(Bloomberg) -- King Charles III on Tuesday delivered a speech outlining the legislative agenda planned for the new Parliamentary session by the UK’s first Labour government in 14 years. Prime Minister Keir Starmer is proposing 40 bills, draft bills and repeals — almost double the agenda detailed in the last King’s Speech by the outgoing Conservative government. Below is a summary of the plans:
Budget Responsibility Bill
Labour will enshrine in law a commitment for future significant changes to tax and spending to always be accompanied by an official forecast and scrutiny by the government’s fiscal adviser, the Office for Budget Responsibility. It’s designed to avert the sort of market chaos unleashed by former Tory Prime Minister Liz Truss during her 7-week tenure in 2022.
National Wealth Fund Bill
The legislation will give a permanent statutory footing for a new National Wealth Fund Labour is setting up to help crowd in private investment in industries like ports, green hydrogen and gigafactories to make batteries for electric vehicles. The government is capitalizing the fund with £7.3 billion of public funds, and plans to align the existing British Business Bank and UK Infrastructure Bank under it.
Pension Schemes Bill
Smaller pension pots will be brought together to prevent people losing track of their savings. Workplace schemes will be more easily consolidated into “superfunds” to reduce the risk of people suffering losses if the sponsoring company collapses. There will also be measures to tackle under-performance by some schemes, and encourage more investment in assets such as infrastructure.
Pension schemes will have to offer members products to convert their savings into structures which pay an income in retirement. The measures together are aimed at helping people boost their retirement savings by about £11,000 on average.
Planning and Infrastructure Bill
The proposals include boosting capacity in local planning departments, modernizing planning committees and unlocking more sites for development. Compulsory purchase rules will be changed to ensure compensation paid to landowners is fair but not excessive where important infrastructure such as affordable housing is being delivered.
Employment Rights Bill
A bill to enact a sweeping set of reforms on workers’ rights, including a ban on “exploitative” zero-hours contracts, an end to “fire and rehire” policies and making entitlements including parental leave, sick pay and protection from unfair dismissal available from day one of a person’s employment. Other measures include making flexible working the default for workers and making it unlawful to dismiss a woman who has had a baby for six months after her return to work.
English Devolution Bill
A bill to transfer power from the central Westminster government to England’s regions, giving local leaders greater powers over planning, transport and employment support. Communities will also be given the right to buy valued local assets, including empty shops, pubs and recreational spaces.
Passenger Railway Services Bill
This will allow the government to bring railway franchises back into public ownership as and when contracts with existing operators expire.
Better Buses Bill
Will give local leaders the powers to franchise local bus services, and lift a restriction on creating new publicly-owned bus operators.
Railways Bill
Building on the railway services bill, this legislation will bring management of the rail network and passenger services into a single public body, Great British Railways.
Bank Resolution Bill
Legislation designed to give the Bank of England more options when when responding to small bank failures. It requires the Financial Services Compensation Scheme, the body that ensures depositors are paid when their bank collapses, to provide funds to the BOE upon request and it allows the scheme to recover those funds by levying fees on banks. It also gives the central bank the ability to require a bank that’s failing to issue new shares.
Arbitration Bill
This aims to make the private dispute resolution process more efficient in order to attract litigants to an industry that’s fiercely fought over in the likes of Dubai, Hong Kong and Sweden.
Product Safety and Metrology Bill
Legislation to update product regulation law, ensuring the law can recognize new or updated EU product regulations where appropriate, as well keeping pace with artificial intelligence and addressing modern-day safety issues with products such as e-bikes and lithium batteries. The bill also aims to create a level playing field between the high street and online marketplaces.
Digital Information and Smart Data Bill
The rework of a bill by the outgoing Tories expands national data access for scientists and establishes electronic birth and death registers. It also sets up digital verification services to help with things like moving house, pre-employment checks and buying age-restricted goods. The new data laws — accompanied by strengthened regulation — will allow the sharing of consenting customers’ data between third parties to boost economic growth, as seen with open banking.
High Speed Rail Bill
The government won’t reverse Sunak’s controversial decision to cancel the second phase of High Speed Rail 2 between Manchester and Birmingham. Instead, it will construct and operate rail projects to improve east to west connectivity across the north of England.
Draft Audit Reform and Corporate Governance Bill
External audits and heightened reporting will be mandated for the UK’s largest private companies, through the replacement of the current Financial Reporting Council with a new regulator, the Audit, Reporting and Governance Authority, with oversight of the audit market and powers to sanction company directors for putting forward dodgy accounts.
Great British Energy Bill
The bill sets up a publicly owned energy company, called Great British Energy, capitalized with £8.3 billion of taxpayer money to enable it to own and operate assets in collaboration with the private sector. Its focus will be to help the UK reach its climate goals, including a fully decarbonized power grid by 2030, as well as bringing down energy bills.
The Crown Estate Bill
The Crown Estate, which manages a range of UK assets from shops and offices to the seabed, will be given the power to borrow and broaden its investment remit. The ability to borrow from the Treasury will help accelerate the development of offshore wind farms.
Sustainable Aviation Fuel Bill
This bill will provide revenue certainty to encourage investment in the construction of sustainable aviation fuel plants in the UK, seen by the government as key to decarbonizing the aviation sector.
Water Bill
Seeks to encourage water company bosses to take personal responsibility for sewage spills, giving new powers for the regulator Ofwat to ban bonuses for executives at companies that have failed to meet environmental standards and asking CEOs to agree a “code of conduct.” The bill will also require water companies to install real time monitors at every sewage outlet, with data that can be accessed by regulators.
Border Security, Asylum and Immigration Bill
It will empower a new Border Security Command to stop people smugglers, tackle criminal gangs who are fueling the small boats crisis, and clear the asylum backlog by ending the use of hotels to house migrants.
Crime and Policing Bill
Legislation designed to rebuild neighborhood policing and improve policing standards. It will also introduce new so-called Respect Orders to clamp down on anti-social behavior, a new offense for assaulting shop workers and sanctions for executives of online knife companies that fail to operate within the law.
Terrorism Bill
This bill will require large venues to enact counter terrorism measures to reduce risks of attack to the public. Smaller venues will be expected to notify the regulator about their premises and put in place simple measures like evacuation procedures. It’s dubbed “Martyn’s Law” for Martyn Hett, one of the 22 victims of a terrorist attack on a concert arena in Manchester in 2017.
Victims, Courts and Public Protection Bill
The bill will try to try to reduce massive delays in the court systems by allowing junior prosecutors to work on cases and allowing fast-track rape cases in specialist courts. It will also require offenders to attend sentencing hearings and put more restrictions on sex offenders.
Children’s Wellbeing Bill
Legislation to provide for free breakfast clubs in every primary school and limit the number of branded items of uniform a school requires. It will also strengthen child protection and safeguarding arrangements, require all schools to teach the national curriculum and expand the schools inspection system.
Skills England Bill
The establishment of a new body aiming to simplify the skills system.
Renters’ Rights Bill
Will reform the lettings market, including a commitment to abolish so-called no-fault, or Section 21 evictions. The bill aims to empower tenants to challenge unfair rent increases, and introduce new rules ending the practice of rental bidding wars by landlords and letting agents. It will also includes provisions on pets, improving poor-quality homes and fixing serious hazards and make it illegal for landlords to discriminate against tenants with children or receiving benefits.
Football Governance Bill
Legacy legislation from the outgoing Conservative government to establish an independent football regulator earlier this year. It will oversee the English Premier League and lower divisions, protecting smaller clubs from financial ruin, requiring fan approval for key decisions and preventing bigger teams from joining breakaway leagues.
Draft Leasehold and Commonhold Reform Bill
Designed to boost leaseholders’ rights to extend their lease and buy their freehold, while also restricting the sale of new leasehold flats. The legislation will also aim to protect leaseholders against losing their homes to freeholders for breaching lease agreements. It will increase regulation of ground rents for existing leaseholders to protect them from unaffordable costs.
Draft Equality Bill
This legislation will make large companies with 250 or more employees publish their ethnicity and disability pay gaps, alongside the information they currently report about gender pay disparities. The bill will also put into law the right to equal pay for ethnic minorities and disabled people, making it easier for them to bring forward claims if they have been underpaid.
Draft Conversion Practices Bill
This bill will ban practices that aim to change someone’s sexual orientation or gender identity that aren’t currently covered by existing legislation.
Tobacco and Vapes Bill
Legislation to gradually phase out the sale of cigarettes was promised by the outgoing Tories, but hadn’t completed its legislative passage when Parliament was dissolved for the election. Labour is reintroducing it, with the core provision that children born after Jan. 1, 2009 will never be able to be sold cigarettes legally in the UK – effectively raising the legal age of purchase by one year, every year. The legislation will also crack down on youth vaping, with rules to reduce the appeal and availability of the products to children.
Mental Health Bill
This bill modernizes the original legislation from 1983, tightening the criteria under which people can be detained under the Mental Health Act, in particular people with learning disabilities and autistic people.
Hillsborough Law
This bill places a legal duty of candor on public servants and authorities. It’s named for the Hillsborough disaster of 1989, a fatal crush at a football ground in Sheffield, which was the subject of a cover-up.
Armed Forces Commissioner Bill
This bill establishes an Armed Forces Commissioner, to act as a champion for service personnel and their families and with powers to investigate issues impacting on the lives of service personnel.
Northern Ireland Legacy Legislation
This bill will repeal one aspect of the outgoing Conservative government’s Legacy Act, which granted an effective amnesty to anyone who killed during the Troubles in Northern Ireland. It will repeal the ‘conditional immunity’ scheme, which was found to be incompatible with human rights law, but falls short of Labour’s manifesto promise of repealing the Legacy Act altogether, instead promising further legislation after consultation with NI political parties.
House of Lords Bill
This bill will remove the right of hereditary peers to sit and vote in the House of Lords.
Cyber Security and Resilience Bill
The bill updates the UK’s existing cyber security laws, bringing them up to speed with the European Union’s, to give give regulators more oversight and resources to address attacks on digital services and supply chains. It will also mandate more government reporting if companies are hit with ransomware attacks.
Commonwealth Parliamentary Association and International Committee of the Red Cross Bill
This bill will allow the British government to treat the Commonwealth Parliamentary Association (CPA) and the International Committee of the Red Cross in a similar way to other international organizations, allowing them to continue operating fully in Britain.
Lords Spiritual (Women) Act 2015 (Extension) Bill
This bill will extend a 2015 bill, allowing female bishops to enter the House of Lords sooner in an effort to increase their representation in the second chamber.
Holocaust Memorial Bill
This bill, originally introduced by the Conservatives but not yet made law, will provide public money for a national Holocaust Memorial and Learning Centre to be built near the Houses of Parliament.
--With assistance from Jack Sidders, Katherine Griffiths, Katharine Gemmell, Jeremy Hodges, Sabah Meddings, Jenny Surane, Ashleigh Furlong, Damian Shepherd, Shelley Robinson, Jessica Shankleman, Olivia Konotey-Ahulu, Isabella Ward, Eamon Akil Farhat and William Mathis.
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