Local authorities are responsible for ensuring there are sufficient places to meet the needs of looked after children in their area, including commissioning places from private or voluntary sector providers as required. They are responsible for agreeing prices with providers accordingly.

The Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) has launched a market study that will examine the lack of availability and increasing costs in children’s social care provision. The CMA is examining concerns around high prices paid by local authorities, specifically prices charged by providers and variation between prices paid for similar types of placements.

The government has also committed to undertaking a widescale review of children’s social care, taking a fundamental look at the needs, experiences and outcomes of the children it supports, and what is needed to make a real difference. The review will be bold, broad, and independently led, taking a fundamental look across children’s social care, with the aim of better supporting, protecting, and improving the outcomes of vulnerable children and young people. The review will be evidenced based and bring together a broad range of expertise.

The government will study the findings and recommendations of both reviews carefully when they report next year.

The Department responded to the Observer on 17 July.

Statutory Sick Pay (SSP) provides a minimum level of income for employees when they are sick or incapable of work. It is paid by employers at £96.35 per week for up to 28 weeks in any one period of entitlement. Employers are legally required to pay SSP to eligible employees who are off work sick or incapable of work, where employees meet the qualifying conditions. Some employers may also decide to pay more, and for longer, through Occupational Sick Pay.

The costs of SSP are met in full by employers. It is therefore important to strike a balance between ensuring employees receive financial support when they are sick or incapable of work with the costs to employers of providing such support.

SSP is just one part of our welfare safety net and our wider government offer to support people in times of need. Where an individual’s income is reduced while off work sick and they require further financial support, they may be able to claim Universal Credit and new style Employment and Support Allowance, depending on their personal circumstances.

The government has previously consulted on reform to SSP, and as we learn to live with a new virus there is space to take a broader look at the role of SSP. The government maintains that SSP provides an important link between the employee and employer but that now is not the right time to introduce changes to the sick pay system.

The National Institute for Health and Care Excellence (NICE) has made a number of recommendations for research on managing chronic pain, including the use of psychological therapies, acupuncture and pharmacological interventions.

NHS England and NHS Improvement are collaborating with stakeholders such as Versus Arthritis to co-produce and coordinate a strategy. Versus Arthritis have been commissioned to produce a decision support tool based on NICE guidance which can help people living with pain and their clinical teams understand all evidence-based options available. Alongside this tool, NHS England and NHS Improvement will also be publishing a commissioning framework to help local services reduce opioid prescribing in summer 2021.

No such assessment has been made. Foodbanks are independent charitable organisations and there are no official statistics relating to either the number of people using food banks or the number of food parcels distributed.

This Government is committed to supporting those on low incomes, injecting an additional £7.4 billion to strengthen the welfare safety net in 2020/21. We also introduced the Covid Winter Grant, now the Covid Local Support Grant, together totalling £269 million, to enable Local Authorities to help the most vulnerable children and families with essential costs.

Local authorities have freedom to set their own criteria determining who qualifies for social housing in their district, through changes introduced in the Localism Act 2011. However, they must ensure that reasonable preference (overall priority) for social housing is given to certain categories of people in housing need, including homeless households, people living in overcrowded housing, and those who have medical and welfare needs.

The Government is committed to increasing the supply of affordable housing and are investing over £12 billion in affordable housing over 5 years, the largest investment in affordable housing in a decade.

This includes the new £11.5 billion Affordable Homes Programme, which will provide up to 180,000 new homes across the country, should economic conditions allow. The new programme will deliver more than double the social rent than the current programme, with around 32,000 social rent homes due to be delivered.

The Government’s proposed Health and Care Bill will help local health and care systems deliver higher quality care to their local communities by establishing integrated care systems on a statutory basis.

The proposals will not change the role of local government in terms of its public health and social care responsibilities, the services it commissions or the funding of those services. An impact assessment for the Health and Care Bill will be published in due course.

In November, the Chancellor set out his vision for a new chapter for the UK’s FS sector to the House of Commons.

The UK’s FS sector will remain global, open and competitive, while being underpinned by high quality, agile and responsive regulation, and safe and stable markets. It will pioneer financial technology to benefit consumers and businesses, use innovation and finance to tackle climate change and move to a net-zero future.

The Cabinet Office launched the advertisement for the permanent Chair of the National Institute of Heath Protection on 2 March which closes on 9 March. Further stages of the recruitment process are pending the outcome of the advertisement.

Nurses will continue to be offered the vaccine beyond mid-February, which includes invitations for the second dose. Information on vaccinating staff has been shared across the healthcare system briefing employers to ensure their staff are offered, and book appointments for, the vaccine.

While it is the responsibility of individual employers to arrange for their staff to be vaccinated, the National Health Service (NHS) has now also opened the National Booking Service to ensure that it is as easy as possible for nurses and other frontline health and social care workers, particularly those working outside the NHS, to access the vaccine. Staff using this service will be asked when booking to self-certify that they are eligible and will be told to take proof of their employment to their appointment at a vaccination centre or pharmacy-led site.

Local NHS employers are using tried and tested methods to encourage take-up within their organisations, based on the annual flu campaign This includes the provision of specific staff campaign materials; extensive engagement by senior nursing figures, such as Ruth May, Chief Nursing Officer for England who regularly endorses and appeals for nurses to book vaccine appointments on behalf of the profession; and targeted engagement with nurses from black, Asian and minority ethnic backgrounds designed to address queries as well as encouraging new international nurses to book appointments too. There is also ongoing information shared on social media for healthcare workers with staff and high profile health professionals sharing their vaccine stories.

Each of the Departmental COVID-19 contracts contain information on the award criteria, whether as a Direct Award using regulation 32(2)(c) under the Public Contract Regulations 2015 under which authorities are allowed to procure goods, services and works with extreme urgency in exceptional circumstances or a call off contract from an existing Government framework contract.

The Government has allocated a total of £22 billion to the Test and Trace programme in 2020-21 with a further £15 billion for 2021-22.  All contracts are being monitored to ensure that performance and quality assurance standards are being met. Where poor performance has been identified we have taken appropriate measures to rectify this.

We take every death in custody very seriously, and we are focussing our efforts to address the levels of self-harm and support those at risk of suicide. This includes tailored action for the women’s prison estate, where a rise has been seen in self-harm incidents since Covid-19 measures were introduced.

We are under no illusions about the impact of the measures which were put in place to protect lives during the Covid-19 pandemic and we have made prisoners’ safety and wellbeing our priority.

We have produced a range of products to support Governors in devising and implementing local safety and welfare plans designed to mitigate risks and promote wellbeing. Over 25,000 new and existing staff have received self-harm and suicide prevention training to help them better support offenders with complex needs. We’ve enabled continued family contact through more than 1,600 secure mobile phones and rolled out secure video call technology into every single prison in the male, female and youth estate. Each prisoner is also given £5 PIN credit per week. We have renewed our partnership with the Samaritans who are providing the excellent Listeners scheme, which trains selected prisoners to provide emotional support to their fellow prisoners. We are also delivering more in cell-activities such as distraction packs, supplementary food packs, and additional educational materials to mitigate the impact of isolation.

We have prioritised the roll-out of the revised version of the Assessment, Care in Custody and Teamwork (ACCT) multi-disciplinary case management system used in prisons to support people at risk of suicide and self-harm in the women’s estate.

We will also be implementing the Offender Management in Custody model in the female estate in April. This will provide each woman with a dedicated key worker who will be able to better support them and identify concerns at an early stage so that women can receive the right support at the right time.

Every prisoner in the male closed estate should have a key worker allocated to them with vulnerable and priority group prisoners having a daily wellbeing check at the minimum and weekly key work sessions where resource and risk allows whilst in regime level 4.

No such assessment has been made.

The £20 per week uplift to Universal Credit and Working Tax Credit was announced by the Chancellor as a temporary measure in March 2020 to support those facing the most financial disruption as a result of the public health emergency. This measure remains in place until March 2021. As the Government has done throughout this pandemic, it will continue to assess how best to support low-income families, which is why we will look at the economic and health context before making any decisions.

We remain committed to promoting human rights in Xinjiang, and our continued multilateral and bilateral activity demonstrates this. The Foreign Secretary has personally raised our serious concerns with his Chinese counterpart on a number of occasions this year. The UK has also taken a leading international role in holding China to account for its gross human rights abuses in Xinjiang and Hong Kong. On 6 October, the UK and 38 other countries joined a statement at the UN Third Committee in New York expressing deep concern at the situation in Xinjiang and Hong Kong, including the mass detention of Uyghurs in political re-education camps. This growing international pressure on China reflects UK diplomatic leadership, including the personal involvement of the Foreign Secretary in raising the issue with a wide range of partners.

Significant external factors over the last few years have inevitably required changes to the original delivery plans for the Digital Services at the Border programme as set out in 2014, for example, the decision to leave the EU, improvements in the Home Office’s approach to using information, and changes to the way that government handles data.

The programme was reset in 2019 to help ensure the best chance of success, this included actions to strengthen the leadership team and put in place a clear plan of delivery.

As part of the reset in 2019, the Digital Services at the Border Programme was extended for three years to complete in April 2022. The Home Office estimate the net additional costs that will be incurred by the programme resulting from the extension will be £173 million.

The information you requested is not held centrally by this department. The department does not currently collect data on numbers of home educated children.

Parents are not required to register if they are home educating their children and, therefore, there is not a robust basis on which the department can reliably collect statistics on home education.

In relation to the COVID-19 outbreak, the department is working closely with local authorities to encourage a return to full attendance in school and is monitoring the situation. Initial conversations with local authorities indicate that the majority have noticed an increase in enquiries from parents about home education. Where parents are anxious about the safety of their children returning to school, local authorities and school leaders are reinforcing that it is in the best interests of pupils to return to school.

Over March and April 2020, the government provided £3.2 billion of emergency grant funding and over £5 billion of cashflow support to assist local authorities through the COVID-19 outbreak.

On 22 October 2020, my right hon. Friend, the Secretary of State for Education, announced allocations of a further £919 million of un-ringfenced funding to respond to spending pressures. This is part of a package of further support for councils, worth over £1 billion.

Baroness Harding was appointed interim Chair of the National Institute of Health Protection on 18 August 2020 by the Prime Minister, while recruitment for a permanent candidate is completed. Baroness Harding receives no remuneration for this role or as Head of NHS Test and Trace.

On 1 May the Government introduced a temporary VAT zero rate on personal protective equipment (PPE) that meets the standard set out in guidance from Public Health England in order to ensure that affected sectors (such as hospitals and care homes) were able to have access to PPE as required. The Government has put in place new measures that will ensure the supply of PPE to these sectors from 1 November.

The zero rate therefore ended on 31 October (as legislated), and the costing of this measure will be subject to scrutiny by the Office for Budget Responsibility and will be set out at the next fiscal event.

An estimate of the revenue raised from VAT on other types of face masks or PPE that have never been subject to the zero rate is not available. HMRC do not hold information on VAT revenue from specific products or services because businesses are not required to provide figures at a product level in their VAT returns, as this would impose an excessive administrative burden.

In July, the Government announced in the Plan for Jobs additional expenditure of over £15 billion for PPE procurement.

The Government have accepted nineteen of the recommendations made in Her Majesty’s Inspectorate of Prisons report, in full or part, and rejected only one (access to social media sites).

The report and recommendations have been considered and the Government’s response has been published https://homeofficemedia.blog.gov.uk/2020/10/23/fact-sheet-short-term-holding-facilities-and-processing-centres-for-small-boats-crossings/ . We would refer to the measures and improvements listed there.

We take the welfare of people in our care very seriously and are committed to ensuring our triaging and short-term holding facilities are safe, secure and humane and follow the latest guidance from Public Health England.

We are adhering to our statutory duties in all aspects, from safeguarding children, to providing the necessary medical requirements to those who have undertaken this dangerous journey.