The interest payments to tenants under the scheme are as follows:

2010: £418,681; 2011: £199,579; 2012: £120,288; 2013: £82,084; 2014: £59,184.

The falling figures reflect record-low interest rates, and also the changes that were made to the contract after 2010. If I may explain:

The service concession agreement that was agreed by Labour Government with the custodial tenancy deposit protection scheme contained a guarantee that the Government would meet any shortfall arising if approved fees were not covered by the interest on deposits held. If interests were low, then the Government would pay the scheme money.

As a result of the low interest rates that emerged due to the financial crash in 2008 and 2009, such an agreement left taxpayers liable for a massive shortfall, which was estimated to reach over £30 million by the end of the contract in 2012.

In May 2010, the Coalition Government inherited this unacceptable situation and looming liabilities for taxpayers. As outlined my rt. hon. Friend, the Member for Welwyn Hatfield (Grant Shapps) on 19 July 2011, Official Report, Column 828W, following extensive negotiations in summer 2010, we removed the guarantee and all associated liabilities as part of a revised agreement.

The Government is currently inviting bidders for the new custodial tenancy protection scheme contract for 2016 onwards, and we are asking bidders how and when they could offer tenants’ interest as part of their bids.

The interest payments to tenants under the scheme are as follows:

2010: £418,681; 2011: £199,579; 2012: £120,288; 2013: £82,084; 2014: £59,184.

The falling figures reflect record-low interest rates, and also the changes that were made to the contract after 2010. If I may explain:

The service concession agreement that was agreed by Labour Government with the custodial tenancy deposit protection scheme contained a guarantee that the Government would meet any shortfall arising if approved fees were not covered by the interest on deposits held. If interests were low, then the Government would pay the scheme money.

As a result of the low interest rates that emerged due to the financial crash in 2008 and 2009, such an agreement left taxpayers liable for a massive shortfall, which was estimated to reach over £30 million by the end of the contract in 2012.

In May 2010, the Coalition Government inherited this unacceptable situation and looming liabilities for taxpayers. As outlined my rt. hon. Friend, the Member for Welwyn Hatfield (Grant Shapps) on 19 July 2011, Official Report, Column 828W, following extensive negotiations in summer 2010, we removed the guarantee and all associated liabilities as part of a revised agreement.

The Government is currently inviting bidders for the new custodial tenancy protection scheme contract for 2016 onwards, and we are asking bidders how and when they could offer tenants’ interest as part of their bids.

I refer the hon. Member to the answer I gave on 4 November 2014 to Question 210573 to the hon. Member for Bradford South (Mr Gerry Sutcliffe).

Visits to the UK by members of the Colombian Armed Forces are focused around defence education. The number of occasions Colombian Armed Forces personnel has trained in the UK in each academic year since 2009-10 and how many such personnel were trained in each such year up to and including the end of the last academic year is:

2009-10: one individual on one occasion.

2010-11: five individuals on five separate occasions.

2011-12: one individual on one occasion.

2012-13: three individuals on three separate occasions.

2013-14: three individuals on three separate occasions

Tables 1 and 2 show the number of Funeral Payment awards and expenditure amount in England, London and North and North East London Budget Area between 2004/05 and 2013/14.

DWP does not hold information about the number of people receiving Funeral Payment awards in a given time period. The number of awards made in each year is not equal to the number of people who received awards as an individual may have made multiple applications in that period.

The lowest geographical level at which we hold Funeral Payment data is by Social Fund Budget Area; the geographical areas used to administer the Social Fund in Great Britain. Since 2008/09, the Budget Area covering Enfield is North and North East London, which also covers Waltham Forest and Barking and Dagenham as well as parts of Barnet, Hackney, Haringey, Harrow, Havering, Islington and Redbridge. Earlier figures for this area are not available.

Table 1: Funeral Payment awards in England, London and North and North East London, 2004/05 to 2013/14

Source: DWP Policy, Budget and Management Information System

Table 2: Funeral Payment expenditure in England, London and North and North East London, 2004/05 to 2013/14

Source: DWP Policy, Budget and Management Information System

Notes

· These figures do not include applications which were processed clerically and have not been entered on to the Social Fund Computer System.

· All figures are rounded to the nearest £100.

The 2014 National Cancer Patient Experience Survey (CPES), which is managed by NHS England, asked over 110,000 cancer patients across the country for their views on their care with 64% responding. Macmillan Cancer Support has published league tables constructed from the data. The tables can be found at:

http://www.macmillan.org.uk/Aboutus/News/Latest_News/Londontrustsremainatbottomofcancerpatientexperienceleaguetable.aspx

My Rt. hon. Friend the Secretary of State meets with NHS England regularly and discusses a wide range of issues.

NHS England is working with NHS Improving Quality, Macmillan Cancer Support and Strategic Clinical Networks to spread good practice across hospitals providing cancer care, including how best to utilise CPES findings. Action includes:

- the launch of an NHS Improving Quality project that pairs highly-rated cancer trusts with trusts that have potential to improve;

- regional events for commissioners looking at how CPES results inform commissioning decisions around cancer patient experience;

- publication of guidance on using CPES data to drive improvement which will be sent to all Trusts who participate in the CPES.

NHS England committed in their Five Year Forward View to improving the information given to people who use services, their families and carers. This builds on NHS England’s Commitments to Carers, published in May 2014, with 37 commitments including NHS England supporting the relevant bodies in signposting carers to information and advice about available support.

NHS England also has a strand of work focusing on improving the quality, integrity and accessibility of health related information, including information targeting carers. In addition, NHS Choices holds a wide range of information relating to the support available for carers.

The 2014 National Cancer Patient Experience Survey (CPES), which is managed by NHS England, asked over 110,000 cancer patients across the country for their views on their care with 64% responding. Macmillan Cancer Support has published league tables constructed from the data. The tables can be found at:

http://www.macmillan.org.uk/Aboutus/News/Latest_News/Londontrustsremainatbottomofcancerpatientexperienceleaguetable.aspx

My Rt. hon. Friend the Secretary of State meets with NHS England regularly and discusses a wide range of issues.

NHS England is working with NHS Improving Quality, Macmillan Cancer Support and Strategic Clinical Networks to spread good practice across hospitals providing cancer care, including how best to utilise CPES findings. Action includes:

- the launch of an NHS Improving Quality project that pairs highly-rated cancer trusts with trusts that have potential to improve;

- regional events for commissioners looking at how CPES results inform commissioning decisions around cancer patient experience;

- publication of guidance on using CPES data to drive improvement which will be sent to all Trusts who participate in the CPES.

NHS England committed in their Five Year Forward View to improving the information given to people who use services, their families and carers. This builds on NHS England’s Commitments to Carers, published in May 2014, with 37 commitments including NHS England supporting the relevant bodies in signposting carers to information and advice about available support.

NHS England also has a strand of work focusing on improving the quality, integrity and accessibility of health related information, including information targeting carers. In addition, NHS Choices holds a wide range of information relating to the support available for carers.

The 2014 National Cancer Patient Experience Survey (CPES), which is managed by NHS England, asked over 110,000 cancer patients across the country for their views on their care with 64% responding. Macmillan Cancer Support has published league tables constructed from the data. The tables can be found at:

http://www.macmillan.org.uk/Aboutus/News/Latest_News/Londontrustsremainatbottomofcancerpatientexperienceleaguetable.aspx

My Rt. hon. Friend the Secretary of State meets with NHS England regularly and discusses a wide range of issues.

NHS England is working with NHS Improving Quality, Macmillan Cancer Support and Strategic Clinical Networks to spread good practice across hospitals providing cancer care, including how best to utilise CPES findings. Action includes:

- the launch of an NHS Improving Quality project that pairs highly-rated cancer trusts with trusts that have potential to improve;

- regional events for commissioners looking at how CPES results inform commissioning decisions around cancer patient experience;

- publication of guidance on using CPES data to drive improvement which will be sent to all Trusts who participate in the CPES.

NHS England committed in their Five Year Forward View to improving the information given to people who use services, their families and carers. This builds on NHS England’s Commitments to Carers, published in May 2014, with 37 commitments including NHS England supporting the relevant bodies in signposting carers to information and advice about available support.

NHS England also has a strand of work focusing on improving the quality, integrity and accessibility of health related information, including information targeting carers. In addition, NHS Choices holds a wide range of information relating to the support available for carers.

The Government has made no such assessment but keeps all tax policies under review.

HM Revenue and Customs (HMRC) have published information on estimates of the cost of the relief. For the year 2009-10, HMRC estimated the relief cost £120 million. For the years 2010-11 through to 2013-14 HMRC estimate the cost of the relief to be £90 million per annum.

These figures are particularly tentative and subject to a wide margin of error.

The Health and Social Care Information Centre collect information on the number of practices opened and closed, which is contained in the attached table.

It is important to note that these figures also include practice mergers and takeovers and do not provide an accurate representation of activity or service provision. In many cases, practices listed in these figures as having closed, will have in fact merged and will continue to see patients. In addition, in this time period the definition of general practice has changed to become a more stringent classification.

The requested information is contained in the following table:

Average GP practice list size by selected areas in England, 2009-2013

Notes: ¹ Workforce data is available by National Health Service organisation only, not geographical regions such as Greater London. Greater London is captured by London Area Team and Enfield by Enfield Clinical Commissioning Group. Prior to 2013, the area of London was serviced by London Strategic Health Authority and Enfield was serviced by Enfield Primary Care Trust. There is no break in the data as the old and new London organisations are coterminous and therefore the data is still comparable over the years provided.

As per the latest GP contract, patients register with a GP practice and are attributed to the practice, not a specific GP.

Data quality: The Health and Social Care Information Centre seeks to minimise inaccuracies and the effect of missing and invalid data, but responsibility for data accuracy resides with the organisations providing the data. Methods are continually being updated to improve data quality where changes impact on figures already published. This is assessed, but unless it is significant at national level, figures are not updated. Impact at detailed or local level is footnoted in relevant analyses.

Source: The Health and Social Care Information Centre General and Personal Medical Statistics. Patient registration information taken from National Health Application and Infrastructure Services Exeter GP payments system.

We reviewed all existing export licences to Israel during Operation Protective Edge. We found that the vast majority of exports currently licensed for Israel were not for items that could be used by Israeli forces in operations in Gaza in response to attacks by Hamas.

On 12 August, the Government announced that twelve licences were identified for components which could be part of equipment used by the Israel Defence Forces in Gaza. As we were unable to clarify whether export licence criteria was being met, we took the decision to suspend this small number of export licences if there was a resumption of significant hostilities.

We monitored the situation closely and assessed that the resumption of hostilities when Hamas later broke the ceasefire was not enough to warrant a suspension.

Universal credit can currently be paid into a credit union current account and claimants would need to provide an individual account number and sort code. We plan to be in a position to make UC payments into any type of credit union account at a future date.

For those without a bank or building society, the Department can pay universal credit into a credit union current account, Post Office card account or by Simple Payment.

A Simple Payment is a cash transfer service, which has been designed to pay those people who DWP cannot pay into any type of account.

Support is available through our own jobcentre network where we are introducing 6,000 additional web access devices to improve digital access by autumn. Claimants can be given access to the internet through these devices to make a claim and support will be given where necessary if they are not familiar with digital services.

DWP already works in partnership with local authorities who can also provide digital access and digital support for claimants through existing outlets.

DWP also provides a telephony service to support those unable to use the digital channel.

Officials from our embassy in Tel Aviv raised the use of lethal force in this case with both the Israel Defence Force and the Israeli Border Police on 16 May.

On 21 May, the local EU missions in Jerusalem and Ramallah issued a local statement expressing deep concern about the deaths of two Palestinian youths on 15 May in the West Bank and emphasising the importance of such incidents being investigated thoroughly. They reiterated the need for security forces, whether Israeli or Palestinian, to refrain from the use of lethal force, except in cases where there is a real and imminent threat to life.

“Improving Outcomes: A Strategy for Cancer”, published in January 2011, committed over £450 million up to 2014-15 to achieve earlier diagnosis of cancer, including improving direct general practitioner (GP) access to key diagnostic tests, such as magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) scans to support the diagnosis of brain tumours. In 2012, the Department published ‘Direct access to diagnostic tests for cancer: best practice referral pathways for general practitioners’ to provide criteria for accessing key diagnostic tests including MRI brain scans. The guide aims to raise awareness of the symptoms that require urgent referral to specialists and sets out where a direct referral for an MRI brain scan may benefit patients through achieving a faster diagnosis. NHS England monitors the use of these diagnostic tests through the Diagnostic Imaging Dataset.

To increase GP awareness of brain tumours in children, in 2012, the Department funded British Medical Journal Learning to provide an e-learning module for GPs on diagnosing osteosarcoma and brain tumours in children. One part of the module supports GPs to understand the main types of brain tumours in children and young people, their common symptom presentations and to recognise when patients need urgent referral, the other deals with communication barriers, and provides potential ways to address these barriers in GP consultations.

In addition to this, since 2005, the Referral Guidelines for Suspected Cancer, published by the National Institute for Health and Care Excellence (NICE) has supported GPs to identify patients with the symptoms of suspected cancer, including brain tumours, and urgently refer them as appropriate. NICE is in the process of updating this guidance to ensure that it reflects the latest evidence and the anticipated publication date for the revised guidelines is May 2015.

I have also recently written to all Health and Wellbeing boards to make them aware of the briefing material developed by the “Headsmart” charity, which aims to increase awareness of the symptoms of brain tumours among parents, schools and health professionals.