Churches Legal Advisory Service (CLAS)

CLAS: King's Speech, 17 July 2024

In the King's Speech today, the following announcements on the new Government's legislative programme were made, which may be of interest to members:

Border Security, Asylum and Immigration Bill: inter alia, “to modernise the asylum and immigration system, establishing a new Border Security Command and delivering enhanced counter terror powers to tackle organised immigration crime”
Children’s Wellbeing Bill: “to raise standards in education and promote children’s wellbeing” by, inter alia, “keeping children safe, happy and rooted in their communities and schools by strengthening multi-agency child protection and safeguarding arrangements, requiring free breakfast clubs in every primary school and introducing legislation to limit the number of branded items of uniform and PE kits that a school can require”.
Draft Conversion Practices Bill: “to ban conversion practices”; however, the Government is clear that “any ban must not cover legitimate psychological support, treatment, or non-directive counselling. It must also respect the important role that teachers, religious leaders, parents and carers can have in supporting those exploring their sexual orientation or gender identity”
Draft Equality (Race and Disability) Bill: will enshrine in law the full right to equal pay for ethnic minorities and disabled people and introduce mandatory ethnicity and disability pay reporting for larger employers (those with 250+ employees)
Draft Leasehold and Commonhold Reform Bill: will implement the provisions of the Leasehold and Freehold Reform Act 2024 and enact the remaining Law Commission recommendations on leasehold enfranchisement and the Right to Manage, tackle unregulated and unaffordable ground rents and remove the threat of forfeiture as a means of ensuring compliance with a lease agreement.
Employment Rights Bill: “to introduce a new deal for working people to ban exploitative practices and enhance employment rights” – inter alia, banning exploitative zero-hour contracts, ending ‘Fire and Rehire’ and ‘Fire and Replace’, and making parental leave, sick pay and protection from unfair dismissal available from day 1.
English Devolution Bill: to give new powers to metro mayors and combined authorities, which “will support local growth plans that bring economic benefit to communities”.
Mental Health Bill: “to modernise the Mental Health Act so it is fit for the twenty-first century”: it “takes forward the vast majority of Professor Sir Simon Wessley’s 2017 recommendations for legislative reform and includes a wide range of changes to shift the balance of power from the system to the patient”.
Pension Schemes Bill: “to increase the amount available for pension savers” and prevent people from “losing track of their pension pots through the consolidation of Defined Contribution individual deferred small pension pots”.
Planning and Infrastructure Bill: will introduce changes to the planning system “to accelerate the delivery of high-quality infrastructure and housing”, by “streamlining the delivery process for critical infrastructure” and “further reforming compulsory purchase compensation rules to ensure that compensation paid to landowners is fair but not excessive”.
Renters’ Rights Bill: “to give greater rights and protections to people renting their homes, including ending no fault evictions and reforming grounds for possession”.
Terrorism (Protection of Premises) Bill: will require venues and local authorities to take steps to prepare for the possibility of a terror attack. The proposals in the accompanying notes suggest that, as in the Bill which fell in the last Parliament, there will be “standard” and “enhanced” tiers of premises, with a fairly light-touch approach to the former
Lords Spiritual (Women) Act 2015 (Extension) Bill: extends the provisions of the 2015 Act for a further period (unspecified) to ensure that female bishops enter the House of Lords sooner than they normally would.

Removing the VAT exemption on private schools and the proposal for a new Council of the Nations and Regions were both mentioned in the King's Speech, but no accompanying draft legislation was published. We assume that the removal of the VAT exemption will be included in the next Finance Bill.