The Maternity and Neonatal Taskforce is currently considering a wide range of evidence and proposals to inform its development of the Maternity and Neonatal Action Plan, and in her response to the debate on Baby Loss Awareness Week on 12 October, my Rt Hon. Friend, the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, who is chairing the taskforce, made clear that miscarriage would be a key area of focus for its work. Department officials will ensure that the study referred to by the Hon Member is taken into account as part of that process.

The Maternity and Neonatal Taskforce is currently considering a wide range of evidence and proposals to inform its development of the Maternity and Neonatal Action Plan, and in her response to the debate on Baby Loss Awareness Week on 12 October, my Rt Hon. Friend, the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, who is chairing the taskforce, made clear that miscarriage would be a key area of focus for its work. Department officials will ensure that the study referred to by the Hon Member is taken into account as part of that process.

The AI Security Institute (AISI) has built trusted, voluntary relationships with the world's leading AI labs. AISI signs a collaboration agreement with every developer whose models it tests before release. This collaborative approach lets us keep pace with a fast-moving technology and adapt as it evolves.

The department is committed to ensuring that the new special educational needs and disabilities (SEND) and inclusion professional development offer supports staff to develop the knowledge and skills they need to meet the needs of children and young people with SEND. As part of SEND reform, the department is proposing to update the SEND Code of Practice with a new requirement for all schools (including primary and secondary) to ensure that their staff receive training on SEND and inclusion.

The department is also investing over £200 million in SEND Continuing Professional Development to support this requirement. The offer includes materials that education settings can use to deliver training in-house, alongside further professional development for teachers, leaders and support staff. The department will monitor engagement with the materials and use the feedback form to help understand how the materials are being used by settings and to inform the continued development of the offer.

Next year, the department will start delivery of new SEND and inclusion courses for teachers, leaders and teaching assistants. The department will use the available registration and participation data to monitor take-up.

As I outlined in my speech on 12 October, the Government has been working closely with the US government and frontier labs to ensure AISI continues to have access to the most powerful AI models. AISI holds trusted, voluntary relationships with the world's leading AI companies, and continues to have access to frontier models for testing both before and after public release. AISI scientists continue to conduct rigorous evaluations of the latest generation of models, including GPT-6 Astra and Gemini 4 Argon.

The total spend on artificial intelligence (AI) tokens for both pilots was £24,000. The Government Cyber Unit worked with departments to ensure that all critical findings were remediated, and remaining vulnerabilities have been transitioned into business-as-usual processes for departments to address in line with their existing risk and vulnerability management policies.

The Department has now published the National Cancer Plan. It sets out our ambition to become a global leader in cancer survival and provides details of how we will comprehensively improve cancer care in all parts of the country. We will work to end the postcode lottery to ensure that access to the best cancer diagnosis, treatment and care is available for everyone, including those with myeloma.

NHS England commissions specialised cancer treatments and works with providers to support consistent access across the country. Where a treatment is recommended by the National Institute for Health and Care Excellence, commissioners and providers are responsible for making the funding available to enable eligible patients to access it, where clinically appropriate.

Treatment for cancer is highly individualised and decisions about cancer treatment are typically made by clinicians and multidisciplinary teams of healthcare professionals. They consider all aspects of a patient's health and circumstances when recommending treatment options. While certain treatments may not be advised for some patients, these decisions are based on medical assessments and what's best for the individual's overall health and well-being.

Following Gatsby’s independent review, the government adopted the updated Gatsby Benchmarks in statutory careers guidance from 2025/26. Benchmark 7 was strengthened so that every pupil should have meaningful encounters with providers by age 16, including further education colleges and independent training providers, and understand the technical education routes available.

The new definition of ‘meaningful’ focuses on quality and impact. Pupils should explore what it is like to learn, develop and succeed with a provider through purposeful, two-way interactions, with opportunities to prepare and reflect.

Statutory guidance encourages schools to self-evaluate against the benchmarks. The Careers & Enterprise Company aggregates and publishes national data annually to inform policy and practice. The 2025/26 data is due to be published later this year and will provide the first baseline against these strengthened expectations.

Benchmark 7 is complemented by statutory provider access legislation, helping ensure pupils hear directly from technical education and apprenticeship providers.

The Online Safety Act already regulates many generative AI services. Through a delegated power in the Crime and Policing Act, the Government will bring additional unregulated AI chatbots into scope, ensuring consistent protections against illegal content and activity, including terrorism offences. Government are working at pace on the detailed policy and technical work needed to deliver regulation, and to ensure it is effective and proportionate.

The Home Office also works closely with the UK AI Security Institute (AISI) to understand the risks posed by advanced AI. AISI have developed trusted, voluntary partnerships with the world’s leading AI labs. Through these relationships, AISI has secured privileged access to frontier models, testing leading AI systems before they are released and working collaboratively with companies to improve their safety and security. AISI maintains close engagement with government and industry, working alongside international partners to assess and mitigate the risks posed by increasingly capable AI systems, including chemical and biological.

The Home Office encourages industry to treat AI safety as an ongoing responsibility, and to monitor their systems throughout their lifecycle to identify risks and put proportionate mitigations in place.s

Where there is central guidance on any issue that applies across the Civil Service as a whole, each Civil Service arm’s length body is required to comply with it and will be held accountable for any evidence of non-compliance through the normal Civil Service management channels. For equality, diversity, and inclusion expenditure, this would be managed through the Cabinet Office.

The Government recognises the significance of epilepsy as a cause of maternal mortality, highlighted by the latest MBRRACE-UK report. NHS England's Maternal Care Bundle (MCB), informed by evidence from MBRRACE-UK, includes actions to support the safe management and monitoring of anti-seizure medication, improve access to specialist epilepsy and maternal medicine expertise, and strengthen multidisciplinary care for pregnant women with epilepsy.

All National Health Service trusts providing maternity services are expected to implement the Maternal Care Bundle in full by March 2027. NHS trusts are also incentivised to implement the bundle through Year 8 of the Maternity Incentive Scheme and must be able to evidence a plan for achieving full implementation by the national deadline.

The National Maternity and Neonatal Taskforce is currently considering a wide range of evidence to inform the national action plan, including the standards set out in the Maternal Care Bundle. Its Charity and Third Sector expert reference group includes representation from Epilepsy Action.

The former Prevent Standards and Compliance Unit (StaCU) was subsumed into the Office of the Independent Prevent Commissioner (OIPC) upon its creation in 2025 and no longer exists. Prior to the transfer of its functions to the OIPC, StaCU was part of the Commission for Countering Extremism. The exercise referenced in StaCU's 2024-25 annual report was undertaken as part of its independent oversight function, and the report was commissioned and published independently of the Home Office. As the OIPC does not currently undertake social media monitoring, neither StaCU nor the OIPC has collected any open-source observations about Prevent on social media websites since 1^st March 2025.

The open-source observations described in StaCU’s 2024-25 annual report were gathered as part of a specific and time-limited exercise to better understand how the delivery of Prevent was being discussed online and assess whether social media observations could help identify complaints or concerns requiring StaCU’s investigation. StaCU received information from a media monitoring service that identified publicly available references to Prevent, including material from open-source social media websites. This was an exploratory exercise, not an ongoing monitoring function.

Neither the Home Office, StaCU as a unit, or the OIPC holds a list of people or organisations that criticise the Prevent programme.

The former Prevent Standards and Compliance Unit (StaCU) was subsumed into the Office of the Independent Prevent Commissioner (OIPC) upon its creation in 2025 and no longer exists. Prior to the transfer of its functions to the OIPC, StaCU was part of the Commission for Countering Extremism. The exercise referenced in StaCU's 2024-25 annual report was undertaken as part of its independent oversight function, and the report was commissioned and published independently of the Home Office. As the OIPC does not currently undertake social media monitoring, neither StaCU nor the OIPC has collected any open-source observations about Prevent on social media websites since 1^st March 2025.

The open-source observations described in StaCU’s 2024-25 annual report were gathered as part of a specific and time-limited exercise to better understand how the delivery of Prevent was being discussed online and assess whether social media observations could help identify complaints or concerns requiring StaCU’s investigation. StaCU received information from a media monitoring service that identified publicly available references to Prevent, including material from open-source social media websites. This was an exploratory exercise, not an ongoing monitoring function.

Neither the Home Office, StaCU as a unit, or the OIPC holds a list of people or organisations that criticise the Prevent programme.

The former Prevent Standards and Compliance Unit (StaCU) was subsumed into the Office of the Independent Prevent Commissioner (OIPC) upon its creation in 2025 and no longer exists. Prior to the transfer of its functions to the OIPC, StaCU was part of the Commission for Countering Extremism. The exercise referenced in StaCU's 2024-25 annual report was undertaken as part of its independent oversight function, and the report was commissioned and published independently of the Home Office. As the OIPC does not currently undertake social media monitoring, neither StaCU nor the OIPC has collected any open-source observations about Prevent on social media websites since 1^st March 2025.

The open-source observations described in StaCU’s 2024-25 annual report were gathered as part of a specific and time-limited exercise to better understand how the delivery of Prevent was being discussed online and assess whether social media observations could help identify complaints or concerns requiring StaCU’s investigation. StaCU received information from a media monitoring service that identified publicly available references to Prevent, including material from open-source social media websites. This was an exploratory exercise, not an ongoing monitoring function.

Neither the Home Office, StaCU as a unit, or the OIPC holds a list of people or organisations that criticise the Prevent programme.

Domestic Abuse Related Death Reviews (DARDRs), previously known as Domestic Homicide Reviews (DHRs), offer a vital opportunity for national and local agencies, local communities, and society as a whole to learn lessons from fatal domestic abuse and to treat every death as preventable.

The Home Office is reforming DARDRs to improve their efficiency, enhance accountability, and ensure that recommendations are disseminated and embedded more swiftly. An updated version of the statutory guidance that underpins DARDRs was published on 15 September 2026.

The statutory guidance sets out the importance of involving family and friends closely in the DARDR process. The 2016 DHR guidance (used for cases commissioned before 15 September 2026) outlines that the review Chair should provide the family with ‘regular engagement and updates on progress through the advocate, including the timeline expected for publication’.

Historically there have been significant delays in the DARDR quality assurance (QA) process. To resolve this, we have reformed the QA process and introduced a new DARDR Quality Assurance Board, appointing three new public office holders. The Board members bring decades of frontline experience and are experts in domestic abuse. This replaces the former QA Panel and is designed to streamline review procedures, ensure consistent, high-quality feedback, and provide Community Safety Partnerships with more timely responses going forward.

As of 1 September 2026, there were 62 reviews awaiting quality assurance. We have successfully reduced the backlog from 11 months in September 2025, to a report being heard within 6 weeks of submission in September 2026. We do not hold the information on the number of outstanding DARDRs commissioned before the 15 September 2026.

The Home Office has committed to funding and delivering an oversight mechanism for recommendations made as part of DARDRs. This work is currently underway, and further details will be announced in due course. In December 2025 we published the Freedom from Violence and Abuse, Cross Governmental Strategy and Action Plan. This outlines that going forward all national recommendations from DARDRs will be shared with the Ministerial Violence Against Women and Girls Board, which will provide governance to ensure that recommendations lead to meaningful change and drive accountability.