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Showing every spoken contribution, including 12,832 under 12 words. Hide short remarks
I thank my hon. Friend for that question and all the campaigning she does on this issue. Our modern service framework will transform palliative care by basing it on strategic commissioning. That will enable us to tackle rising demand, identify patients much earlier, and ensure that quality of care no longer depends on someone’s postcode. I would of course be happy to meet her and Baroness Finlay to discuss that further.
Dementia is a vital issue, and we are of course committed to creating a national care service. Baroness Casey’s independent commission will set out recommendations to deliver that. She recently made recommendations in her speech at the Nuffield Trust, and we are already implementing those, including the creation of a dementia tzar to push forward all those issues, in terms of both psychosocial care and clinical research.
I have discussed this issue with my hon. Friend and I know he feels very strongly about it. I would be delighted to meet him to follow up. It sounds as if some progress is being made, but we need to ensure we get this sorted.
With permission, Mr Speaker, I would like to make a short statement to update the House on tomorrow’s business. The business for tomorrow is now: Wednesday 15 July—A general debate on Iran—[Interruption.]
The general debate on Iran will be followed by a motion to approve a statutory instrument relating to national security. The business for the remainder of the week is unchanged. Thursday 16 July—The Sir David Amess summer Adjournment debate. The subject of which has been determined by the Backbench Business Committee. The House will rise for the summer recess at the conclusion of business on Thursday 16 July and return on Tuesday 1 September. I will make a further business statement on Thursday.
If I may, I will introduce some facts into the situation. I appreciate the frustration of Members when business is changed at short notice and when debates are postponed, but they will appreciate the importance of the House being able to discuss the escalating and fast-moving situation in the middle east before the recess. The right hon. Gentleman, who knows that I hold him in high regard, may want to take away the word “distastefully” and have another think about that. What is distasteful is the crisis erupting once again in the middle east. This is an opportunity to update the House, and for Members to give their views on this matter at the earliest opportunity. The right hon. Gentleman reads out a motion that, he tells us, was to be tabled for tomorrow. I have to say that that is the first I have heard of the motion; no such motion was tabled for the Opposition day tomorrow. We did not see the words of the motion. A decision was made on whether the House should debate an unfolding international crisis. The right hon. Gentleman talks about what might happen on Monday. He had the opportunity yesterday to raise the question of whether the future Prime Minister would come to the House on Monday. Others raised that issue, but he did not.
The right hon. Gentleman might have raised it in the Daily Mail, but he did not raise it in the business statement yesterday, unlike others across the House. As for his suggestion that there should be a statement tomorrow, I remind him that if the business tomorrow was as he asks for it to be, there would be no statement. We do not have statements on Opposition days.
I hope to be able to confirm that in due course, but my hon. Friend is not far off.
The reality is that if a new Administration is formed on Monday, it will take some time to get that Administration into place. As I said yesterday, there are no plans to change the recess dates; those dates were set for the convenience of Members, to enable them to plan ahead. The work of the Government will continue through the recess, and I am sure that once the next Prime Minister is in place, he will come to the House, following recess, to update it on his plans.
I absolutely welcome many of the Conservative hon. and right hon. Gentlemen who are present, because we do not often see them in this place. Mr Speaker, it tells you something about the state of the modern-day Conservative party when its Members can turn out en masse for this statement, but not for debate on some of the big issues of the day.
The right hon. Gentleman was a very distinguished Chief Whip, but I fear that he is looking back at when he served in that role with rose-tinted spectacles. I remember both what we did to his party, and what it did to us. Opposition days are not set in stone, in the way that he is suggesting. Had we known what the motions were, that might have informed the debate on this decision, but I remind the House that there is a crisis escalating across the middle east. As for the future Prime Minister, the work of the Government will continue through the recess, and once the Prime Minister is in place, they will come to the House at the earliest opportunity following the recess.
The right hon. Gentleman—who, again, was a very distinguished Chief Whip—might well agree with the former Chief Whip sitting next to him, but that does not make them right. I am not sure that the right hon. Gentleman is correct about what happened once a date was agreed, but if he is, that was because of the right hon. Gentleman’s decency in using the usual channels in that way. Perhaps there otherwise would have been a greater degree of uncertainty. As I have said, when the new Prime Minister is in place, he will come to the House at the earliest opportunity, following recess, and update the House.
As I recall, Boris Johnson was appointed before the summer recess, and there was time for him to make a statement. If I am incorrect, I apologise, but I am confident that was the case. The right hon. Lady raises an interesting question about whether tomorrow not being an Opposition day creates space for statements. I will take that question away and think about it.
I am not sure that it is in the right hon. Lady’s interest for us to debate her time as Chief Whip. I agree that this is unusual, and it is not a decision that has been taken lightly, but I point out to her and to Opposition Members that the situation in the middle east is unusual. We could well be in the midst of a greater conflagration in that region. She talks about a crisis in this place; she is suggesting that scrutinising the Prime Minister is more important than the crisis that is unfolding in the middle east. She is a shadow Foreign Office Minister. I find that statement incredible.
The right hon. Gentleman is a very distinguished Member of this House, but I do think that the Opposition are talking lightly about what is unfolding in the middle east. This Government have brought statements and debates about Iran to the Floor of the House, but the Opposition are suggesting that nothing that is happening out there is sufficient to merit a debate tomorrow, before the recess, in which the Government can set out their position, and hon. and right hon. Members can set out their views and inform the Government. I think that this is the right way to go about it. If there is need for a recall of the House during the recess to discuss this or any other matter, that will be considered in the usual way.
I am not seeking to usurp that. What I am saying is that I have also been in this place for the past 25 years, to jog the hon. Gentleman’s memory, and it has happened. It does happen on occasion. [Hon. Members: “When?”] Look, I cannot give the hon. Gentleman the dates off the top of my head, but I am absolutely confident that it happened. It happened during his Government—the Government whom he supported. It happened, and I think the record will demonstrate that. This is a highly unusual situation. We are heading towards a recess; the House needs an opportunity to discuss this situation further, and that is what I am seeking to provide.
I will not get into the disdain that the hon. Gentleman’s Government, of whom he was a firm supporter, showed for this House, because we simply do not have time. As I have said, when the new Prime Minister is in place, he will come to this House and set out his plans for the future. I will not try to speak for the hon. Gentleman, whom I hold in equally high regard, about what his constituents think, but if he thinks they are not concerned about the situation in the middle east, our brave servicemen and women in the region and the economic impact of what is happening, he needs to go and talk to them.
I am sure that when the Prime Minister is in place, he will be coming to this House at the earliest opportunity following recess, and he will set that out. [Interruption.] Let me just answer the right hon. Gentleman’s question. I expect that when Ministers get up tomorrow to open or to respond to the debate they will set out Government policy. I do not expect that policy to change, even though the Administration might change. The Government will be setting out the plans for the summer. Even if we have a different Prime Minister and a different Administration, I am not sure that the policy will change in the way that the right hon. Gentleman seems to be suggesting.
I am grateful to the right hon. Gentleman for informing those on the Government Benches what the other topic was going to be for the Opposition day debate. [Interruption.] I am standing at the Dispatch Box, and Mr Speaker knows the importance I put on Ministers telling the absolute truth when they stand here. I was totally unaware until the right hon. Gentleman just told us—[Interruption.] No, I was totally unaware of the topic, not just the wording. That illustrates his point about the usual channels, because the usual channels, funnily enough, are a two-way process. It is about the Opposition saying to the Government, “This is what we are going to raise”, and then making sure that the debate rises to that, because the Government are informed in sufficient time. If he has a problem with how the usual channels are working, he might want to talk to his side.
I just point out gently to the hon. Lady that I have already said that the Government will continue during the recess. I expect that decisions and announcements will be made, and there was never going to be an opportunity for every new or existing Secretary of State to be brought to this House to answer questions. That is what we will do when the House reconvenes in September. I am sure that those Secretaries of State and the new Prime Minister will want to set out the Government’s plans at the earliest opportunity.
Again, the work of the Government will continue through the recess. The Prime Minister will make a statement to the House at the earliest opportunity. I am sure the right hon. Gentleman did not mean to do so, but he must not downplay what is happening in and around Iran. If he wants to talk about embarrassing performances, let me gently remind him of what he said from the Dispatch Box as a Minister. He might want to turn around to his right hon. Friend the Member for Aldridge-Brownhills (Wendy Morton), the former Chief Whip, and apologise: because of the mess he made on that day, she lost her job.
I thank the hon. Lady for reminding us what tomorrow was going to be about, because we did not know. [Interruption.] Well, we might have known tomorrow, but we certainly did not know today. [Interruption.] That is the point, actually, because if the Opposition wanted to set up something that the hon. Lady says is so important, why was no motion tabled to set out what the debates would be? It is all right for the Conservatives to prepare for that, apparently. [Interruption.] If that is the case, it is irrelevant. I am talking about a situation that is erupting once again in the middle east. People who are listening to or watching this debate will be doing so with a degree of incredulity, seeing the Conservatives preferring to go down a route of playing some weird political game while the middle east is on the brink of conflagration.
As I have said before, and I say again, when the new Prime Minister is in place he will come and make a statement to the House, and set out his plans on those and other matters. The hon. Gentleman has raised the issue of taxation—[Interruption.] Hon. Members might want to listen to this, because it answers a question that they have asked before and to which I now have an answer. The universal credit vote was blocked on 7 September 2021 by Jacob Rees-Mogg, who scrapped an Opposition day in order to vote for a national insurance rise.
That is because on the day the Opposition were suggesting my right hon. Friend should come here and make that statement he will be putting together a new Administration—presumably appointing a new Cabinet, and then a new Administration. He will be setting out—[Interruption.] If Members want to scrutinise an Administration, they should at least provide an opportunity for the Prime Minister and the Administration to be in place. However, that is not the reason why tomorrow’s business is being altered. Tomorrow’s business is being altered because we are on the verge of a conflagration, and a decision was made without knowledge of what the motions would to be for tomorrow. A decision was made that it was appropriate for the House to consider that matter, rather than the motions that were yet to be tabled.
I am slightly alarmed by the constant references to the respect in which I am held. I think today may constitute a seminal moment in that regard. This is not a binary issue. It is about deciding, with a relative shortness of time given that the House has voted for the recess to start on Thursday, what we believe should be the priority for the House to discuss. Should it be the conflagration in the middle east, or motions that we had yet to see?
The hon. Gentleman’s first point was that it happened to us, or we did it. I understand, because I would have been angry at the time. I can assure the House that I would have been very angry, and I understand the anger on the Opposition Benches. What I am saying, however, is that the decision is a choice between an issue relating to the international situation, which we need to discuss before the recess, and motions that we were yet to see. As for writing to or otherwise contacting my right hon. Friend the Member for Makerfield, I assure the hon. Gentleman that my right hon. Friend will know that the business for tomorrow has changed, and he will now know what the topic is, and if he wishes to come here to make his views plain on that particular issue—or if any other Member wishes to do so—that is a matter for my right hon. Friend.
As I have said, the new Prime Minister will wish to come to this place, and, on the points that the hon. Lady has raised, he will want to answer questions; but let me give her a different scenario for what tomorrow might have looked like if it had been an Opposition day. We could have had a motion which, perhaps, the whole House could have got behind, about the dangerous international situation—[Interruption.] We could have done that, because we could have risen to the occasion. But what we got—the shadow Leader of the House read it out—was a party political motion. We did not know that, but it turns out to be proven—[Interruption.] Let me be clear: we did not know the wording of the motion. We did not know what that was. But let me just say this. I do not appear to be so all the time, but I am always optimistic. Sometimes I expect Opposition parties to use Opposition days to rise to the occasion. Unfortunately, however, I am disappointed yet again.
I do not agree with the hon. Gentleman at all. The work of the Government will continue throughout the recess. What the Government will set out tomorrow is our position on the situation in the middle east. If, heaven forbid, there is a need to recall Parliament or indeed we return to this matter in September, even with a new Prime Minister, I do not expect there to be a major difference in that regard. The hon. Gentleman knows that this is a matter of the highest importance to our constituents. [Interruption.] There is no statement today because we are changing the business for tomorrow to give Members on both sides of the House the opportunity to make their case, perhaps in an extended way, rather than simply in a statement. That is what this important issue tomorrow deserves.
I think the hon. Gentleman is making a bid for a role that does not exist but could be created: the shadow Minister for clichés. As I have said, the new Prime Minister will come to this House and set out his plans, but we deemed the crisis unfolding across the middle east to be of sufficient priority to change tomorrow’s business. I apologise that that is the case. Nobody wanted to do it, but that is what the importance of the situation demanded. I am sorry if the Opposition cannot get their head around that.
Further to that point of order, Mr Speaker. I just want to thank the hon. Gentleman for making my point for me. He said—[Interruption.] No, he said that the Opposition have until the House rises to put down the—[Interruption.] I have not disputed that; he is simply confirming that when we made this decision, that was not clear. We did not know that.
No, we did not. The decision was therefore taken to go with the situation in Iran, rather than hang around and wait for what the Opposition might come up with. [Interruption.]
Every week in my surgeries I hear about the consequences of Thames Water’s failures. An elderly widowed constituent was left without running water after it failed and botched the installation of a water meter, and she was forced to shell out hundreds of pounds on an emergency plumber to remedy the situation. Will the Minister confirm that she understands the anger of constituents like mine with regard to Thames Water and its continued failing? Will she confirm that she will keep all measures under review?
Will my hon. Friend give way?
My hon. Friend is most welcome. I am grateful for all the amendments that the Government have tabled, but I remain concerned that the current civil legal aid rate is £40 an hour. She has referred to security-vetted counsel. Is it likely that security-vetted counsel will be prepared to work for £40 an hour, when those of us who have done legal aid work know that, frankly, half the work that we do is unremunerated?
The people who lead these inquiries are leading public figures and have usually held significant judicial office. Is the hon. Member honestly suggesting that they are going to be successfully pressured by people who want to destroy the British state?
I join my many colleagues in paying tribute to the Hillsborough families—those in the Gallery today, and those who, for very understandable reasons, felt that they could not be here. Your quest for justice is truly inspirational to all of us, and I thank you so very much for your perseverance and everything you have done. I do not doubt that it will make the country a better place. Many people have raised concerns about the duty of candour in this legislation, and its application to the security services. I am sure that when the right hon. and learned Member for Kenilworth and Southam (Sir Jeremy Wright) raised this issue in the Chamber, he did so in good faith, but no one who has raised those concerns has been able to point to any case in which the existing law protecting the security services and the secret information that they hold has actually failed, or to any problems resulting from the existing arrangements. Those concerns seem to be entirely hypothetical. Giving the security services a huge carve-out from the duty of candour when there were known problems with, for example, the evidence given to the inquiry on the Manchester Arena bombing seems completely unsustainable and unreasonable. There is literally no evidence to suggest that this Bill presents any risk to national security. I join my colleagues in saying that if there were evidence to suggest that the existing arrangements had ever failed us, many of us would think again about the drafting of this Bill, as it has been presented by the Government. We would all put the country first, but I cannot see anything that should prevent this law from going ahead as drafted. It is so important to get to the truth, and I hope that the duty of candour will help to move things forward significantly. We owe it to the Hillsborough families, and the many families affected by the many other disasters that we sadly hear about too often in this place, to ask the other question: what comes next? That is why I rise to speak in support of new clauses 5 and 6, tabled by my hon. Friend the Member for Hammersmith and Chiswick (Andy Slaughter), through which he calls for a national oversight mechanism that follows up on the actions taken by public authorities in response to the conclusions and recommendations of inquests and inquiries. We must get to the truth, and we must have recommendations on how to avoid future catastrophes, disasters and unnecessary risk, but we then have to do something to stop those things happening again. At the moment, prevention of future death reports and inquiry reports are all too often not followed up—or not followed up consistently across the board. All too often, including after the Ockenden report and the maternity scandals, systemic change has not followed from inquiry recommendations, despite the considerable resources and effort put in by individuals to improve systems. We think about justice for the Hillsborough families, the Grenfell families and many other families who have sadly lost loved ones in terrible circumstances, but we must make sure that we bring into play the mechanisms that ensure proper follow-up after all these disasters. We must follow through on inquiry outcomes, and ensure that the right mechanisms are in place. I thank very much everyone who has worked to get us to where we are today—the many families, but also the Members of Parliament who have worked across party and for a great deal of time on bringing this legislation forward. Let us keep this work going.
I know that older and vulnerable populations are often supported by naval clubs, particularly in coastal areas, but also across the country. In West Bromwich, unfortunately, our naval club, which is well used by older veterans, is set to close. I have been campaigning hard to try to save it and will work with everyone to try to do that. Does my hon. Friend agree that community groups such as naval clubs are very important in tackling the health inequalities, deprivation and isolation issues he is talking about today? [Sir Alec Shelbrooke in the Chair]
I am very grateful to the Government for all they have done to improve the NHS. On the different models of GPs, I have a local NHS trust chain of GPs called Your Health Partnership, some of which, particularly in Oakham, have struggled to provide the right care for communities. Luckily, the Oakham surgery and its staff have done a good job to improve services. Could the Government look carefully at the different types of models for GPs to ensure good care for all constituents across the country?
I beg to move, That this House has considered isolation and hidden deprivation in coastal communities. What a stupendous pleasure it is to serve under your incredible chairship, Mr Vickers. With so much discussion in recent weeks about the north-south divide, I thought that this debate would be the perfect opportunity to bring colleagues from coastal communities together in a time-honoured parliamentary tradition of comparing notes on who has been most overlooked for funding. While that is a joke, it makes a serious point: communities like mine often feel isolated, not just from funding and opportunity, but from the national conversation. In recent years, the challenges facing the Isle of Wight have rarely made headlines or shaped the political agenda. That does not make them any less real or important to those of us who live there. What is great about securing this debate is that we can highlight in glorious technicolour the deprivation faced by coastal communities, and how that is simply not seen as urgent, visible or politically fashionable to champion by those meant to represent us. I am therefore pleased to have secured the debate and am encouraged to see so many colleagues from coastal communities across the length and breadth of the country coming together to champion the British coast. One of the biggest challenges I have faced since being elected in 2024 has been convincing policymakers that the Isle of Wight deserves not simply Government attention, but the same level of support and intervention as that of other communities facing similar levels of deprivation, poor education outcomes and lower life expectancy. Often, the island’s challenges are treated as serious enough to be acknowledged, but not urgent enough for Government intervention. I believe, however, that deprivation and isolation in places such as the Isle of Wight have reached a point where we can no longer pretend that the challenges are a hidden or unknown phenomenon. The evidence has been there for years and the experiences of local people speak for themselves. As a 2024 report from the London School of Economics argued, many of the persistent challenges facing seaside communities are driven by, in part, “a striking degree of complacency and indifference.” As Professor Chris Whitty said in his 2021 report into the health of coastal areas, even after adjusting for age and deprivation, “there remains a ‘coastal excess’ of disease”, otherwise referred to as the coastal effect. Without falling into the trap of reeling off statistics for the sake of it, I want to highlight a few examples that show exactly why the issue demands greater attention, in particular on the Isle of Wight. It is isolated by the Solent and we are the only English constituencies with only one method of transport on and off, which is privately operated. With 85% of the island classified as rural, delivering services becomes that much more difficult. We have the second highest level of educational deprivation in the south of England, a population whose average age is 11 years higher than the national average, and child poverty rates that continue to sit about 4% above the national average. Taken together, those figures demonstrate a community with clear and pressing needs, but one whose deprivation is too often obscured by neighbouring affluence, leaving it overlooked by the very funding formulas designed to help those who need them the most. I know that it has become something of a running joke that, along with my hon. Friend the Member for Isle of Wight East (Joe Robertson), I mention ferry travel in almost every speech or intervention I make, but I ask colleagues to imagine what it would be like regularly to pay between £200 and as much as £500 to get to the next county—so to travel from Derby to Nottingham or Southampton to Portsmouth, they would need to find that sort of money. For the island, that is not a hypothetical question; it is a reality. During the Isle of Wight festival a few weeks ago, the cost of a return car ferry rose to over £500, due to dynamic pricing. For most people, a journey with a maximum distance of 12 miles would be a routine trip. For islanders, it can mean a bill larger than many people’s weekly pay packet, simply to reach the mainland and to access the services that many others take for granted. When we consider that islanders earn, on average, £5,000 a year less than their mainland counterparts, yet still rely on the same highly expensive ferries to access specialist hospital appointments, visit family and friends, pursue educational opportunities or simply enjoy the freedom to travel, the scale of our isolation becomes much clearer.
The hon. Member, my neighbour, is correct. He will not be surprised to know that I have already raised the issue at least once, if not several times, with the potential incoming Prime Minister. It is not just islanders’ wallets that are impacted, but our council budgets, public services and ultimately the sustainability of the island. Earlier this year, the fair funding review left the Isle of Wight council facing a £13 million a year funding shortfall, despite the additional costs and challenges I have already described. If that does not demonstrate that current funding formulas are failing places like ours, I do not know what does. There is nothing fair about a funding review that overlooks the additional costs of island life and then expects local services to deliver the same or more with significantly less. The truth is that being an island or a coastal area comes with unavoidable costs. Even when positive changes are made nationally, they often take longer to reach us, if they reach us at all. Research undertaken by the University of Portsmouth has identified an island factor: the unavoidable additional costs associated with delivering services on the Isle of Wight. The study found that our island status creates extra costs through self-sufficiency, dislocation and what it termed the “island premium”, estimating an added cost of £380 per resident every year, but costing the Isle of Wight council at least £23 million a year extra just to stand still when compared with a similar-sized authority on the mainland. That is coupled with our deprivation, which is often hidden in plain sight. Unlike in some parts of the country where deprivation is concentrated in large urban areas, our challenges are widely dispersed across the island. Areas that experience significant levels of child poverty, poorer health outcomes and educational disadvantage sit directly alongside communities that are comparatively affluent and rank far more favourably in the Government’s indices of deprivation. That phenomenon has been described by academics as “nested deprivation”, where pockets of deep need exist in areas that appear on average to be doing relatively well. The consequence is that deprivation can be masked by neighbouring prosperity. That helps to explain but not justify how the Isle of Wight’s two constituencies can rank among the most deprived and left behind in the country on some measures, yet still miss out on funding opportunities such as Pride in Place. In other words, our deprivation is not hidden because it does not exist; it is hidden because it sits behind postcard views, nostalgia and pockets of affluence, fuelled by second-home ownership that can distort the reality. Such deprivation makes the challenges already facing the country much harder to deal with on the island. Delivering special educational needs and disabilities provision on the island or in a coastal area brings additional challenges, from recruiting and retaining specialist staff to ensuring that there are enough specialist places available. Unlike many mainland communities, families do not have the same range of nearby alternatives when local provision is stretched, and accessing support off the island can mean significant additional cost and disruption. With an ageing and often isolated population, the healthcare inequalities highlighted by Professor Chris Whitty in his 2021 report on coastal communities ring particularly true on the Isle of Wight, where we continue to see higher than average rates of heart disease, diabetes, cancer and dementia, all while patients must travel across the Solent to access specialist treatments such as radiotherapy and chemotherapy.