Online Safety Act 2023: Repeal
I remind colleagues that if they wish to speak, they should bob—quite a few colleagues are bobbing already, so thank you for that.
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Online Safety Act 2023: Repeal
Before we continue, could I ask that everybody has their phone on silent, please?
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Topical Questions
T3. The Defence Secretary says that this country should get on a war footing, but the UK currently has no comprehensive anti-hypersonic, anti-ballistic missile defence system. Given the threats from Russia and elsewhere and their capabilities, that means that all our constituents, whether they vote Labour or Conservative, are defenceless, and that this country, frankly, is a sitting duck.
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Topical Questions
The Minister for Defence Readiness and Industry said that we would have the defence investment plan in the autumn. The Secretary of State has now told us that they are working flat-out to get it to us by the end of the year. When I was in the Army, we had a saying that two minutes early is three minutes late. Can we just make sure that this lackadaisical approach to punctuality has not spread to the military? Can the Secretary of State confirm that the King’s birthday parade will indeed take place at 11 am on 13 June?
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Online Safety Act 2023: Repeal
It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Sir John, not least because it means that you cannot speak. I think you would happily take up a good hour of the debate talking about the perils and ills of the internet, and how it needs to be shut down, so that is probably for the best.
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Online Safety Act 2023: Repeal
I congratulate the hon. Member for Sunderland Central (Lewis Atkinson) on introducing the debate. He made a particularly excellent contribution to last week’s petition debate on mandatory digital identification; although his party’s leadership may not have thanked him, I am sure his constituents did. He is right that the internet allows unprecedented connection, which is for good, but also for ill. Our job is to balance that inherent tension, while recognising that sometimes there is no balance to be found and that we have to make a choice when it comes to children being served a toxic online diet of extreme content. When we were in government, that choice was the Online Safety Act, about which thousands of petitioners have raised concerns, believing that its breadth and scope are having too restrictive an effect. I have some sympathy with those concerns, because the Act is large and very complex; although it is proving effective in protecting children in many ways, the implementation undoubtedly comes with challenges, whether that is VPN usage or the inadvertent capturing of no to low-risk sites in compliance duties.
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Online Safety Act 2023: Repeal
I agree, and I am interested to hear what the Minister has to say about VPNs—whether they should be age-gated, whether we should look at app store controls so that parents have to consent to children downloading VPN apps, or whether there are other, more effective ways of doing that. The sites that we have talked about may be smaller community forums, or they may be volunteer-run, but they are often mid-size tech companies that do not have the resources that the social media giants have to navigate the legal risks and intricacies of the Act without diverting precious capacity that might otherwise be used to innovate and expand their businesses. I have talked to some of those businesses. They may have one person who can do legal compliance; if they are looking at the next stage of the OSA’s implementation, they may be pulled off other work that is helping to grow the economy. We have to take that very seriously and look into it. A lot of those sites are effectively no risk whatever, and the OSA is probably too burdensome for them. We do not want the Act to stifle our vital tech sector. Concerns have been raised about freedom of speech and user privacy. I can understand those concerns in principle; particularly when age verification first came into place over the summer, there were instances where there was a practical impact and posts were restricted. However, it seems that those early examples have been recycled many times to suggest that the Act is having a wholesale dampening effect on what people feel confident saying online, and I am not sure that that is actually the case. Those concerns are often conflated with other issues, such as the policing of tweets, non-crime hate incidents, the application of legislation such as the Public Order Act 2023, and outrageous cases of state overreach, such as that of Graham Linehan. We must also be mindful of those who seek to exaggerate those concerns for the sake of big tech’s commercial interests. I note the comments that the hon. Member for Oldham West, Chadderton and Royton (Jim McMahon) made about the power that platforms hold. On the other side of the ledger are worries that it remains relatively straightforward for under-18s to access pornography. There is no foolproof way to age-gate the internet. We have to see the Online Safety Act as a first step in a pushback against the wholly unacceptable situation that we witnessed previously. Of course some children seek out material and will continue to do so with determination, but far too many had previously been stumbling across explicit or illegal material by complete accident. Studies that have already been cited today suggest that 41% of children first encountered porn on X, rather than seeking it out. If the Online Safety Act has a material impact on reducing that risk, it will have served its purpose. The hon. Member for Milton Keyneps Central (Emily Darlington) provided some truly shocking statistics and rightly said that we are putting porn back on the top shelf. As she was saying that, I thought back to the advent of magazines such as Zoo and Nuts when I was a teenager. They were seen as having dreadfully explicit content that was far too readily available, but they seem quite quaint when we think about what children can access now. Pornhub reported a 77% reduction in visitors after implementing age verification measures, but it is important to note that the traffic previously going to such sites has not simply disappeared. A chunk of it has shifted to smaller sites that may be riskier because, in some cases, they think they can financially benefit from not implementing age-gating, which is against the law. Those sites need to know that Ofcom fines are coming. No website should assume that it can sidestep its legal duties. The fines are designed to outweigh any short-term commercial advantage gained by ignoring the law. I do not believe that the best way of dealing with these concerns is to repeal the Online Safety Act, and nobody in the Chamber has advocated for that, but it is for us to review it and to work out how to tighten up child safety while being honest about the aspects of the law that need to change. A very long and winding road led to the previous Conservative Government passing the Act in 2023, but it was one of the first markers on internet regulation to be put down globally that said that the status quo—children having easy access to illegal explicit content—simply could not continue. As the hon. Member for Morecambe and Lunesdale (Lizzi Collinge) suggested, we cannot have untrammelled freedom for adults in this space, because that status quo caused significant harm to children. It is right that we now expect more from social media platforms, which were given an opportunity to self-regulate and were found wanting. The Act has driven them to make design changes to help parents, children and teenagers, including Meta’s teen accounts and some aspects of Roblox. Without those protections, more children would encounter harmful content, receive unsolicited contact from adults, and access material that encourages self-harm, eating disorders or even suicide. Families would also continue to face barriers when seeking answers from tech companies following tragedies. Pressure on those companies will continue for as long as we see technology’s pernicious effects on our children, including a chatbot’s recent encouragement of a teenager into suicide. Despite the criticisms levelled at this law, it remains popular with parents. Parents must remain sovereign in how children are raised, and they must have the parenting confidence to deny phones and social media to their children, but no matter how involved or savvy parents are, they need help with these challenges—challenges that creep into the heart of people’s homes in a way that we have not seen before, and find their way to children through what other children may be sharing with them. During the years that the Act was being drawn up, we made a lot of changes, including removing the provisions relating to legal but harmful content in 2022. That is good because, as we can see, Ofcom has an enormous job on its hands dealing with some of the biggest online problems, such as age-gating pornography. Had we taken an expansionist approach, we would now be facing far greater problems around free speech, and Ofcom would have an even heavier role—not to mention workload—as arbiter of the public square. Hon. Members need to think about that carefully: the OSA became a Christmas tree on which everybody hung their niche, individual concerns, and it became unimplementable. If the Labour Government wish to go down a more restrictive route in some of these areas, they have to be mindful of that risk. They need something that can actually be implemented in law and they need to resource the regulator to implement it. Long before the Act was brought in, the status quo was also having a negative impact on journalistic content. There is lots of discussion about freedom of speech, but I recall having discussions as a media Minister with traditional news content providers that were extremely frustrated by west coast content moderators arbitrarily taking down their content with no opportunity to appeal. With this legislation, we introduced must-carry provisions that would give proper news content providers a greater chance of their content being visible, which is important for journalistic credibility and to make sure that we have truth in online spaces. As I have said, the Online Safety Act represents the start of a journey as countries grapple to find the right framework through which adults can retain their freedom on the internet while children are treated as children. This debate is particularly timely as a new social media ban was introduced in Australia last week. My party will be watching that closely, but concerns about social media and mobile phones go far beyond the ability to access porn or illegal content. As a party, the Conservatives are concerned about the impact of social media and smartphone use on children’s mental health, education and social development. I suspect that any hon. Member who has recently been to a school in their constituency will have heard about the challenges to the learning environment, the challenges of the social interactions between children, and the challenges that parents are facing at home, which go way beyond the issue of illegal content. We have also heard other concerns. I liked the way the hon. Member for Worcester (Tom Collins) described it as “a veritable chemistry lab of…psychoactive substances”. He also made some interesting observations about safety and how, as a democracy, we must think very carefully about broader harms. The Act will be statutorily reviewed next year. I would welcome the Minister telling us whether the Government are examining the measures that have been discussed today, including whether GDPR protections on the processing of children’s data might be raised from age 13 to 16. Age-gating also needs attention. Reports of VPN use suggest that children have been circumventing protections, and we must consider whether age-gating should be applied more comprehensively, including to VPN use or via app stores or at device level to close those loopholes. Adults also need to be assured of the privacy preserving nature of the age verification tools that they are using. There are concerns about the volume of sensitive data being collected. As I have described, we also need to ensure that low-risk tech firms are not being disproportionately burdened. They did a huge amount of work before the July phase of Ofcom’s introduction of age verification, and they are worried that they will need to make a further step change for regulatory compliance, given the burden that will place on them. Regulation has to remain proportionate, targeting high-risk sites and services without undermining innovation or our competitive position in tech. We also need to examine, as has been discussed many times today, the emerging technologies such as generative AI and chatbots —as was suggested by the hon. Member for Dewsbury and Batley (Iqbal Mohamed) and the hon. Member for Worcester. The legal position under the OSA is not yet entirely clear, but children are increasingly exposed to AI-generated content, and we need to know if the Act is flexible enough to deal with innovations of that kind. As hon. Members have described today, the Online Safety Act is a necessary first step, but it is only the beginning of a much longer fight to protect childhood. We have to create the space for childhood and adolescence away from screens, with all the richness and stimulation that the real world can bring. Parents ultimately can never cease their vigilance. The internet cannot be made wholly safe, and we cannot be naive about that. Ultimately, parents have to remain the ultimate backstop to make sure that their children are safe online—but they need help. It is our role as legislators to provide some of those tools and that assistance to help children through their childhoods. I hope that we look back at the time before the Online Safety Act and wonder how we ever allowed children to be exposed to the unbridled internet culture that has hitherto been the norm. To return to the opening remarks of the hon. Member for Sunderland Central, the internet has led to the creation of new bonds and a huge multiplication of opportunity, but simultaneously the opportunity for harm. Sometimes we need to make a choice, and while the Online Safety Act is undoubtedly imperfect, the imperative to protect children will always take precedence. If social media platforms are held to greater account, so be it.
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Defence Investment Plan
10. What discussions he has had with service chiefs on the proposed level of spending in the forthcoming defence investment plan.
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Defence Investment Plan
I am a former Chief Secretary to the Treasury, and I have seen reports that service chiefs are drafting letters to the Secretary of State warning of their concerns about whether enough money is going into defence. When the delayed defence investment plan is produced, will it give clarity on when the Government will reach the critical 3% threshold? To be credible, the plan needs to distinguish between the start of the next Parliament, which will be in 2029, and the end of it, which will be in 2034. If the plan does not do that, no one will take the aspiration seriously.
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NHS: Winter Preparedness
The Secretary of State says that the strikes come at a time of maximum danger for the NHS and has called on the junior doctors to call off the strikes. I agree with him, but will he accept at least some responsibility for the second round of strikes on his watch? Last year he conceded a bumper pay deal to the same junior doctors with no strings attached. It is hardly surprising that they judge him a soft touch on pay and have come back for more this year.
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Employment Rights Bill
We are short on time, so I will limit myself to two points. I will start with what my hon. Friend the Member for Ruislip, Northwood and Pinner (David Simmonds) admirably described as the “craven capitulation” of the Liberal Democrats. Just a week ago, the Liberal Democrats were arguing passionately about unions’ abilities to cause strikes, and about the right to guaranteed hours. Then what happened? Five peerages came along. Now they are in favour of those things. It used to be the case with their last Prime Minister, Lloyd George, who famously used to sell peerages for money. Now it seems that the Liberal Democrats sell their principles for peerages.
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Employment Rights Bill
I am grateful for that direction, Madam Deputy Speaker. Let us move to Lords amendment 120N. This is a major new policy. We do not have to argue about whether a £118,000 cap is a good or bad idea. I think the cap is a good idea, but the amendment seeks to clarify the process by which the Government have decided to impose this measure in the Bill. It was not part of the manifesto. It was not part of the Bill or discussed in the Bill Committee. It has just been inserted at the last moment in ping-pong. There has been no risk assessment, no impact assessment, and no consultation. The amendment does not put the Government off course. All it asks the Government to do is, within three months of Royal Assent, “conduct a review of the limit imposed by this section on the amount of the compensation awarded”. That consultation only has to consult employers’ organisations, trade unions—one would think Labour Members would be in favour of that—and “organisations representing employment law practitioners, and such other persons as the Secretary of State considers appropriate.” If the Government choose to implement policy on the hoof, the least they can do is undertake a consultation that they should have carried out—
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Defence Spending: Economic Growth
On behalf of the Opposition, I join you in expressing our total condemnation of the horrific Bondi Beach terrorist attack, Mr Speaker. We must stand united in this House against antisemitism in all its forms. May I also offer our condolences to all affected both at Bondi and at Brown University, and to the family and friends of Lance Corporal George Hooley? We echo the Secretary of State’s sentiments about his service to our country. I echo the question from the hon. Member for North Devon (Ian Roome). It is a very simple and specific question. Will the defence investment plan be published before the rise of the House on Thursday: yes or no?
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Defence Spending: Economic Growth
Is the Secretary of State seriously saying that he does not know his diary for the rest of the week? He could ask one of the other Ministers on the Front Bench, or one of the special advisers or officials. Surely he knows whether later this week—on Tuesday, Wednesday or Thursday—he will be giving the most important defence statement of the year. It is extraordinary that he does not. To remind the House, in June the Secretary of State promised from the Dispatch Box that the defence investment plan would be “completed and published in the autumn.”—[Official Report, 2 June 2025; Vol. 768, c. 63.] It is already late—just like the strategic defence review, the defence industrial strategy and the housing strategy. Does that not illustrate perfectly why the Defence Committee said that when it comes to war readiness, Labour is moving at a “glacial pace”?
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Topical Questions
In May, the Secretary of State said from the Government Dispatch Box that the UK-EU defence pact “opens the door” to the €150 billion EU defence fund. From this Dispatch Box in June, I warned that what the Secretary of State was actually doing was surrendering our precious sovereign fishing grounds without getting a penny in return. Who was right?
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Defence Investment Plan
19. What discussions he has had with service chiefs on the proposed level of spending in the forthcoming defence investment plan.
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Defence Investment Plan
When Labour published the strategic defence review, the independent authors wrote in The Telegraph that the commitment to spending 3% of GDP on defence was “vital” to establishing the affordability of that review. Now the Government’s own service chiefs are voicing their concern over funding. Is the Minister really telling us that he has no idea in what year they will reach 3% and no plan for how they are going to get there?
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NATO Defence Expenditure Target
2. What discussions he has had with the Chancellor of Exchequer on meeting the NATO target of 5% of GDP on defence expenditure.
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NATO Defence Expenditure Target
I am grateful to the Secretary of State for that answer, but it is curious to see what is and is not in the Red Book from the Budget we just had. Page 88 shows in intricate detail just how big the welfare budget will get as a result of the scrapping of the two-child benefit cap, but there is no such analysis anywhere in the Red Book of defence spending. Will he set out clearly at the Dispatch Box when the UK will hit the domestic 3% target, and when we will ultimately get to that 5% target? In which financial year will that be?
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Topical Questions
T5. Given that Germany has lifted its partial arms embargo on Israel, why do the UK Government persist with restrictions on defence export licences to our ally?
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Women Veterans
My constituent Katie has served in the RAF for 25 years. In preparation for her return to civilian life, she secured an MOD rentals tenancy to provide housing stability before she receives her pension next year and can buy a house of her own. At short notice, that tenancy was withdrawn, leaving her and her family facing potential homelessness, in clear violation of the armed forces covenant. Despite repeated appeals and over 28 days of silence from the Ministry of Defence, no resolution has yet been offered. Will the Minister please review this case urgently and the letter I sent to Ministers on 5 December to ensure that female veterans like Katie are properly supported during their transition back to civilian life?
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Employment Rights Bill
Will my hon. Friend give way?
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Employment Rights Bill
I am extremely grateful. My hon. Friend is setting out a powerful case. We are puzzled, because a system designed for ordinary workers that has a sensible cap is now being opened up to the very CEOs who, as has been highlighted, would not have previously used it. We have a Labour party in hock to the unions yet strangely proposing a measure that was not included their manifesto which can only help the rich. What happened to the Labour party?
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Employment Rights Bill
We did not hear it from the Minister, so could the hon. Member please explain the case for removing the cap?
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Employment Rights Bill
On that very point, does the hon. Member believe that it is totally pragmatic to have disregarded her objections to the removal of the cap in return for additional places for the Liberal Democrats in the House of Lords?
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Employment Rights Bill
Labour colleagues shake their heads as my hon. Friend lays out the blindingly obvious. That goes to show why introducing a measure at the last minute during ping-pong is inappropriate and precisely why the House of Lords is right to say that we must consider this fully. It is quite obvious that Labour Members do not want to understand it; they obviously do not understand the implications.
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Employment Rights Bill
Has the Minister conducted an impact assessment? If so, how much does she think this change will cost? How many uncapped awards will be made? These are the kinds of big, important decisions that the other place has concerns about, as do Conservative Members. If she has that evidence, she could put this to bed tonight by simply providing it to us so that we can make an informed decision.
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Employment Rights Bill
I am conscious that we are debating a particular point. Is the hon. Member voting for or against the cap? That is the essence of what we are looking at today.
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Employment Rights Bill
I was listening carefully to the hon. Gentleman, but he tailed off when he was talking about a problem, and it did not quite go through. I think that he was talking about the fact that there would be a delay because of the consultation. In 1999 and 2015 there were consultations on the very issue of a cap. Why have the Government not done that?
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Draft Rehabilitation of Offenders Act 1974 (Exceptions) (Amendment) (England and Wales) Order 2025
It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Ms Lewell. I am grateful to the Minister for setting out the purpose of this statutory instrument. Having reviewed it, the Opposition will not be opposing the instrument this evening. Each amendment is limited in scope and responds to specific gaps that have been clearly identified. One of the clearest areas where that is the case is the provision for self-employed individuals and those employed directly by private individuals. As the explanatory memorandum explains, the final report of the independent inquiry into child sexual abuse recommended enabling self-employed people working in sensitive roles with children to obtain checks against the DBS children’s barred list. I understand that the Government’s subsequent progress update confirmed that, by the end of 2025, self-employed people and those employed by private individuals will be able to access high-level DBS checks. We fully recognise the importance of those recommendations, and I would be grateful if the Minister confirmed whether they are still on track for that. Forgive me if those checks have already been made available, but if they have not, are we on track for the end of the year? At present, an individual carrying out a role within an organisation can be subject to the appropriate enhanced or barred list check, while a self-employed person doing identical work cannot. That inconsistency is neither sensible nor safe. It is also worth recognising that this direction of travel is not new; the previous Conservative Government accepted the principle of the IICSA recommendations and began the process of reviewing the supervision exemption and considering widening access to barred list checks. The changes relating to electronic monitoring contractors are justified and a proportionate response to risk. Staff working with monitoring technology occupy positions of trust, and allowing fuller disclosure checks will help to reassure the public that the system is robust and that those carrying out that important work meet the necessary standards of integrity. Likewise, enabling the Department for Work and Pensions and its contractors to require disclosure of spent convictions for registered healthcare professionals reflects the sensitive nature of the work that those professionals undertake. They are individuals who assess vulnerable claimants, often with access to personal and medical information; it is appropriate that they are subject to the same safeguarding standards expected in the NHS and other comparable roles. Taken together, these changes strike the right balance between supporting rehabilitation and ensuring public protection. They are targeted, proportionate and consistent with public expectations and existing safeguarding frameworks. My questions for the Minister are about the implications for the volume of checks that we might expect as a result of more people being suitable for them, and whether he can update us with important contextual information. In my local area, for example, some people experience significant delays and sometimes wait so long for checks to be completed that job offers fall through. We support these changes, but while they might be well intended and sensible, the Minister is introducing yet more checks into the system, so it is important that he outlines whether there are any issues in the current system—which I think there are—with people getting checks. If he is introducing more, he needs to keep them on a tighter rein. I know that the process is devolved to each local police force, but it would be good if the Minister gave an overview of how well he thinks it is currently performing.
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Draft Rehabilitation of Offenders Act 1974 (Exceptions) (Amendment) (England and Wales) Order 2025
Will the Minister write to me, in conjunction with the Home Office colleagues, with an overview of where he thinks performance is across the different areas?
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Jimmy Lai Conviction
I, too, pay tribute to the bravery of Jimmy Lai and his family. The reality is that we are engaged in a battle over what form of state will dominate in the coming decades: states like ours that try, imperfectly, to balance the rights of individuals and the state, or authoritarian regimes such as China, which want unfettered state power. Those sorts of regimes respond to strength. The Foreign Secretary has talked about how we feel and said that the Government feel upset and angry, but those sorts of regimes respond to strength. Given that, does she agree with me that it would be a disastrous decision to allow the super-embassy to go ahead?
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Defence Spending: Economic Growth
Most of our allies and our industrial competitors have a system of offsetting to support their domestic defence capability, economy and jobs, and traditionally this country has had global by default. When will we see the detail in the defence industrial strategy that states that the Government intend to bring forward a programme of offsetting to match our competitors?
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NHS: Winter Preparedness
Will the Health Secretary ensure we have clarity on advice regarding the use of face masks, particularly where they are mandated? He will be aware that conflicting advice is issued by various agencies, which confuses people and reduces confidence. Will he ensure that advice is rigorously evidence-based?
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Employment Rights Bill
We are addressing the specific issue of the removal of a limit on the cap. Of course, while this will have a big impact on businesses, it will also have a huge impact on our public sector. Large organisations that employ significant numbers of high-paid professionals, such as the NHS, will see their insurance costs driven up significantly by this measure, so it is all the more surprising that no consultation or impact assessment is before the House when we are asked to make the decision this evening. We must reflect on the real-world impact of this measure, alongside the package of measures in a Bill that worthily deserves to be scrapped in its entirety. One of the proudest achievements of the last Conservative Government was that when we left office, youth unemployment was half what we inherited from the previous Labour Government. A huge share of those 4 million new jobs went to younger people. Today, the number of young people not in education, employment or training has hit over 1 million. The Resolution Foundation said, on this issue specifically, that “young people are bearing the brunt of Britain’s jobs downturn”. Most of us will have heard from businesses in our constituencies that all the measures in the Bill are significantly raising the barriers to entry for new workers into the market at a time when there is a double whammy. Our demographics as a country make it much harder to recruit them compared with older, more experienced workers, simply because there are fewer young people in our population. Imposing new measures like this that make it more expensive and harder for young people to get their first foot on the ladder is a dereliction of our duty to our economy. We must not forget that for our young people, many of whom we hope will end up as those high-paid professionals, getting and keeping a job is the thing that is most important in their lives—to their health, their mental wellbeing, their wealth and their long-term life prospects. In addition, it is our economy that pays not just for those people’s wellbeing, but for the public services on which so many other people depend. In conclusion, while the whole Bill deserves to be scrapped—it is shocking to see the craven capitulation of the Liberal Democrats, rather than fighting the corner of British workers—let us at least vote to support this small change that has come from the other place. Let us show that somebody in this Chamber is on the side of jobseekers, wealth creators and those who will create future opportunities for our economy, our country and our people.
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Defence Investment Plan
The NATO Secretary-General, our service chiefs and intelligence leaders have warned repeatedly about the growing risk of conflict with Russia, yet the recent Budget did not reflect that reality. In fact, the MOD is cutting £2.6 billion in-year, and we have discovered this week that it is cutting overseas training just to try to balance the books. When the Minister speaks to service chiefs about the defence investment plan, does he ask them to plan for credible deterrents, or simply to accept that there is no cash behind the Government’s rhetoric?
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Employment Rights Bill
When I look to the other House, across the political divide I see captains of industry—people who have led businesses small and large. Does the hon. Member see any merit in their arguments?
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Industry and Exports (Financial Assistance) Bill
Will the Minister give way?
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Industry and Exports (Financial Assistance) Bill
I thank the Minister. Just on a point of clarification—I am sure that this will be hammered out in Committee—we have heard about the assistance that the Government have given over the past 15 months to UK Steel, Jaguar Land Rover and others, but it is important to talk about the significant cyber element. Jaguar Land Rover was hit by a big cyber-attack, and we saw a step change when the Government stepped in and essentially made British taxpayers the insurance company. Does the Minister see any risk in the Bill, and what message does it send to adversaries such as Russia, which he just mentioned?
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Violence against Women and Girls Strategy
I can see how frustrated the Minister is, and I share her frustration. The Home Affairs Committee stands ready to work constructively with her. I gently say that I can imagine what she would say if she was standing here and I was at the Dispatch Box saying that I will announce the strategy on the last day of term—I do not think she would be terribly happy with me. From talking to organisations that work in the sector, we know that there have been real problems with getting services commissioned because of the uncertainty that the delay has caused. Can she set out what she has been doing as a Minister to reassure commissioners that they can commission services and that the strategy will not block them from doing so, so that these services can continue their great work?