The sweeping review of the rail industry, announced by the Transport Secretary in September, has moved significantly forward with the launch of the call for evidence today (6 December 2018).

Keith Williams, independent chair of the Rail Review and former British Airways chief executive, is inviting evidence from a wide range of stakeholders in all parts of the country, including passenger representatives, businesses, leading thinkers and investors, and local and devolved bodies and governments.

He is travelling across the country visiting cities, towns and regions that depend on rail connections, listening and gathering information that will help inform a transformation of the rail industry to benefit passengers and support a stronger, fairer economy.

Keith Williams said:

Creating a railway for the 21st Century passenger is at the core of this review.

We’re launching a call for evidence and want to hear from passengers, the industry, leading thinkers and investors – and also the cities, towns and regions who depend on their rail connections.

Next year, after forensic investigations and conversations with people across the country, we will deliver a white paper with ambitious proposals for change.

The review will consider ambitious recommendations for rail reform, building on the government’s franchising strategy and bringing track and train closer together to reduce disruption and improve accountability. It will also consider regional partnerships and how we can use innovation to improve services and value for money for passengers.

The government will publish a white paper on the review’s recommendations, with the implementation of reforms planned to start from 2020.

The businesses have come forward in the 6 months since the launch of the Education and Employment Strategy, which set out a series of measures to boost prisoners’ skills while in custody and improve their chances of securing work on release.

Reoffending costs the taxpayer £15 billion each year and evidence shows that ex-offenders in employment are up to 9 percentage points less likely to commit further crime.

A major focus of the strategy is to encourage a culture change within companies so that they see beyond an offender’s conviction to their potential as an employee.

The interested businesses span a range of sectors, including construction and retail, and they could join employers such as Virgin Trains, DHL and Recycling Lives which are among more than 300 around the UK already seeing the benefits of employing those with a criminal record.

Having registered their interest, the businesses will now work with the Ministry of Justice to explore how to take forward their relationship with prisons.

Justice Secretary David Gauke said:

I passionately believe that building up offenders’ skills and helping them into work encourages offenders turn their backs on crime, benefitting them and society as a whole.

I am delighted that so many businesses are recognising the value of giving ex-offenders a second chance and a job — their interest sends a clear message to offenders that if they work hard and behave well in prison then real opportunities await them.

I would encourage more businesses to consider getting involved in our New Futures Network and help ex-offenders into work.

Andy Milner, CEO of Amey, said:

At Amey, we believe in hiring the best people for the job, no matter what their background or history. For us, hiring ex-offenders is not only the right thing to do but it also makes good business sense.

There is a growing skills gap within our industry and within our prison population there is a pool of highly motivated people learning new skills such as engineering, carpentry and plumbing who just need someone to believe in them to help change their lives.

The ‘Passport into Employment’ programme we have in place as part of our prisons maintenance contract together with our waste recycling partnership with Recycling Lives is helping to support men and women to transform their lives and demonstrates our commitment to rehabilitating ex-offenders.

Other achievements since the strategy was launched include:

• Prisons in Yorkshire have secured a £250,000 investment to start a construction academy at HMP Leeds – to equip offenders with valuable skills ahead of release.
• A new body, the New Futures Network, has been established to build partnerships between prisons and employers – filling skills gaps in companies by providing job opportunities for men and women on release from custody.
• More than 160 education providers have signed up to deliver education in prisons, after a new system was put in place. Governors will be running competitions to bring in these new providers from April.

The new construction academy in Yorkshire will offer fully accredited qualifications to prisoners and will be funded by a £250,000 grant.

Offenders who graduate from the academy will help plug the skills gap in the sector – 44% of small and medium house-building businesses claim the shortage of skilled workers is reducing their ability to construct more homes.

The innovative new academy, based at HMP Leeds, is due to open in February 2019 and will benefit 168 participants across 7 prisons in the region each year.

Since the launch of the Education and Employment Strategy in May, a new body, the New Futures Network, has been established to work with employers to generate training and job opportunities.

It has already begun work in 3 areas – Yorkshire, Tees and Wear and Wales – and will be rolled out across England and Wales in 2019.

The Network, launched in October this year, will follow up with the 120-plus businesses and broker partnerships to create more prison workshops, paid placements for serving prisoners and jobs on release.

In November a new system was put in place providing governors with access to education providers from across the country. This has already attracted more than 160 education bodies, businesses and charities, providing courses ranging from construction to life skills and money management.

Notes to editors

• The project to establish the new construction academy will be delivered in partnership with the charity Bounce Back, which already works with HMP Brixton to train prisoners for construction.
• The academy is due to open in February 2019, with prisoners working to get the building itself ready prior to that.
• All skills training will be structured to take into account the average length of stay, average length of sentence, the need for continuity of learning, teaching of soft skills and tailoring the experience to the meet the needs of industry to ensure the best possible opportunity of employment outcomes post release.
• The launch of the Prison Education Dynamic Purchasing System has given governors direct access to a wide variety of educational providers, charities and businesses, to commission services for their prisons. So far more than 160 have signed up. They will be able to begin delivering courses from next April.

Statement by Ambassador Karen Pierce, UK Permanent Representative to the UN, at the Security Council Briefing on Peacebuilding and Sustaining Peace

Wednesday, 5 December

Thank you very much indeed Mr President. Thank you for travelling to be with the Security Council today. And may I join other speakers in also expressing my personal and the British government and Her Majesty the Queen’s condolences on the death of President Bush who I had the honour to meet a number of times. He was indeed a great statesman.

And as you and Minister Faki did Mr President, I think it’s also worth noting once more the passing this year of Kofi Annan, another great statesman who worked very closely with President Bush and both of them had at the heart of what they were trying to achieve everything that this debate is about today. So thank you very much for putting it on our agenda. And thank you to the other ministers for coming to join the Security Council.

I think it’s very good Mr President that we’ve been able to have the benefit of Cote d’Ivoire’s own experience. Too seldom in the Security Council do we hear of successes, so we wish your government well in everything it has achieved and long may it continue. And we salute all the reforms that you have brought in.

Another piece of good news that the Council was able to participate in recently concerned the lifting of sanctions on Eritrea and this success in Africa is very much welcome. I think a number of speakers have drawn attention Mr President to the fact that two thirds of armed conflicts that ended in the early 2000s relapsed within five years. So it’s therefore vital that we remain focused not just on resolving conflicts but on sustaining peace in the long term.

And I’d like to focus in my remarks on three key lessons today:

Firstly, and as other speakers have noted, a political settlement needs to include the full spectrum of society – including women, including the Polish focus on human rights, including what the Dutch minister said about women and girls and education – and all of this is vital if peace is to be sustainable.

We need to be bold in this approach and we recognise that it can often be extremely difficult in the aftermath of a conflict to be magnanimous and to reach out to all sections of society. Nevertheless it is a very critical element. In the British experience from Northern Ireland, we believe that we were able to accommodate the interests of diametrically opposed armed groups in the political process that has brought two decades of peace.

It’s important also that we engage with elites and that we encourage them to give a lead rising above political, ethnic and religious divides and take tough choices for the benefit of all of their citizens. And I think it is all on our minds Mr President that the peace talks in Yemen are about to start and we look to all participants to approach these constructively and in a spirit of compromise.

Secondly post-conflict power structures and institutions need to be fully representative and they need to be legitimate. Fair power structures that broaden inclusion, accountability and transparency over time are more likely to reinforce a sustainable peace. That said there must be a political agreement, and I think we are all aware that in Iraq, Libya and Afghanistan and result power struggles undermined ambitious state and institution building. Syria Mr President becomes even more important in this context. We will not be able to consider providing reconstruction assistance absent of a political settlement.

I think it’s also worth pointing to the virtues of patience. The World Bank estimates that making meaningful improvements to institutions takes a minimum of 10 years. And I think the Peruvian intervention spelled out the vital importance of getting things like infrastructure right. So the conclusion from that is that long term, predictable and coordinated support from the international community as a whole is obviously going to be critical if peace is to last.

Bosnia represents a successful example in this particular context -The success of their transition to a peaceful state over 20 years after the Dayton Accords – this is in part due to the collaboration and support of this Council, the European Union and NATO and many others, including civil society and NGOs. In fact Paddy Ashdown who was the High Representative in Bosnia had three particular lessons for managing the end of a conflict. The first was do the rule of law first. His second rule was have a plan and stick to it. But his third rule was be prepared for it to take a long time. And I think we often approach things in haste Mr President. Obviously we don’t condone backsliding; the key is to keep moving forward but we do need to have patience.

Thirdly we need to ensure that basic needs are provided for in the short term and support economic development in the long term. The provision of basic needs is vital to the alleviation of immediate post-conflict humanitarian needs but also to ensure political processes have the capacity to develop and thrive.

Development itself needs to be inclusive and create widespread benefits to ensure that groups are not inadvertently left behind. The ILO’s Decent Work Agenda and Jobs for Peace and Resilience Programme rightly emphasizes the importance of employment-centred recovery and accessible opportunities for society to grow and for cohesion and this all helps to reinforce the Sustainable Development Goals.

If we wish to ensure that the 2 billion people who live in countries affected by conflict are not trapped in a cycle of violence then we must address instability head on. And it was very good to learn of the African Union’s Agenda 2063 which will clearly have a key role to play in this regard.

Mr President it isn’t possible to touch on all ramifications of this important subject but thank you once again for sharing Cote d’Ivoire experience with the Council and starting a very thorough discussion of this issue.

Thank you Mr President.

The Health and Social Care Secretary Matt Hancock has announced that the 100,000 Genomes Project has reached its goal of sequencing 100,000 whole genomes from NHS patients.

The 100,000 Genomes Project uses whole genome sequencing technology to improve diagnoses and treatments for patients with rare inherited diseases and cancer. It is led by Genomics England and NHS England.

Since the project was launched in 2012 it has delivered life-changing results for patients who have had their genomes sequenced, with 1 in 4 patients with a rare disease receiving a diagnosis for the first time.

Thirteen NHS Genomic Medicine Centres (GMCs) were created to support the project, along with a state-of-the-art sequencing centre and an automated analytics platform to return genome analyses to the NHS.

The UK is the first nation in the world to apply whole genome sequencing at scale in direct healthcare. Genomics can enable doctors to identify those at risk of disease, help prevent it and provide personalised treatments to give patients the best chance of recovery.

To build on the project’s success, in October the Secretary of State set out an ambition to sequence 5 million genomes in the UK over the next 5 years. The health secretary also announced the launch of the NHS Genomic Medicine Service. This will see all seriously ill children and adults with certain rare diseases or cancers offered whole genome sequencing as part of their care from 2019.

Health and Social Care Secretary Matt Hancock said:

Sequencing the 100,000th genome is a major milestone in the route to the healthcare of the future. From Crick and Watson onwards, Britain has led the world in this amazing technology. We do so again today as we map a course to sequencing a million genomes. Understanding the human code on such a scale is part of our mission to provide truly personalised care to help patients live longer, healthier and happier lives.

I’m incredibly excited about the potential of this type of technology to unlock the next generation of treatments, diagnose diseases earlier, save lives and enable patients to take greater control of their own health.

Sir John Chisholm, Chair of Genomics England, said:

At launch the 100,000 Genomes Project was a bold ambition to corral the UK’s renowned skills in genomic science and combine them with the strengths of a truly national health service in order to propel the UK into a global leadership position in population genomics.

With this announcement, that ambition has been achieved. The results of this will be felt for many generations to come as the benefits of genomic medicine in the UK unfold.

Professor Dame Sue Hill, Chief Scientific Officer for England and Senior Responsible Officer for Genomics at NHS England, said:

This achievement has only been possible because of the amazing commitment and contribution of NHS teams across the country and I would like to thank each and every one of them for rising to this challenge and excelling in its delivery.

The results, which will continue to be returned to patients, show how genomic medicine can transform lives, bringing quicker and better diagnoses and increasing the number of patients surviving cancer, and the opportunity now is for the NHS to turn this research into reality by introducing sequencing technology as part of our world-leading NHS Genomic Medicine Service.

The Transport Secretary and Mayor of London have today (5 December 2018) accepted the resignation of Sir Terry Morgan as Chairman of Crossrail Ltd. The Transport Secretary has also accepted his resignation as Chairman of HS2 Ltd.

Sir Terry, who recently joined HS2 Ltd, was Chairman of Crossrail Ltd for almost a decade, guiding the project through construction towards completion.

The government has also announced that Allan Cook CBE has today been appointed as the new Chair of HS2 Ltd. A successor for Sir Terry on Crossrail Ltd will be announced in due course.

Transport Secretary Chris Grayling said:

Sir Terry has been an integral part of Crossrail for almost a decade and I would like to thank him for his dedication and the expertise he brought to the role. I am also grateful to him for his work as chair of HS2 Ltd.

HS2 is the country’s biggest infrastructure project and, with his wealth of experience, Allan Cook CBE is the right person to oversee the project as it progresses towards full construction.

Allan Cook CBE DSc is a chartered engineer with more than 40 years’ international experience in the infrastructure, automotive, aerospace and defence industries. His experience includes serving as Co-Chair of the Defence Growth Partnership, Chair of the High Value Manufacturing Catapult, as a director of JF Lehman and Company, and as a former lead non-executive director for the then-Department of Business, Innovation and Skills under the coalition government. Among his other senior posts, he was also chair of WS Atkins Plc, Leonardo UK, and Deputy Chair of Marshalls Group. He served as the CEO of Cobham Plc from 2000 to 2009.

Allan Cook CBE said:

It is a privilege to be asked to take on this crucial role on UK’s biggest infrastructure project. HS2 will transform Britain through the creation of jobs and skills across UK industry. It will improve connectivity and passenger experience as well as creating value for the UK economy.

HS2 has made impressive progress in the past 18 months – with 7,000 highly skilled people currently working on this project. The regeneration of the West Midlands and Curzon Street in Birmingham are now well underway.

I’m looking forward to working with Mark Thurston, his team and our partners, getting ready for the next few years when we will be making significant progress on building HS2 for the future.

HS2 Ltd continues to work with its supply chain partners ahead of main construction work on Phase 1, and is working to deliver services from London to Birmingham from 2026 in line with the target delivery date.

Crossrail Ltd and TfL will appoint a new chair for the company as the project moves from construction to testing.