The Government are continuing to make progress on delivering their industrial strategy through publication of the response to a consultation on regulatory changes and scheme delivery for the British industrial competitiveness scheme.

BICS is the flagship policy of the industrial strategy that will address Britain’s longstanding competitiveness challenge in manufacturing. The policy will support heavy industry, advanced manufacturing and manufacturing supply chains.

Following the recent consultation, the Government confirm that they will proceed with planned changes to the renewables obligation, capacity market and feed-in tariffs to implement BICS.

The consultation response also confirms key aspects of scheme delivery, including certificate length, application windows, further eligibility requirements and an update on the delivery of the additional payment announced in April. These measures will help ensure that BICS delivers the greatest possible impact for businesses in Great Britain.

The Government will shortly be announcing the launch of an online eligibility checker tool. This simple, free-to-use tool will allow businesses to input basic information and receive an indication of their likely eligibility for BICS. It will be accompanied by comprehensive business guidance.

To support the timely introduction of BICS, legislation will be laid before Parliament in the autumn. Applications will open on 1 October and close on 30 November for year one of the scheme. Eligible businesses will receive support from April 2027, subject to applying within this window.

I encourage hon. Members to engage stakeholders in their constituencies to raise awareness of the British industrial competitiveness scheme and to invite businesses to use the eligibility checker in the coming weeks to assess their likely eligibility and then apply when applications open in October.

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One year ago, this Government published the modern industrial strategy, a 10-year plan to increase business investment, drive economic growth and support high-quality jobs across the United Kingdom. The strategy backs the industries that will define the 21st-century economy and tackles the barriers that have too often held back investment, innovation and growth.

Businesses, trade bodies and investors told us that what they needed most was a long-term plan that provided certainty. They also told us that one of the greatest barriers to growth was not ambition, but friction. In response, we have taken action across planning, infrastructure, energy, skills, access to finance, and regulation to make the UK a better place to start, grow and scale a business.

Today, we are publishing a one-year update on delivery of the industrial strategy, setting out how we have taken co-ordinated action to start addressing these barriers to growth. This includes introducing major planning reforms to accelerate infrastructure delivery, reducing energy costs for thousands of firms, improving access to finance for growing businesses, investing in the skills needed by key industries, and strengthening the support available to companies seeking to start, scale and stay in the United Kingdom. Twelve months on, businesses are beginning to see the benefits of a more joined-up approach to Government, with over £380 billion of private investment commitments secured, more than 155,000 jobs supported, and reforms under way to remove barriers to growth across the economy.

The Industrial Strategy Advisory Council continues to play an important role in advising on delivery of the strategy and maintaining a long-term focus on implementation. In January we announced the appointment of Amelia Gould, Keith Anderson and Dana Strong to the council, and in April confirmed that Clare Barclay would continue to serve as chair. We are now confirming that Aislinn Rice, Dame Diane Coyle, the right hon. Greg Clark, Greg Jackson, Henrik L. Pedersen, Henry G. Overman, Kate Bell, Roy Rickhuss, Tunde Olanrewaju and Dame Nancy Rothwell (deputy chair) will continue to serve as members of the council. Chris Grigg, chair of the National Wealth Fund, and Phil Smith, chair of Skills England, will also continue as ex-officio members.

Supporting growth also means ensuring that regulation works for businesses and investors. Alongside the industrial strategy update, we are reporting on progress under the regulation action plan and introducing a new regulator sponsorship charter and growth goals for regulators, marking a shift from ambition to delivery. Our approach is clear: we are regulating for jobs, growth and investment, ensuring the UK’s regulatory system actively supports economic expansion, innovation and competitiveness.

We committed to reduce the annual administrative burden of regulation by 25% by the end of this Parliament, equivalent to £5.6 billion in savings. We have already identified £2 billion in net annual savings, with £1.5 billion delivered and a further £0.6 billion in progress—we are now over a third of the way to our target.

Alongside reducing burdens, we are enabling innovation. Later this year, we will introduce legislation to create regulatory sandboxes, allowing businesses to test new products and services safely in controlled environments and providing clear pathways to market.

Sandboxes are being developed across key sectors, including AI, life sciences, maritime autonomy and last-mile delivery, helping ensure that the UK s areas of greatest opportunity are also its fastest-moving.

The regulator sponsorship charter and growth goals for regulators will further embed a pro-growth mindset across the regulatory system. This will ensure that regulators actively support innovation, investment and economic expansion alongside their core duties.

This marks a shift towards a more flexible, responsive way of regulating that keeps pace with innovation, rather than relying on fixed rules that can quickly become outdated. It means moving from barriers to pathways, from risk aversion to managed experimentation so that innovation can be tested, refined and scaled in the UK.

One year on, the industrial strategy is beginning to give businesses the certainty and confidence to invest, grow and create jobs. By working in partnership with industry, we are backing the sectors, technologies and places that will drive future prosperity, while building a more resilient economy in an increasingly uncertain world. Regulatory reform supports that wider mission, helping ensure that businesses can bring new ideas to market more quickly and seize the opportunities of the industries of the future. As we enter year two, we will continue to strengthen the conditions for investment and growth across the United Kingdom through the industrial strategy.

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The fifth round of negotiations on an enhanced free trade agreement with Turkey took place in Ankara between 15 and 23 June 2026.

Economic growth is our first mission in Government, and free trade agreements have an important role to play in achieving it. A stronger trade relationship with Turkey can support jobs and prosperity in the UK, with trade between the two totalling £28.4 billion in the four quarters to the end of Q4 2025—an increase of 4.3% from the previous year.

To support this round of negotiations, I travelled to Turkey to meet with the Minister of Trade, Professor Dr Ömer Bolat, and Deputy Minister of Trade, Mustafa Tuzcu.

Negotiations were constructive, with positive progress being made in a number of areas.

Trade in services

Productive discussions were held across a range of technical areas, including digital trade, domestic regulation and telecommunications. The investment session saw valuable exchanges, reflecting the shared ambition and good will between both sides. Particularly strong progress was made in legal services, among other areas. Across sessions, negotiators engaged in detailed text-based discussions, testing areas of alignment, exploring respective levels of ambition, and identifying outstanding issues. Both sides continued to engage productively, building on progress made in previous rounds.

Trade in goods

Negotiations covered a range of market access and regulatory issues, including goods market access and sanitary and phytosanitary measures, along with others. Discussions focused on reviewing respective proposals, testing areas of alignment, and identifying remaining gaps, while maintaining and upholding the UK’s high standards. Both sides reached agreement on modalities for market access offers. These sessions were positive and productive with both sides seeking a high ambition outcome to support businesses and drive progress forward.

Additional areas

Wider cross-cutting discussions covered intellectual property, Government procurement, trade remedies, environment, state-owned enterprises, among others, with intellectual property discussions in particular picking up pace—signalling a growing shared focus on this area. Key themes included strengthening protection and enforcement of intellectual property, as well as environmental co-operation and sustainability.

Concluded chapters

After five rounds of negotiations negotiating, teams have closed 11 chapters, along with agreement on multiple annexes and associated issues. They have made substantial progress towards an agreement that will strengthen bilateral trade and create the enabling environment that can increase UK exports to Turkey, supporting jobs across UK nations and regions.

The UK will only ever sign a trade agreement that aligns with the UK’s national interests, upholding our high standards across a range of sectors.

The sixth round of negotiations is expected to take place in the autumn. Ministers will update Parliament on the progress of discussions with Turkey as negotiations continue.

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Today the Government are publishing the 10-year capital plan for health and social care. Long-term capital under-investment has left the healthcare system starved of resources to function at its fullest, with large parts of the NHS and wider healthcare estate operating in outdated, inefficient and occasionally unsafe infrastructure. This was made clear in Lord Darzi’s report, which estimated a £37 billion shortfall of investment since 2010 compared with international peers.

The 10-year health plan set out the long-term vision for healthcare provision with the three shifts of hospital to community, analogue to digital and sickness to prevention as the core components of a new care model based on the NHS’s founding principles. This capital plan will bring together our commitments into a single coherent framework that is aligned with the 10-year health plan, and ensure infrastructure is the enabler for transforming the NHS over the decade ahead.

The Government are fully embracing this challenge and have already taken steps to address the root causes affecting healthcare delivery. At spending review 2025, the Chancellor provided the largest ever health capital budget, as well as multi-year allocations to 2030 for capital funding streams overall and extended certainty on NHS maintenance budgets to 2035. The priority is now to get on and deliver our priorities within this—making the most of both the budget and the certainty that enables the most strategic investment choices.

We will enable the first shift from hospital to community by reconfiguring the estate so that patients see the appropriate staff in the right place, and we have already invested £102 million in the primary care utilisation and modernisation fund, with a further £200 million over four years to 2030. In addition, we will support the development of neighbourhood health centres, as well as ensuring the secondary care estate can deliver the highest-quality healthcare for the most complex and specialist cases. Maintenance of the estate will extend beyond the current spending review via an investment of £6.75 billion over nine years to target the most critical building repairs through the estates safety fund.

The second shift from analogue to digital will be enabled through over £4.4 billion of capital investment over this spending review period, alongside over £6 billion of revenue funding into technological and digital programmes. This will enable seamless navigation between primary and secondary care such as through the NHS app and single patient record as part of an ambition to make the most digitally accessible healthcare system in the world.

The third shift from sickness to prevention will be achieved through continued investment into research and development as part of DHSC’s non-NHS capital allocation over the course of spending review 2025. This will enable earlier identification of illnesses, allowing for earlier intervention and strengthening system resilience to future threats. This is backed by notable investments including a new state-of-the-art health security campus in Harlow, Essex, that will create 1,600 extra jobs, and up to £1 billion for pandemic preparedness to replenish and expand stockpiles, in line with lessons learned from covid-19. We are also continuing our investment into genomics, pledging more than £650 million over the next five years.

This plan also supports the Government’s wider missions set out in the plan for change of driving economic growth and productivity, supporting the housing agenda, creating new healthy spaces to live and progressing towards net zero and clean energy. We will continue to commit to the NHS’s existing net zero targets and increase its climate resilience through continued setting of standards, showing climate leadership, and working across the system to break down barriers to financing and delivering net zero investments.

The increases in funding will be supported by our capital reforms, to reduce the layers of approval and reduce the time from initial proposal to get spades in the ground. We have already set the additional freedoms and flexibilities through devolving more control over capital budgets to the NHS frontline. Through this plan, we are also placing much greater focus on the outcomes of spend, and on taking steps to continually strengthen our approach to evidence, evaluation and benefits realisation.

The 10-year capital plan provides the clarity needed to do things differently and allow capital to become a true enabler of healthcare reform.

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Today the Department has published the first “New Hospital Programme annual report”, covering the 2025 to 2026 financial year.

This report marks the first full year of delivery following the programme reset and the publication of a costed, phased delivery plan through the NHP plan for implementation in January 2025. It represents an important transition from recovery and stabilisation to sustained delivery under a clearer and more realistic framework.

The report sets out the progress made by the NHP during the last financial year, at both programmatic and scheme level. Over the reporting period, the programme has strengthened its governance and assurance in response to scrutiny from the National Audit Office and Parliament.

It has made progress across hospital schemes in multiple waves, and new delivery approaches have been implemented such as the Hospital 2.0 standardised design model and the Hospital 2.0 Alliance commercial framework, aimed at improving efficiency, increasing market capacity, and enabling faster delivery at scale.

Each scheme within the NHP presents its own complex challenges. Market capacity at all tiers continues to pose potential delivery constraints. The launch of the Hospital 2.0 Alliance is an important step in creating a commercial environment that protects the supply chain and enables concurrent delivery of several large hospital schemes.

Looking ahead to the 2026-27 financial year, the NHP will continue to progress schemes in line with the plan for implementation. For wave 1 schemes, focus will remain on business case development and preparing sites for main construction. The seven RAAC replacement schemes, while having been deemed safe to remain open beyond 2030 with appropriate mitigations in place, remain a priority and will continue to be a key focus for the programme in the financial year 2026-27.

Wave 2 schemes will focus on early works to support scheme readiness and de-risk future delivery, and for schemes in wave 3 there is focus on early pre-construction work to de-risk the delivery of schemes where it is necessary to do so at this stage.

A copy of the report has been placed in the House of Commons Library and is available on www.gov.uk.

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