrade UK implement the events and research elements of its programme throughout the rest of this year.

The Government is continuing to implement the Safeguarding the Union command paper, which includes delivering regular meetings of the East-West Council.

The most recent EWC meeting took place in January on the theme of Connectivity: improving East-West trade and community links across the UK. This meeting included four UK Government Ministers from three departments, demonstrating the Government’s broad and deep commitment to delivering for people in Northern Ireland. We intend that the Council will next meet in autumn 2026.

The Government is committed to the Northern Ireland Troubles Bill which will replace the flawed Legacy Act with a fair, transparent system that will allow victims and their families obtain the answers they have long sought, and provide robust and deliverable protections for our former service personnel.

The Government has worked closely with the UK Intelligence Community and with the Intelligence and Security Committee to assess the impact of any measures on the functions of the intelligence and security services.

The Bill includes measures designed to ensure that sensitive information is handled securely and can be protected from inappropriate disclosure. This includes information related to the functions of the intelligence and security services.

As for all public authorities, there will be some limited costs for the intelligence and security services in preparing for the application of the duty and in adapting existing practice to meet its requirements. The Bill’s impact assessment sets out that the extent of ‘new’ costs in the support of these investigative processes is likely to be low.

The Government will continue to review the impact assessment of the Bill as the Bill is amended.

The Impact Assessment for the Courts and Tribunals Bill shows that the structural reform package in the Bill is expected to reduce incoming demand on the Crown Court by almost 20%. It also shows that reforms will support the rule of law by improving access to justice through increased case disposals, strengthening confidence in legal institutions, and supporting a more effective and resilient justice system.

The Impact Assessment can be found, attached.

The noble and learned Lord is incorrect: 896 IPP prisoners have never been released; that is 11% down on last year. My view is that we need to get them into the right prison. Two years ago, only 70% of them were in the right prison; now 91% are in the right prison, and we need to support them so they can get out. Prisons like HMP Grendon, which is a therapeutic community, do good work with IPP prisoners, and HMP Warren Hill has specialist units to support them. I want them to progress as quickly as possible but as safely as possible, so when they are out, they can stay out and do so safely.

I join the noble and learned Lord in his admiration for my noble friend Lord Timpson, but the fact is that we have an independent Parole Board, which makes the decisions—not the Government—on whether someone can safely be managed within the community, as the noble and learned Lord knows. If they cannot be safely managed in the community and are released, they will be living next door to you—and no responsible Government are going to do that.

The noble and learned Lord is right that the Chinese ambassador was summoned to the Foreign Office, which, in diplomatic terms, is a serious thing. I do not know the contents of the conversation or indeed who was in the room, but I can confirm that this act took place in response to what happened with the sentencing of Jimmy Lai and to indicate the very firm belief of the UK Government that this should not have happened and that Jimmy Lai should be released immediately.

The Ministry of Justice routinely publishes data in Offender Management Statistics Quarterly (OMSQ) on the prison population.

Table 1: Mean Tariff Length for Offenders Who Committed Murder, by Year of Sentence

Table notes:

1. *Data for 2025 are up to 30 September 2025.
2. Figures are subject to change as more information about tariff becomes available.
3. Tariff length is the time between date of sentencing and tariff expiry date, and does not take into account any time served on remand.
4. Figures do not include offenders who received a Whole Life Order.

Source: Public Protection Unit Database

Data sources and quality

The figures in the above tables have been drawn from administrative IT systems which, as with any large scale recording system, are subject to possible errors with data entry and processing.

The Ministry of Justice routinely publishes data in Offender Management Statistics Quarterly (OMSQ) on the prison population.

Table 1: Number of prisoners serving life sentence who were aged 25 years or younger at sentencing, with a tariff of 25 years or more, broken down by sex, ethnicity and imprisonment status.

Table notes:

1. Tariff length is the time between date of sentencing and tariff expiry date, and does not take into account any time served on remand.

2. Offenders who are 25 years old or younger at sentencing includes everyone not yet 26 years old at sentencing.

3. Figures include offenders who received a Whole Life Order.

Disclosure control

An asterisk (*) has been used to suppress values of two or one. This is to prevent disclosure of individual information. Further disclosure control may be completed where this alone is not sufficient.

Source: Prison NOMIS and Public Protection Unit Database

Data sources and quality

The figures in the above tables have been drawn from administrative IT systems which, as with any large scale recording system, are subject to possible errors with data entry and processing.

The requested information can be found in the table below.

Table: Prisoners serving an Extended Determinate Sentence by sentence length, as at 30 September 2025, England and Wales [note 1][note 2]

[note 1] Figures based on Extended Determinate Sentenced prisoners with a recorded sentence length.

[note 2] Judicially Imposed Sentence lengths as recorded on prison-NOMIS

Data quality - The figures in the table have been drawn from administrative IT systems which, as with any large scale recording system, are subject to possible errors with data entry and processing.

Disclosure control - Where necessary, [c] has been used to suppress values of one or two to prevent the disclosure of individual information. Further disclosure control may be completed where this alone is not sufficient. This could include the secondary suppression of zero values.

Additional resources - Key statistics relating to offenders who are in prison or under Probation Service supervision can be found in the Offender management statistics quarterly (OMSQ) publication - Link to 'OMSQ publication' (opens in a new window).

Crown copyright (produced by the Ministry of Justice)

The Ministry of Justice routinely publishes data in Offender Management Statistics Quarterly (OMSQ) on the prison population.

Table 1: Mean Tariff Length for Offenders Receiving a Life Sentence, by Age at Sentencing and Year of Sentence

Table 2: Median Tariff Length for Offenders Receiving a Life Sentence, by Age at Sentencing and Year of Sentence

Table notes:

1. *Data for 2025 are up to 30 September 2025.

2. Figures are subject to change as more information about tariff becomes available.

3. Tariff length is the time between date of sentencing and tariff expiry date, and does not take into account any time served on remand.

4. Figures do not include offenders who received a Whole Life Order.

Data sources and quality

The figures in these tables have been drawn from administrative IT systems which, as with any large scale recording system, are subject to possible errors with data entry and processing.

Source: Public Protection Unit Database

The Ministry of Justice routinely publishes data in Offender Management Statistics Quarterly (OMSQ) on the prison population.

The information needed to provide a comprehensive answer to these questions could be provided only at disproportionate cost as central records are not kept in a way that they can be filtered by the required fields to obtain the information.