Royal assent

The next stage is the detail.

Two weeks later, it is due to return for the third reading, and if approved, it goes to the Royal Assent and then becomes an Act of Parliament.

One theory, these donations are going to be disqualified as the donors have not resided in the UK for 12 months.

In the meantime, reform will spend as much as they can.

And some of those provisions were actually snuck into the Tax Reform Measures Number 2 Bill and passed through Parliament.

So whilst we still have an open consultation, we actually had some of those measures passing through Parliament and receiving Royal Assent, which is something I've not heard of before.

I guess reasonably shocking in that respect.

So that implemented the changes that were sort of colloquially being referred to as the widow's tax, making sure that where your spouse inherits a property, be it from the deceased, their deceased spouse, or because being co-owners, so joint tenants or something like that, means they can kind of keep the new status with respect to the part of the property that they've acquired or the whole property that they've acquired, making sure that they can continue to negatively gear the property going forward or get the 50% discount with respect to the new CGT rules.

hasn't.

Unless I missed the newsflash, has the Royal Assent been given yet?

It's gone through the branches.

But has the Royal Assent been given yet? Not as far as I'm aware.

Neither am

I.

A bill in Jersey recently became law, and the government there says the first medically assisted death could happen on the island late next year.

Similar legislation on the Isle of Man is awaiting Royal Ascent.

This is not the end of the assisted dying campaign in Britain.

Supporters say they'll be back, but it looks like they'll have to wait until after the next general election to have any hope of changing the law.

And I'll come on to why I say that's wrong in a second.

Then January 2026, the Sentencing Act gets royal assent and Section 23 of that Act contains what is called the early release provisions, which applies to existing prisoners.

And so people who are already in prison and were sentenced on a different basis now benefit from the Section 23 provision, which by a statutory instrument is then scheduled to come into force as of this month and more in October.

David Lammy knows, and everybody knows in the MOJ, what this scheme is going to result in.

In the meantime, the National Criminal Justice Board, which is this overarching body that's supposed to coordinate criminal justice reform, I discovered had not met at all in 2026.

The last meeting of the board was on 8 December 2025.

So the clock is now ticking from Royal Assent in January 2026 towards the coming into force of these provisions in September, October and the early release, in inverted commas, of all these existing prisoners.

There's no communication to prepare everybody for this.