On 13 May, King Charles delivered the 2026 King’s Speech, setting out the Labour government’s legislative agenda for the year ahead. 37 bills were announced, weighted toward national security, public service modernisation, energy resilience, and digital infrastructure, against a stated backdrop of a “dangerous and volatile world.” Four bills stand out as worth flagging, covering health data, home ownership, clean power, and digital security. NHS modernisation bill for a single patient record The headline measure is the Single Patient Record (SPR) , accessible via the NHS App. The bill will join up health and social care records, with the SPR targeted first at those receiving maternity and frailty care by 2028 before a wider rollout. Patients will be able to view their own records; clinicians across settings will see a shared view. The bill also abolishes NHS England and transfers its functions to the Department for Health and Social Care, folds Healthwatch England into DHSC, and moves the Health Services Safety and Investigations Body into the Care Quality Commission. ICBs gain a clearer commissioning remit, including for primary care, dentistry, ophthalmology and pharmacy. Is it new? The SPR is the latest in a long line of attempts . The National Programme for IT under Blair attempted a unified record from 2002 and was effectively scrapped by 2011 after years of cost overruns. care.data, the 2014 GP-data-linkage scheme, was abandoned in 2016 over consent and privacy concerns. The General Practice Data for Planning and Research programme was paused in 2021 on similar grounds. Privacy concerns and unclear data-control responsibilities have been the recurring blockers. Reception. Mixed. The King’s Fund called the SPR a potential “gamechanger” for joined-up communication, but warned the abolition of independent patient-voice bodies risks the government “marking its own homework.” Nuffield Trust’s Thea Stein warned of the danger that “the NHS is tied up reorganising itself precisely when it needs to be improving patient care”. Commonhold and leasehold reform bill to end the “feudal” system The bill creates a new legal framework for commonhold: full freehold ownership for flats, without third-party landlords, and bans the use of leasehold for new flats. Ground rents on existing long leases will be capped at £250 per year, falling to a peppercorn rate after 40 years. Forfeiture will be abolished and replaced with a statutory enforcement scheme. The final bill amends the Leasehold and Freehold Reform Act 2024 to make it cheaper and easier for leaseholders to extend their lease or buy their freehold. Is it new? Commonhold has existed in UK law since 2002, but fewer than 20 commonhold schemes have ever been created: the legal framework was unworkable for flats and mortgage lenders wouldn’t lend against it. The Law Commission published a comprehensive reform report in July 2020. It took the All-Party Parliamentary Group on leasehold and commonhold reform until 2017 to persuade Number 10 that the commonhold legislation needed to move from the Justice Department to the Housing Department. The previous government planned to add commonhold to the 2024 Leasehold and Freehold Reform Act but ran out of parliamentary time before the general election. This marks fourteen years of campaigning culminating in legislative commitment. Reception. Leasehold reform campaigners are positive: the Leasehold Knowledge Partnership called it the end of “the third-party parasitical freeholder role.” Housebuilders are cautious about commonhold viability. Institutional freeholders, whose ground-rent income is materially affected, are opposed. Energy independence bill: clean power 2030, with a security framing The bill’s stated objective is to scale up homegrown renewable energy and protect living standards for the long-term, within the government’s clean power 2030 mission , targeting at least 95% clean electricity generation by the end of the decade. Reforms are expected giving households and businesses with solar panels, batteries, electric vehicles and heat pumps a greater role in balancing the electricity grid, with consumers benefiting more directly from periods of surplus renewable generation. Two adjacent bills sit in the same frame: Nuclear Regulation Bill. Implements the recommendations of the Fingleton Review , including a new commission for nuclear regulation and updated safety risk frameworks. The Fingleton Review was published in November 2025 by John Fingleton CBE, lead of the Prime Minister’s Nuclear Regulatory Taskforce. Electricity Generator Levy Bill. Increases the windfall tax on generators from 45% to 55% , and pushes older renewable assets onto fixed-price contracts, intended to break the link between gas and electricity prices (we’ve written about this before). Is it new? The substance is largely continuity. Clean Power 2030 was the headline of Labour’s energy strategy from the 2024 manifesto onwards, with NESO publishing its delivery pathway in late 2024. GB Energy was established in 2024. The Energy Profits Levy (the windfall tax on oil and gas) has existed since May 2022, raised in stages. What is new is the framing : this is energy security and national resilience first, climate second: a clear post-Ukraine, post-Israel-Iran escalation reset. Reception. The Energy and Climate Intelligence Unit said the government “is sticking with clean power as its solution to two energy crises in a matter of years, in line with the International Energy Agency’s recommendations”. Renewables industry broadly supportive of balancing market reform and price decoupling. Generator levy is the contentious piece: investors flag impact on returns and project economics. Cyber security and resilience bill: hardening the digital backbone The bill brings data centres into the scope of the UK’s cybersecurity reporting regime for the first time, treating facilities holding patient and clinical data as essential infrastructure on a par with energy and water networks. The NHS holds records for more than 60 million patients across England alone. Reporting tightens: strict 24-hour and 72-hour reporting requirements, with fines of up to £17 million or 4% of global turnover for non-compliance. Two adjacent bills sit in the same frame: Digital Access to Services Bill. Introduces a non-mandatory, free-to-access digital ID providing secure proof of identity across government services. Fintech voices have welcomed the fraud-prevention use case; privacy commentators have countered that a national digital identity framework “would inevitably become a high-value target for cyber criminals and state-sponsored adversaries alike”. Enhancing Financial Services Bill. Consolidates the Payment Systems Regulator into the FCA. The live question for fraud is what happens to the authorised push payment reimbursement regime, currently with the PSR. Is it new? The Cyber Security and Resilience Bill was first announced in the July 2024 King’s Speech and has been re-introduced after consultation. It builds on the 2018 NIS Regulations (the UK implementation of the EU NIS Directive). The expansion to data centres reflects their designation as Critical National Infrastructure in September 2024. Digital ID has been debated in the UK for over two decades: the Blair government attempted national ID cards from 2003 (scrapped in 2010). The Tony Blair Institute has campaigned for digital ID for years. The shift here is the voluntary positioning: the mandatory framing was dropped after public and political backlash. Reception. Industry broadly supportive of the cyber bill’s clarity but flagging implementation burden. Practitioners argue it “must go beyond traditional measures to create stronger incentives for post-quantum readiness”. On the financial services side, reception is more split. Deloitte notes that “reforms affecting the FOS are most likely to prove controversial because of the perception by some stakeholders that the reforms reduce consumer protections”. Consumer protection groups have raised concerns about specialist payments expertise being diluted in the PSR-FCA merger.