King’s Speech 2026: key legislation for local government

Education for All Bill

This bill is aimed at raising standards in schools and introducing "generational reforms" of the special educational needs (SEND) system.

The bill will:

• Provide early support to children with SEND by legislating to require settings to produce an individual support plan for every child and young person with SEND.
• The role of the SEND tribunal will also be reformed.
• Enable local support by making mainstream settings more inclusive. The Bill will ensure more children and young people receive the right support early on, by delivering more training on SEND and inclusion than ever before. This will be underpinned by a new requirement set out in the SEND Code of Practice, to ensure staff in every nursery, school, and college receive training on SEND and inclusion.
• Fund schools on a “fair and consistent basis”, wherever they are in the country, and requiring schools to pool a portion of their funding for SEND. It will ensure children and young people with the most complex needs receive high quality, consistent support, through new Specialist Provision Packages. It will end the “postcode lottery” for children and young people with Education, Health and Care Plans (EHCPs) by introducing a new national template, and moving from a system of annual reviews to reviews at the end of every key stage for school-age children, with parents able to request an earlier review.

Public Office (Accountability) Bill

This bill is aimed at introducing the Hillsborough Law to bring forward a duty of candour for public servants.

The bill will:

• Create new obligations on public bodies and officials to help investigations to find the truth; providing information and evidence with candour, proactively, and without favouring their own position. This includes a new criminal offence for non-compliance.
• Place public officials under new duties of candour relating to their day-to-day work. These “professional duties of candour” will be set out in mandatory ethical codes - with potential consequences up to and including gross misconduct for those who do not comply.
• Establish clear individual accountability for creating and spreading false narratives – through the creation of the offence of misleading the public.
• Reform the offence of “misconduct in public office” - including a new offence of serious impropriety, and another of breaching a duty to prevent death or serious harm. Both of these offences will come with serious custodial sentences.
• Tackle the "disparity in power between the state and bereaved families at inquests by providing bereaved families with access to non-means tested legal aid for all inquests where a public authority is an interested person, and placing a duty on public authorities to only use legal representation when necessary and proportionate.

Draft Taxi and Private Hire Vehicle Bill

This bill is aimed at strengthening public safety, removing barriers for disabled passengers, and reflect how people travel today, including the use of booking apps.

The bill will:

• Modernise taxi and private hire law for the way people travel today, replacing a "patchwork of outdated, Victorian-era rules" with a single, consistent framework across England.
• Give regulators stronger enforcement powers.
• Improve transparency and information-sharing nationwide by mandating use of a national database of all licensed vehicles, drivers and PHV operators, so licensing authorities can better protect the public and passengers can have greater confidence in the system.
• Deliver more accessible services for disabled passengers, by strengthening existing protections and removing barriers to travel helping ensure people who rely most on taxis and PHV are not left behind.

Representation of the People Bill

This bill is aimed at “bringing British democratic traditions into the modern era” and improving protections for electoral staff and candidates from abuse.

The Bill will:

• Give 16 and 17 year olds the right to vote in all UK elections.
• Expand the law so those who are convicted of intimidating or abusing electoral staff can be disqualified from standing for or holding elected office. It also empowers courts to give tougher sentences to those who abuse candidates, campaigners, elected representatives and electoral staff, and removes the requirement for candidates who are acting as their own election agents to have their home address published on the notice of election agents.
• Broaden the range of ID that can be used at a polling station in Great Britain to allow the use of UK-authorised bank cards.
• Work to test new automated registration systems.
• Introduce tougher rules on political donations.
• Strengthen the role and powers of the Electoral Commission to maximise the impact of reforms to political finance rules.
• Improve the resilience and capacity of the postal voting system, by bringing forward the deadline for candidate nominations; moving the postal vote application deadline earlier; and clarifying key processes to Returning Officers to reduce risk and improve delivery.

Overnight Visitor Levy Bill

This bill is aimed at transferring more power out of Westminster by devolving new revenue raising powers – and has been described by the Government as the "first step in a new era of fiscal devolution" in England.

The bill will:

• Give mayors and potentially other local leaders of Foundation Strategic Authorities the power to introduce a levy to raise and invest money into projects that improve their areas, raise living standards and drive growth".

Social Housing Renewal Bill

This bill is aimed at protecting social housing stock, giving affordable housing providers the “clarity and confidence” needed to build more social homes, and better protecting tenants who are victims of domestic abuse by providing them with greater security and stability.

The bill will:

• Introduce three core objectives: First, to protect much-needed social housing stock and thereby incentivise the building of more social rented homes. Second, to create a fairer system with greater protections for tenants in instances of domestic abuse. Third, to reduce unnecessary bureaucracy and give providers greater regulatory certainty so that they can invest in new social and affordable homes with confidence.
• Measures in the Bill will increase the eligibility requirement for Right to Buy to 10 years, amend percentage discounts to better align with new maximum cash discounts and exempt newly built social housing for 35 years.
• It will also ensure that councils and other potential buyers are notified before social homes are sold to maximise opportunities to retain stock.
• Increase protections for victims of domestic abuse to remain in their property away from their abuser or move to suitable alternative accommodation.
• Repeal unimplemented provisions from previous legislation that the Government said would not have worked in the interests of tenants or providers. These include requirements for local authorities to sell high-value homes, grant flexible (fixed-term) tenancies, and to charge higher income tenants higher rents. It will also reduce bureaucracy for councils by streamlining housing consents.

Remediation Bill

This bill is aimed at speeding up remediation for people living in homes with unsafe cladding.

The Bill will:

• Make construction product manufacturers pay towards fixing the problem they caused, by fixing long-standing gaps in the law and ending years of inaction.
• Introduce a new legal duty to remediate, compelling those responsible for the safety of their buildings, such as freeholders, to identify, assess, and fix their buildings without delay.

Highways (Financing) Bill

This bill is aimed enabling roads to be built at pace by introducing a new financing approach to fund large-scale road schemes.

The bill will:

• Introduce a licence regime to allow private companies, as licence holders, to deliver key road schemes to improve the road network. The Bill will set out the powers and responsibilities of the licence holders.
• Name an independent regulator to provide strong oversight of licence holders, to ensure that the infrastructure built under this model remains well maintained, efficiently managed, and provided at a fair and proportionate cost to users.
• Introduce backstop measures to protect vital publicly used assets managed under the model, helping ensure that the roads remain open even if the private company fails.

Courts Modernisation Bill

This bill is aimed at implementing "significant reforms" to the criminal justice system.

The bill will:

• Remove the right of defendants to elect for a Crown Court trial in cases which can be heard in either a Magistrates’ or a Crown Court (triable either-way cases).
• Extend magistrates’ court sentencing powers up to 18 months for single and multiple triable-either-way offences, with the potential to increase this to 24 months if necessary.
• Replace the automatic right to appeal against a conviction or sentence in magistrates’ courts with a permission stage.
• Repeal the presumption of parental involvement "to ensure courts prioritise the child’s best interests and adopt an open-minded approach, rather than starting from a presumption that parental involvement will further the child’s welfare".
• Reform the office of the Senior President of Tribunals, bringing structural alignment with the courts under the unified leadership of the Lady Chief Justice.

Regulating for Growth Bill

This bill is aimed at reducing the burden of "unnecessary regulation" and making the UK’s regulatory "system fit for the future so that it plays a full role in delivering growth and supporting innovation".

The bill will:

• Strengthen the Growth Duty, elevating consideration of growth in regulatory decision-making without undermining regulators’ core objectives (e.g. on safety or the environment). It will give a list of leading regulators such as Natural England, the Environment Agency, and the Health and Safety Executive (HSE), a clear, statutory mandate to prioritise growth “without undermining their important core functions”.
• Reduce unnecessary risk aversion and ensuring regulatory decisions support investment, infrastructure and market creation. This will be supported by a new statutory power for ministers to issue strategic steers, enabling them to define what growth means in different regulatory contexts, including through regulators enabling innovation. The new strengthened Growth Duty also has additional legal measures such as reporting requirements, to ensure that it has real measurable impact.
• Create ‘sandbox powers’, which will be legal powers to allow existing rules to be temporarily relaxed, under strict controls, to test new products and technologies in real-world settings.

Clean Water Bill

This bill is aimed at strengthening confidence in the water sector, restoring the public’s trust, giving investors the stability to back long-term upgrades, and providing the clarity needed to support economic growth.

The bill will:

• Create a new, independent and integrated water regulator by bringing together the relevant functions of Ofwat, the Drinking Water Inspectorate, the Environment Agency and Natural England.
• Create a stable, long-term planning framework by consolidating existing water industry planning into two core planning frameworks and exploring establishing national water targets. This would give companies, investors, and regulators clear five, 10, and 25 year direction and the potential to reduce duplication and unnecessary administrative burden where planning and reporting are streamlined
• Deliver cleaner rivers, lakes, and seas by providing the legislative tools to ensure targets are ambitious, enabling pre-pipe solutions like sustainable drainage systems to reduce spills and consolidating and strengthening agricultural pollution rules.
• Build long-term resilience into the water system through statutory resilience standards and better asset mapping.
• Strengthen drinking water protection and public health by giving the new regulator stronger enforcement powers and responsibility for convening expert advisory groups to keep drinking water standards world-leading

Source: King's Speech 2026: background briefing notes