What Britain's parties say and do in public, recorded from the source.
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Labour Party
Latest entry 10 Nov 2026
Conservative and Unionist Party
Latest entry 10 Nov 2026
Liberal Democrats
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Reform UK
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Green Party
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Plaid Cymru
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Showing every spoken contribution, including 12,868 under 12 words. Hide short remarks
No, we are not going to pause our development of solar power—it is essential to get bills down for families and get us off the rollercoaster of fossil fuels. We take safety incredibly seriously; the Energy Minister has met the National Fire Chiefs Council and is working assiduously on these issues, and I am sure he would be happy to meet the hon. Lady.
I agree with my hon. Friend. He puts it very well. Our renewables auctions have resulted in enough power to power the equivalent of 23 million homes. That is significantly cheaper than building new gas-fired power stations, which is what the shadow Secretary of State wants to do; I am old enough to remember when she was in favour of clean energy—but never mind. The Under-Secretary of State for Energy Security and Net Zero, my hon. Friend the Member for Leeds North West (Katie White), mentioned London Climate Action Week, and what is so striking is that countries around the world are drawing the same lesson: that we need to electrify and get off the fossil fuel rollercoaster.
What is he on, Mr Speaker? To be clear, even in the most ambitious scenarios, our plans for solar in 2030 would use 0.6% of agricultural land; I am happy to repeat that. I do not know what makey-uppy nonsense the shadow Minister is producing. The wider issue is that the Conservatives complain about energy bills, and energy bills are too high, but we have the cheapest form of power available—solar power—and they say no to it. They want to keep us hooked on fossil fuels, and we saw the impact of that with the Iran war and the Russia-Ukraine crisis. I think the Conservatives have got to go back to the drawing board.
In the two years since July 2024, this Government have secured renewable power for the equivalent of 23 million homes, invested in the biggest nuclear building programme in half a century, started to deliver the biggest investment in warm homes in our country’s history, taken £150 off energy bills and shown global climate leadership. I am proud that we are delivering on our mission to make Britain a clean energy superpower, so that we get lower bills and good jobs, and protect future generations.
I appreciate the hon. Gentleman’s question, because the situation facing families who use heating oil has been significant since the Iran war started. That is why we made money available, including to the Scottish Government, to help families in particular hardship. We have also increased the help available through the boiler upgrade scheme for those families using heating oil. I continue to discuss what more we can do with colleagues across Government.
We will look at all suggestions, including my hon. Friend’s. We do look at cumulative impact in the planning process, and the strategic spatial energy plan will be very important. Members have raised this before. It is very important to understand the concerns of local people when planning where infrastructure is to be built.
I am incredibly proud of our record over the last two years. This Government have delivered the biggest investment in warm homes in our history, broken records on renewables, and secured over £100 billion of private sector investment. We have the biggest nuclear-building programme in a generation, and a plan for 400,000 new clean energy jobs. All the shadow Secretary of State had to show for her time in office was the trashing of our clean energy industries; there was no nuclear power delivered, and we had the worst cost of living crisis in generations.
The truth is that we all face a choice on the future of our energy system. Do we learn the lessons of history—of two fossil-fuel crises in five years, as a result of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and the Iran war—and say that we want energy sovereignty with clean, home-grown power that we control, or do we not? We have made our choice.
The hon. Gentleman makes a really important point. I am happy to give that undertaking. We want to see the opportunities around SMRs throughout the United Kingdom. I am happy to discuss that with him.
The hon. Gentleman raises an important issue. The way to get bills down is to drive for clean energy, which the Conservatives oppose. Why have bills gone up in the last few months? Because of the Iran war. [Interruption.] They know that they have gone up because of the Iran war—
My hon. Friend raises an important issue about the treatment of businesses. I am sure that there is more to do on brokers. We will look at his suggestions.
I think the hon. Member is talking not just about what will happen at Wylfa, but all the other routes to market that are happening, including advanced modular reactors and other technology. I can honestly say to him that we have massive enthusiasm from a whole range of private sector companies, and we are driving that forward at pace.
The framework provided by having a clear sense of mission, through the Clean Power 2030 action plan and the Climate Change Act 2008, is crucial. That is why we have the £100 billion of private investment. We are going to carry on doing it.
We think the contracts for difference model is a good one. We want to get on with opening the auction, and we continue to look at all these issues.
That is something we take incredibly seriously. We are an energy policy and industrial policy Department. We have made progress on that and are determined to make further progress.
Yes. We love Cornwall; we love the potential of what it can provide in terms of floating wind. My hon. Friend states her case incredibly well.
My hon. Friend makes an incredibly important point. We will write to her with a good answer.
Will the right hon. Member give way on that point?
I thank the right hon. Gentleman, who has been taking a lot of interventions. Does he acknowledge that we are here to think about those not-so-good employers, not just the good ones? That is what the Employment Rights Act is about. At the weekend I met an employer who had minor concerns about what it was going to mean for him, but he said that, by and large, he was already doing a lot of this stuff. It is not about the good employers; it is about the not-so-good ones.
What we are talking about is not so much the safety of staff when they come forward, but the safety of patients, and whether we genuinely believe that the proposed modification to the arrangement will improve patient safety. That is the underlying point. Although the safety of staff is important, it is the safety of patients that we must bear in mind.
It is a pleasure to serve under your chairship, Ms Lewell. The question is what will make patients more safe. Does incorporating the department that looks at safety into the organisation that inspects the services help? It might. Safety is not an add-on; safety must be at the heart of absolutely everything that we do. Safety is not a separate matter; it depends on those who work in our NHS and all of us all the time. That must be the culture. Let us not rely so much on inspections and litigations. At a time when we are unable to find jobs for newly qualified midwives, we spend more on obstetric litigation and compensation than we spend on obstetrics. I applaud what our Government are trying to do and their intention to improve things.
I listened carefully to what the Minister said about a change of culture. A change of culture can certainly happen. In the surgical world, we used to bring patients into the operating theatre, check that the patient was on the operating table and do the operation. Sometimes, we operated on the wrong patient and on the wrong part of the body. We then introduced the World Health Organisation checklist, which checked absolutely everything before we started. It was a complete change of culture in the operating department. We made sure that we had the right prosthesis, the right patient and that we were operating on the right part of the patient. Now, the WHO checklist is a universally adopted process. I am absolutely sure that the culture in the health service can change.
I rise to speak to new clause 74 on behalf of my hon. Friend the Member for Rugby (John Slinger), who is in the Gallery, and also to some extent on behalf of my predecessor, Jo Churchill, who was the Member of Parliament for Bury St Edmunds and Stowmarket before me, and was also a Health Minister. This is about Healthwatch and the patient voice. The amendment tabled by my hon. Friend the Member for Rugby suggests that the Secretary of State create an impact report within 12 months of the Bill passing through Parliament to assess what the impact of the amalgamation or integration of the functions of Healthwatch into the ICB would in fact be, and in particular look at the effectiveness of the complaints procedure and the way in which complaints were responded to. The theme is also that which we spoke about this morning on whether an organisation can successfully interrogate itself. I believe that with the appropriate safeguards it probably could, but I do think that the suggestion that there ought to be a formal report on the impact within 12 months is something worth considering.
Is it the hon. Member’s belief that that is something that Healthwatch would have been able to deal with, support and prevent?
rose—
I am grateful to the hon. Member for taking my intervention and I am sorry that it is late in the afternoon. The question we are faced with is this: what is the best system to serve our patients? If the best system turns out to be a system that is procured from another country, would he in principle always object to that?
It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mr Efford. We meet at a moment when the global aid system is under extraordinary pressure. I thank the right hon. Member for Dumfriesshire, Clydesdale and Tweeddale (David Mundell) for securing this incredibly important debate. Current projections suggest that cuts to international aid could contribute to as many as 14 million additional deaths by 2030, including 4.5 million children under the age of five. That is the human cost of dismantling the world aid architecture at speed. The United Kingdom is not alone in reducing aid spending—the United States, France, Germany and Canada are all scaling back their commitments—but that does not make our choices less significant; it makes them more significant. When every major donor retreats at the same time, there is no one left to step into the gap, and yet the challenges we face today do not stop at national borders. Conflict, climate change, forced displacement, pandemics and antimicrobial resistance affect us all. Investment overseas is increasingly an investment in our own security and prosperity here at home. Global health provides perhaps the clearest example of why this matters. Viruses do not stop at passport control. The first line of defence against the next pandemic is not at Heathrow or Dover, it is in strong public health systems thousands of miles away. Our national health service and the health security of people across Britain depend on a global health system that works effectively for everyone. That is why I welcome aspects of the Government’s approach. I welcome the decision to provide protection for key multilateral health organisations, and I am proud that the UK has made ambitious commitments to the Global Fund and to Gavi, the Vaccine Alliance—institutions with a proven ability to deliver vaccines at scale and to reach communities that fragmented programmes often cannot. The Government are also right to recognise that countries want autonomy, not dependency, and that our role should be to help to build resilient health systems that countries themselves can sustain and own. That is the right long-term objective.
I agree 100%. My hon. Friend the Member for Doncaster East and the Isle of Axholme (Lee Pitcher) has already talked about his role in the water, sanitation and hygiene all-party parliamentary group. Access to water is an absolutely essential health determinant. Partnership and resilience building are incredibly important, but they cannot be the whole answer. A strategy designed to strengthen systems over many years does little for a clinic that is closing next month. Communities facing the loss of essential services are not reassured by a long-term theory of change, much as we love that in the development arena. They are worried about whether medicines will be available, whether healthcare workers will be paid and whether the lights will stay on. Withdrawal is fast, capacity building is slow, and people are falling through that gap. That is why, to be honest, the decision to withdraw support from the Global Polio Eradication Initiative and the Pandemic Fund is really quite disappointing. The Government’s own impact assessment warns that these choices increase the risk of disease outbreaks. We are closer than ever to eradicating polio, a disease that has blighted generations of children, and yet, potentially because of cuts to official development assistance, we are stepping back from that goal. I urge us not to. I am equally concerned about the dismantling of the Fleming Fund. Antimicrobial resistance may sound a little abstract, but it is not a distant or theoretical threat. Just ask anybody what they think will happen if their antibiotics do not work when they need them. It is one of the most pressing public health challenges that we face. The effectiveness of antibiotics underpins modern medicine and protects countless lives every day. Our NHS depends on those medicines continuing to work. Recent outbreaks of serious infectious diseases remind us just how much rests upon them. As we have just been reminded, health does not exist in isolation. Clean water, good nutrition and quality education are health interventions by another name. For example, children whose mothers have received a secondary education are far more likely to be fully vaccinated. Although I welcome the prioritisation of healthcare spending, we cannot ignore the reality that in practice many of the programmes being cut are health programmes, too. Nowhere is that more evident than in Africa. The continent bears about a quarter of the world’s disease burden while possessing only 3% of the global health workforce, yet bilateral aid to Africa is facing a 56% reduction—the steepest regional cut across the entire ODA budget. Multilateral institutions will of course continue to play an essential role, but we should not be so naive as to believe that they can absorb cuts of that scale without consequences. The consequences are already becoming clear. In Malawi, an estimated 250,000 adolescents could lose access to family planning services each year. In Somalia, fewer women, girls and boys will be able to access lifesaving healthcare because of these decisions. Behind every statistic is a human being whose opportunities, health and future are being diminished. There is also a broader question of fairness. The NHS benefits enormously from healthcare workers who trained overseas before coming here to serve patients across the United Kingdom, which we sometimes forget in our conversations about immigration. It has been estimated that the UK has saved about £14 billion by relying on health professionals educated and trained elsewhere, and many of the countries from which those workers come are themselves grappling with fragile and understaffed health systems. That is not a windfall; it creates a responsibility. We have a duty to invest back into the health systems from which we have drawn so much expertise, not to withdraw support at the very moment that those systems are under increasing strain. The lessons of Ebola, covid-19 and antimicrobial resistance are ultimately the same: we cannot isolate ourselves from global threats, and the cheapest crisis is the one that we prevent. Ministers have described these decisions as exceptional measures taken in difficult fiscal circumstances. I recognise those pressures, but we have a responsibility to keep people safe, including people here in the United Kingdom. We are weakening the protection of some of the world’s most vulnerable communities, and in doing so we are undermining our own health security here in Britain. For those reasons, I urge my Government to look again. We need a credible, serious and urgent plan to restore aid spending, not only because it is the right thing to do but because it is in our national interest.
rose—
My hon. Friend is correct. I recently met constituents in my office who are deeply concerned about the internet blackout. They are unable to find out if their families are okay and have told me some horrendous stories, including—this is unverified—that a two-year-old child has been shot. Their major concerns are the food shortages and lack of medicines that can go in. Does my hon. Friend agree that the blockades must stop immediately so that children can survive?
Some of my constituents have been labelled terrorists because they have spoken out and are now unable to travel to visit their families, even if the blockade should end. Does my hon. Friend agree that that type of draconian abuse of the law must stop and that my constituents should not be labelled as terrorists just for speaking out?
rose—
I thank my hon. Friend for his work as chair of the APPG on Kashmir. In Stoke-on-Trent North, I too have been contacted by residents about people who live on both sides of the line of control, and they are seriously worried. We have had reports of shortages of food, medical supplies and baby milk. Does my hon. Friend agree that the UK Government must do all they can to open all possible humanitarian routes?
I congratulate the hon. Gentleman on securing this important debate. My constituents have similar concerns about the impact of fraud, especially on vulnerable people. I have spoken to the noble Lord Hanson, who has been developing the strategy, to outline those concerns. Does the hon. Gentleman agree that the direction in the new UK fraud strategy, the expansion of the “Stop! Think Fraud” campaign and the promotion of proactive policing are good things that should be welcomed?
It is, as ever, a pleasure to see you in the Chair, Ms Lewell. Healthwatch was established, at least in part, as a response to the Mid Staffs scandal. Mid Staffs came up three times in our evidence sessions, and the hon. Member for Winchester mentioned it just now. That scandal matters to everyone, but it has a particular resonance for my role in Parliament. Many of my constituents were harmed by the failing at Mid Staffs. I was born in that hospital, and I speak as a Staffordshire MP. None of us should ever forget what happened or allow it to be swept aside without examining it. There were a great many failings at Mid Staffs over a long period. Oversight was just not in the room when decisions were being made. Staffordshire county council’s health and care overview and scrutiny committee clearly did not do that job. The Francis report stated: “The arrangements for public and patient involvement, and for local government scrutiny in Stafford, were a conspicuous failure.” The report recommended some changes to ensure that Healthwatch, which was in the process of being set up at the time, was funded properly. In that light, the framing of this debate is important and timely. Healthwatch has been going for well over a decade. It is right that we now examine its impact, as it is a significant part of patient voice within the NHS. Despite the very best efforts of a great many hard-working staff and an army of committed volunteers across the country, the quality of local healthwatch organisations is pretty changeable. Over the past few weeks, I have spoken with right hon. and hon. Members from across the House. The feedback that I have received has ranged from, “My local healthwatch team is brilliant— I work with them really closely and they have really helped out with a huge amount; they deliver great things in my constituency” all the way to, “I have some pretty significant concerns about their impact.” In a couple of cases I heard, “What is Healthwatch? I have never heard of it.”
Funding Healthwatch is really important, but to address the issue properly, we must make sure that Healthwatch is in the rooms it needs to be in. Funding needs to be part of the process that ICBs follow. I will touch on that later, so the hon. Member will hear further thoughts on the matter. Local healthwatch organisations across all our constituencies have an important role. At the local level, they are geographically bound to counties. In constituencies like mine and that of the hon. Member for North Shropshire, those geographical areas are huge. The health disparities within my constituency, with two towns that are 4 miles apart, one with a significant mining—
In isolation, that criticism would be legitimate, but, alongside other changes being introduced, there are ways to mitigate that problem. I am concerned that local healthwatch branches are not truly local. The healthwatch in Staffordshire has not held an event in my constituency for a number of years. I think its last three events were just volunteer fairs to get more volunteers involved. That is not to say that there are not significant numbers of people there who work very hard to support people in their engagement with the health service, but geographic changeability is real. On a national scale, Healthwatch England has a huge role to play.
I will make some progress. There are concerns that if we roll some responsibilities into ICBs or councils, the Department needs to make sure that the issue does not get pushed to the side and that the funding does genuinely remain for patient voice. I am reassured that there will be a patient experience directorate within the Department. That will bring decision making and the patient voice into the Department while also keeping an eye on what is happening with those ICBs and ensuring that they have standards to hit. The Department needs to ensure that it is sharing good practice and keeping oversight of local authority commissioning of social care. The CQC is starting to do that, and there are some positive indicators. There is obviously more work to do, and we need to stay on top of it because, as I said earlier, there are risks whenever there are changes to healthcare. I am reassured that bringing the patient voice into the room with decision makers is the right way to enact change.
I am just about to conclude, so I will allow the hon. Lady to come back when she makes her speech shortly. The final point I want to make is about local government. I hope the Secretary of State will issue guidance on how local government will commission adult social care services. I also hope we will get annual reporting from ICBs and local councils on how they are using the patient voice. I know that the Secretary of State will have the ability to intervene, and I would expect him to do so should those reports show that the patient voice is not being used, is not finding its way into the room or is not leading to the meaningful change that the Amos report suggests.
8. What recent assessment he has made of the potential contribution of agrivoltaics to clean energy generation in England.