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Major bills and policies post-Queen's Speech

The Queen’s Speech doesn’t contain the type of high-profile announcements we’ve come to expect following an election. Julian McCrae says this is a good thing.

With 27 bills, today’s Queen’s Speech is roughly the same size as many of its post-election predecessors. However, in terms of substance, it is heavily focused on Brexit. The Repeal Bill, immigration, customs, farming – all these bills will take time and effort to pass. In contrast, the other bills are more workman-like, with few of the big initiatives that might have been expected from a Conservative government that won a large majority.

This is probably a good thing: Brexit will inevitable take up huge amounts of political capital and official resources. It seems that, by voting for a hung parliament, the electorate has achieved the prioritisation that our political parties failed to do when they wrote their manifestos.

We’ve updated our tracker of major government legislation and policy commitments following today's Queen's Speech.

Major bills

As well as the Brexit bills, the Queen’s Speech also reintroduced some of the bills that did not make it through Parliament before the election. However, reforms to prisons and changes to local government finance appear to have been abandoned.

Major bills tracker

Major policies

The Queen’s Speech provided greater clarity on government's policy priorities. The expansion of grammar schools appears to be dropped and there is no mention of further devolution to areas of England. Reforms to the school funding formula and the creation of an industrial strategy are continuing, though the details remain sketchy. The status of many of the proposed welfare cuts will probably become clear during the next few days of parliamentary debate.

We will continue to update these tables over the course of Parliament.

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