My noble Friend the Secretary of State for Business, Enterprise and Regulatory Reform has today made the following statement:

The Government are committed to doing everything they can to ensure that appropriate lending to businesses continues. The Chancellor has already announced the creation of UK Financial Investments Ltd which, in respect of those banks recapitalised by Government¹, will monitor compliance with the conditions we set to maintain the availability and active marketing of competitively priced lending to small businesses and homeowners.

I am today hosting the first meeting of the Small Business Finance Forum. This forum, the establishment of which was announced to the House on 24 October, brings together all banks, small business representative organisations and small businesses themselves to have an informed dialogue to discuss and resolve their concerns on business lending.

I am pleased to announce to the House that today we have agreed the establishment of a new monitoring panel on business lending. This panel, made up of senior Government officials from HM Treasury and the Department for Business, Enterprise and Regulatory Reform and representatives of the Bank of England will monitor and enter into a constructive dialogue with individual lenders on the availability, risk and overall cost of lending to small and medium-sized businesses from the five major banks².

These banks have agreed to provide, in strictest confidence, data on the availability, risk and overall cost of lending to the monitoring panel.

The establishment of this panel, and the agreement of the five major lenders to enter into a dialogue with Government on this basis, demonstrates our continuing commitment to ensure that appropriate levels of finance are available for SMEs in the UK.

¹ HBOS, LloydsTSB, RBS

² Barclays, HBOS, HSBC, LloydsTSB and RBS

With the expiry of the call-out order made in November 2007, a new order has been made under Section 54 of the Reserve Forces Act 1996 to enable reservists to continue to be called out into service to support operations in Afghanistan. The new order is effective until 10 November 2009. Reservists continue to make a valuable contribution to operations in that country and some 670 reservists are currently called out in support of the operation.

“Healthy weight: Healthy Living”, published in January 2008, announced a social marketing campaign of £75 million over three years. It now has the committed support from a range of partners from industry to local grass-roots organisations. This is the first coalition of its kind to be brought together by Government to tackle the growing problem of obesity.

Change4Life is a lifestyle revolution which will help families eat well, move more and live longer. Under the banner Change4Life, the Government are aiming to galvanise support from everyone in the country from grass-roots organisations to leading supermarkets and charities.

Before Change4Life was created, the Department undertook detailed research to test out what messages would work with families. That research is published today and shows that:

parents do not recognise that their children are overweight—just 11.5 per cent. of parents with overweight or obese children recognise it;

parents underestimate how much unhealthy food and convenience food they buy as well as overestimating the amount of activity their children do;

only 38 per cent. of adults know that obesity can lead to heart disease and only 6 per cent. know about the link of cancer with being overweight;

many families use snacks as rewards, as fillers during times of boredom and to appease conflict;

parents of older children are more worried about not feeding them enough and the risk of eating disorders such as anorexia; and

lack of knowledge, confidence and skills is the main barrier which stops parents cooking from scratch.

These statistics are a convincing evidence base for the campaign. They demonstrate the need for a change in people’s lifestyles and Change4Life aims to provide the information to enable families to make healthier informed choices.

The brand of Change4Life has now been unveiled and the first partner organisations have revealed their pledges which set out what they plan to do to help people make healthier choices in their lives. In addition to commercial partners, 12,400 local activists have signed up and many more have pledged their support. The pledges of commercial partners are as follows:

Tesco

Tesco stores serve 20 million customers per week and employ over 250,000 people. The organisation is committed to spreading the word on the benefits of a healthy lifestyle among its customers and workforce.

Tesco will also run themed Change4Life promotional activity (Change 4 Life for Less) in store on healthier products, and their customer magazine, which reaches 5 million customers, will include features on the campaign and tips to help customers get healthier.

Tesco will support the campaign with a range of other initiatives. Their store-based Community Champions, staff members dedicated to understanding and linking up with the communities around their stores, will support the project with activities tailored to their own communities, ranging from stalls in store to tell customers about the campaign, to visits to schools.

Asda

Asda serves over 16 million customers a week and employs 165,000 people. Asda and its CEO Andy Bond have committed to supporting Change4Life.

Asda will be actively supporting Change4Life in communications to customers and colleagues, through its trading activity including promotions that encourage healthier eating and the Asda website. Asda will dedicate space to profiling Change4Life in each issue of the Asda magazine, which has a circulation of 3 million and estimated readership of 5.5 million.

Asda have also committed to supporting Bike4Life to promote cycling as a fun, safe activity that all the family can do. Asda CEO, Andy Bond, will cycle from Lands End to John O’Groats in August 2009 to raise £1 million for a new charity that will be set up to make cycling easier and more affordable for families living in deprived communities. This ride will be supported by a strong promotional campaign and events for customers and colleagues in all of Asda’s stores.

Asda’s Sporting Chance, which gives children access to free sports sessions in the school holidays, will be co-branded with Change4Life.

Kellogg’s

Kellogg’s is the UK’s best selling grocery brand.

Kellogg’s will support the campaign by entering into a new funding agreement and programme with ContinYou to expand the highly successful Breakfast Clubs programme under the Breakfast4Life umbrella. This project includes an investment of £100,000 a year for the next three years, and broadening the partnership to include complementary organisations. Kellogg’s and ContinYou aim to develop Breakfast Clubs in the 500 most deprived areas in Britain, and promote universal access to breakfast clubs for every child by 2013.

Kellogg’s will also support the Swim4Life programme in a number of ways. They will be providing an additional £240,000 a year to Swim Active for the next three years. This money will be invested in new Swim Active projects that encourage reluctant swimmers into the water. This new activity, and other activities developed with the ASA, will be co-branded Swim4Life.

Kellogg’s will also co-brand the Fit For Life workplace campaign with Change4Life. This campaign provides Kellogg’s 2,000 employees with nutritional and exercise programmes as part of a FDF/BiTC programme.

Fitness Industry Association

The Fitness Industry Association is committed to getting its 2,500 members to actively promote Change4Life.

The FIA will create a Change4Life promotion for summer 2009, which will involve members opening their doors to new exercisers, free of charge, to try a range of activities.

This is in addition to co-branding their dance and school programmes, and aligning their GO programme for young girls who are turned off sport to the Change4Life.

PepsiCo

PepsiCo as an organisation is committed to supporting Play4Life by producing a PSA print/outdoor advertisement to promote the benefits of active play and increase activity levels, using the wealth of sporting talent contracted to them.

PepsiCo has a portfolio of household brands that is well placed to support Change4Life. Through Tropicana for example, they will extend their partnership with their current breakfast club partner, Magic Breakfast under the Breakfast for Life umbrella.

National Convenience Stores

In November Costcutter, Nisa Mills Group and a number of other retailers are taking part in a Change4Life programme in the North-East to improve the accessibility of fresh fruit and vegetable in low-income areas.

They are investing in new chillers in prominent locations at the front of stores, offering a wider range with strong Change4Life branding, providing tips and hints to customers and staff on how to eat more fruit and vegetables, as well as offering promotions on fruit and veg.

The programme will be rolled out to a total of 120 stores in the North-East by next June.

ITV

ITV is pledging to support the Change4Life movement on-screen and online.

In the new year ITV will be running a campaign to encourage its viewers to pledge to lose weight, eat more healthily and take more exercise.

Launched on ITV1, the campaign will include eight weeks of national and regional activity, tracking viewers’ progress in meeting personal pledges to lead healthier lives.

The Government’s response to the consultation on reform of discrimination law, published on 21 July 2008, gave a commitment that the Government would make a statement after the parliamentary recess setting out a defined programme of work to tackle age discrimination in the health and social care sectors and to help service providers prepare for legislation.

This programme of work will address age equality issues in health and social care. It will inform the implementation of the Equality Bill, planned for next Session, which, subject to parliamentary approval, will ban harmful discrimination on grounds of age against people aged 18 and over, and will also consider non-legislative measures to tackle age discrimination.

The work will be underpinned by the following principles:

age discrimination and unfair treatment based on age have no place in a fair society, which values all its members;

personalisation means that individuals’ needs for health and social care should be on the basis of their individual condition and circumstances, not general assumptions about their age;

services should be differentiated by age only where this is objectively justifiable; and

services for all people should be subject to achieving overall value for money in the use of public funds.

We plan to take the following action:

we shall seek views of stakeholders including professions and service commissioners and providers via the Departmental National Stakeholder Forum, the Social Partnership and the Third Sector Sounding Board, by running a learning event by the end of November 2008. This will raise awareness with a view to setting up an advisory group shortly afterwards;

we shall establish an advisory group to include key stakeholders with an interest in using, providing or commissioning services, training those who provide care, and monitoring action on age equality. The group will have a remit to produce advice to the Government to include:

identifying where age discrimination may occur in health and social care;

setting parameters for obtaining evidence of current policies, practice and service organisation which does or may result in age discrimination;

consideration of possible exceptions to a ban on unjustifiable age discrimination;

consideration of what action the Department and others may need to take to remove unjustifiable age discrimination in the provision, organisation and experience of health and social care; and

consideration of costs, risks and benefits of differentiation of services for different age groups, to inform a compulsory impact assessment.

Departmental officials will support the advisory group which will be extended and supported by:

a reference group of interested organisations and networks to get widest input and debate;

sub-groups for specific areas, for instance mental health and social care could start work on implementation plans in advance of other areas of healthcare for which evidence is not yet available; and

a technical analysts’ sub-group that will give advice on evidence gathering and analysis.

We will publish a summary of the group’s discussions and any advice it produces on the Department’s website and will encourage wider participation in its discussions through stakeholder engagement.

We expect that the advisory group’s work will take 18 months to complete. It will start in December 2008. An early task will be to establish provisional milestones for the phases of work, including on the key services and sectors. Emerging evidence from the work will be used as it becomes available to inform the ongoing development of policy and priorities on the provision and commissioning of health and social care, and this will contribute to discussion on action to address age equality in health and social care.

The advisory group will draw on existing departmental stakeholder networks, and new ones, such as National Voices, as they become available.

The Government will undertake consultation on possible exceptions to the ban on harmful age discrimination—in health and social care—taking account of the findings of the advisory group when it has completed its work.

Throughout this year, the Government have been delivering the biggest shake-up of the immigration system for a generation. We are delivering a stronger border that maximises the use of new technology, a selective Australian-style points system to control migration and a clear expectation that newcomers earn the right to stay.

Already this year, we have made sweeping changes to our border protection, including checking fingerprints before we issue a visa, screening all travellers against watch-lists and introducing a single border force with police-like powers. Last week we laid immigration rules making a number of changes, including to implement the skilled and temporary worker tiers of the points-based system (PBS), simplify the route for business visitors, and to increase the minimum age for obtaining a marriage visa from 18 to 21.

The Government are making an unprecedented investment in skills and training to ensure that UK residents do not lose out to overseas workers or see jobs go abroad because of a lack of skills. We have recently made a number of funding agreements with employers, worth £630 million over three years, to give them greater access to flexible, bespoke training aimed at tackling skills shortages in their sectors. These agreements cover sectors such as catering and hospitality, the nuclear industry and construction.

A fundamental part of the skilled worker tier of the points-based system is the shortage occupation lists, for the United Kingdom and Scotland. These are skilled occupations where the Government consider there are shortages so that it is sensible for vacancies to be filled by migrant workers from outside the European economic area. Migrant workers seeking to come to work in the UK score points if they are applying to work in one of these occupations.

In setting these lists, I have carefully considered the advice from the independent Migration Advisory Committee (MAC), which reported to Government on this matter in September. I am very grateful to the MAC for their independent advice. The lists are shown below.