What’s in the Queen’s Speech? Five key announcements
Today’s Queen’s Speech outlined more than 20 different pieces of legislation the government will look to implement over the next session of parliament.
The Queen delivered the government-written speech in a stripped back affair this afternoon, just days after the Conservatives made significant gains in last week’s “super Thursday elections”.
City A.M. outlined five key announcements.
Levelling up agenda
One of the key items in the speech was a promise to “level up opportunities across all parts of the United Kingdom, supporting jobs, businesses and economic growth and addressing the impact of the pandemic on public services”.
This is a part of Johnson’s promise in the 2019 election to provide more economic opportunities and wealth to areas north of London.
The government has planned a £4.8bn “Levelling Up Fund” to invest in infrastructure and jobs, a £830m “Future High Streets Fund” and the creation of another eight freeports in different regions which will see taxes slashed for some companies.
Government briefing documents alongside the speech also outlined more than £27bn of investment into A-roads and a “massive programme of rail investment across the North and the Midlands”.
There will also be a Skills and Post-16 Education Bill that will aim to “support a lifetime skills guarantee to enable flexible access to high quality education and training”.
Voter ID laws
The Queen said a suite of new government legislation “will strengthen and renew democracy and the constitution”, including “to ensure the integrity of elections”.
The Electoral Integrity Bill will force people show identification, which is already required in Northern Ireland, at polling stations across the country.
The government said in this would “give voters confidence that their vote is theirs, and theirs alone, by tackling electoral fraud”.
The new measure has been labelled by Labour as way to disenfranchise young and ethnic minority voters who are most likely to not have an official ID and are less likely to vote Tory.
The government says the measure had not decreased voter participation in Northern Ireland since being introduced in 1993.
Planning reform
The speech also included a promise to bring forward “laws to modernise the planning system, so that more homes can be built, will be brought forward”.
This will happen through the Planning Bill, which the government says will “create a simpler, faster and more modern planning system to replace the current one that dates back to 1947”.
This will be done by providing faster procedures for local development plans and to reform the planning system to allow more new homes to be built on undeveloped land.
Dom Cummings’ Aria agency
The speech also confirmed the creation of the Dominic Cummings’ pet project.
The new high risk-high reward Advanced Research and Invention Agency (Aria) will come to fruition in the next session of parliament, after business secretary Kwasi Kwarteng green lit the £800m project earlier this year.
The government said Aria will be given “broad powers to take an innovative approach to research funding, and a mandate for higher tolerance for failure when pursuing high-risk research”.
Aria is based on the US’ Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (Darpa), which has overseen the creation of experimental military and civilian technologies.
Cummings said at a Science and Technology Committee two months ago that Aria should be run by four or five people that have complete control over decision making and have “good taste in scientific ideas and scientific researches”.
Social care
The speech also included a pledge that “proposals on social care reform will be brought forward”, after Johnson said on his election as party leader in 2019 that he would fix “the crisis in social care once and for all”.
However, there were no details on how this would happen in documents sent out to accompany the speech.
Successive governments over the past 20 years have promised to improve the social care system, with very little success.