Danny Kruger

Party affiliation

Register of interests

Register on Parliament's site

Latest on this tracker 749

1. 2 Sep 2025·Parliament·Danny Kruger

   Eating Disorders: Prevention of Deaths

   I will be quick, in that case. I express my appreciation to the hon. Member for Isle of Wight West (Mr Quigley) for a very important speech; I am grateful to him. I particularly welcome the points made by him and the hon. Member for Carlisle (Ms Minns) about the need for better understanding and collaboration in the system, and I echo his call for the national register of deaths to reflect deaths from eating disorders. I pay tribute to the Cotswold House unit, run by the Oxford Health NHS Foundation Trust in Marlborough in my constituency, which is a really important in-patient and out-patient unit working with adults. I echo the points, which I think are shared across the Chamber, about the value of NHS units as opposed to operations run by private equity companies, whose work I have real concerns about. I want to add a couple of points to those made by hon. Members about the very legitimate campaigns of the organisations to which we are all indebted for their work. First, the point about early intervention has been made and I will not repeat it, but we clearly need to invest in more understanding both at GP level and among communities and families, and support people while they are still at home. Secondly, we must ensure we have a better and more adequate transition from children’s to adult services, which is a real issue I have come across in casework.<span id="67WH" class="column-number" data-column-number="67WH"></span> My final point is about the importance of step-down provision. It is not enough just to get people back to a healthy weight and then leave them to themselves; they need proper support for many months—

   Hansard source
2. 1 Sep 2025·Parliament·Danny Kruger

   Health and Disability Benefits: Spending Estimate

   It is good to see the Minister back after the break, but I am sorry to hear that there are still no plans to reduce spending on personal independence payments. He has said that he is collaborating with people who would not be working with him on his review if there were to be any reductions in the levels of benefit or eligibility. Given that veto on cuts to PIP, I implore him again to consider the benefits to which PIP is a gateway, such as Motability, disability premiums, council tax discounts and blue badges. Will he promise at least that those entitlements could come down?

   Hansard source
3. 1 Sep 2025·Parliament·Danny Kruger

   Health and Disability Benefits: Spending Estimate

   But with no possibility of any of those entitlements coming down or any of the spending being reduced? We have 1.25 million foreign nationals claiming universal credit, most of whom are not in employment. I hope that the Minister does not plan to co-produce his plans with foreign nationals—although, knowing Labour lawyers, I expect they will say that the European convention on human rights demands that they do just that. Does he think that subsidising more and more foreign nationals is what the British social security system is for? If not, will he restrict sickness benefits to British nationals only, as we have argued for?

   Hansard source
4. 17 Jul 2025·Parliament·Danny Kruger

   Future of the Church of England

   It is an honour to stand here in this empty Chamber to speak about the original purpose of this space, when it was a chapel in the Church of England. The old Chamber of the House of Commons, on which this space was modelled after the great fire of 1834, was St Stephen’s Chapel—formerly a royal church. It was given by the heirs of Henry VIII to Parliament to serve as its debating Chamber. Madam Deputy Speaker, your Chair stands on the altar steps. The Table with the Dispatch Boxes is where the lectern stood. I mention that because the link between this place and the Church of England is not merely ceremonial. The Prayers we say here at the start of every day are not just a nod to tradition. Our democracy is founded on Christian faith. This Parliament remains the law-giving power of the Church of England. We in this place have the responsibility to approve or disapprove the doctrine and the rules of the Church, and that is as it should be, because the Church of England is not some private club or just another eccentric denomination. The Church is a chaplain to the nation, and through the parish system, in which every square inch of England has its local church and its local priest, we are all members—we all belong. Even if you never set foot in your church from one year to the next, and even if you do not believe in its teachings, it is your church and you are its member. When I speak of the Church of England today, I am not speaking about the internal politics of the Anglican sect; I speak of the common creed of our country, the official religion of the English and the British nation, and the institution—older than the monarchy, and much older than Parliament—which made this country. It is no surprise that both the Church and the country itself are in a bad way, divided, internally confused and badly led. The Church is riven by deep disputes over doctrine and governance, and is literally leaderless, with even the process of choosing the next Archbishop of Canterbury unclear, confused and contended. The country itself reflects that—unclear in its doctrines and its governance, profoundly precarious, chronically exposed to threats from without and within. It is at risk economically, culturally, socially and, I would say, morally. Last month, in the space of three days in one infamous week, this House authorised the killing of unborn children—of nine-month-old babies—and it passed a Bill to allow the killing of the elderly and disabled. I describe those laws in those stark terms not to provoke further controversy, but because those are the facts. We gave our consent to the greatest crime: the killing of the weak and most defenceless human beings. It was a great sin. If, standing here, I have any power to repent on behalf of this House, I hereby repent of what we did. In the reaction to these votes, and all around us in reaction to the state of the country and the world, something else is happening. There is a great hunger in society for a better way of living, and I want to use this opportunity to explain what that better way is and why we here in England have the means to follow it.<span id="521" class="column-number" data-column-number="521"></span> The Jewish and Christian God is a God of nations. He is interested in people as individuals, but also as groups—as communities not only of kinship but of common worship, with a common God. Uniquely among the nations of the world, this nation—England, from which the United Kingdom grew—was founded and created consciously on the basis of the Bible and the story of the Hebrew people. In that sense, England is the oldest Christian country and the prototype of nations across the west. The story of England is the story of Christianity operating on a people to make the institutions and culture that have been uniquely stable and successful. The western model was forged and refined in England over a thousand years from the 9th to the 19th centuries. What is that model? It is simply this: that power should arrange itself for the benefit of all the people under it, and specifically for the poorest and weakest; that the law is there to protect the ordinary person against the abuse of power; and that every individual has equal dignity and freedom, including, crucially, the freedom of conscience, religion and belief, which makes space for other religions under the Christian shield—a secular space. Indeed, the idea of a secular space is a Christian concept that is meaningful only in a Christian world. These are ideas that only make sense if one accepts that we have some intrinsic value—a value that is given to us and is not of our own making or invention. Throughout the long years from the time of Alfred to the time of Victoria, it was assumed that a nation was a community of common worship and that our community —this country—worshipped the Christian God. Then, in the 20th century, another idea arose: that it was possible for a country to be neutral about God; that the public square was empty of any metaphysics; and that the route to freedom lay through the desert of materialism and individual reason—“no hell below us, above us only sky”. That idea was wrong. The horrors of the 20th century attest to that, not least in the west, where we escaped totalitarianism but have suffered our own catastrophes of social breakdown, social injustice, loneliness and emptiness on a chronic scale. Ugly and aggressive new threats are now arising, because we have found that in the absence of the Christian God, we do not have pluralism and tolerance, with everyone being nice to each other in a godless world. All politics is religious, and in abandoning one religion we simply create a space for others to move into.

   Hansard source
5. 17 Jul 2025·Parliament·Danny Kruger

   Future of the Church of England

   My hon. Friend will not be surprised to hear that I do agree with him. He makes the point very well, and I absolutely acknowledge it. The paradox <span id="522" class="column-number" data-column-number="522"></span>of our constitution is that under a monarchy, we have a system with the most developed political freedom in the world, and that under an established Church, we have a tradition of freedom of conscience and belief in which all religions can be accommodated. It is because the cross is at the centre, and I notice that the cross is above your Chair too, Madam Deputy Speaker. As I was saying, in abandoning one religion we simply create a space for others to move into as the dominant faiths. There are two religions moving into the space from which Christianity has been ejected, and one is Islam. In a debate yesterday, I said how much I find myself in agreement with Muslim colleagues in Parliament on moral and social matters. But as I have been saying, this is a Christian country—if it is a country at all—and I cannot be indifferent to the extent of the growth of Islam in recent decades. It is the other religion that worries me even more. This other religion is a hybrid of old and new ideas, and it does not have a proper name. I do not think that “woke” does justice to its seriousness. It is a combination of ancient paganism, Christian heresies and the cult of modernism, all mashed up into a deeply mistaken and deeply dangerous ideology of power that is hostile to the essential objects of our affections and our loyalties: families, communities and nations. It is explicitly and most passionately hostile to Christianity as the wellspring of the west. That religion, unlike Islam, must simply be destroyed, at least as a public doctrine. It must be banished from public life—from schools and universities, and from businesses and public services. It needs to be sent back to the fringes of eccentricity, like the modern druids who invest Stonehenge in my constituency with a theology that is seen as mad but harmless because its followers are so few and no one serious takes them seriously. We can no longer pretend, as people did in the 20th century, that we can be neutral or indifferent to God or to the public square being a godless desert. The fact is that the strong gods are back, and we have to choose which god to worship. I suggest we worship the God who came in the weakest form, Jesus Christ. This God is a jealous god—it is him or nothing—and we have to own our Christian story, or repudiate it. Not to own it is to repudiate it, and to repudiate Christianity is not only to sever ourselves from our past, but to cut off the source of all the things we value now and that we need in the future, such as freedom, tolerance, individual dignity and human rights. Without the Christian God, in whose teaching these things have their source, these are inventions—mere non-existent aspirations. To worship human rights is to worship fairies, but if we own our story and remember the real sources of our civilisation, we can have these things and make them real—real freedom and tolerance and dignity, a culture of love and, crucially, a culture of humanity. We are in the age of the machine, and a great choice confronts us: whether to make machines in the image of fallen man, bent on exploitation and domination with mankind in its sights, or to make them what they properly are, the servants of mankind able to help us make a better world. To conclude, a wind is blowing, a storm is coming and when it hits we are going to learn if our house is built on rock or on sand, but we have been here before. The reformers of the 11th and the 16th centuries, the <span id="523" class="column-number" data-column-number="523"></span>Puritans in the 17th century, the Evangelicals in the 19th century all brought this country back from the edge—from idolatry, error or just plain indifference, and from all the social and political crises that indifference to Christianity brought about—and they each in their generation restored this country to itself. A new restoration is needed now, with a revival of the faith, a recovery of a Christian politics and a re-founding of this nation on the teachings that Alfred made the basis of the common law of England all those centuries ago. This is a mission for the Church under its next leader, whoever that is; it is a mission for this place—the old chapel that became the wellspring of western democracy—and for us, its Members; and it is a mission for our whole country. It is the route to a prosperous modernity founded on respect for human dignity, responsibility for the created world and the worship of God.

   Hansard source
6. 16 Jul 2025·Parliament·Danny Kruger

   Giving Every Child the Best Start in Life

   It is a pleasure to follow the hon. Member for Stoke-on-Trent North (David Williams); it has been a while since I have heard the words “Stoke-on-Trent North, Kidsgrove and Talke”, which used to be bellowed out by our former hon. Friend and his predecessor Jonathan Gullis, who was a great schools Minister—briefly—in a previous Government. I pay tribute to him and his memory—much lamented. I also pay tribute to David Johnston, another former Member, who was children’s Minister in the last Government and was responsible for many of the important reforms that my hon. Friend the Member for Harborough, Oadby and Wigston (Neil O’Brien) mentioned. I welcome this debate on what I think is a cross-party agenda. I recognise much of what the Minister said about the importance of early years and the sorts of interventions that the Government are talking about. I welcome the impending child poverty strategy, which is an important step forward for us. I want to make a simple and straightforward point. I have heard a lot in this afternoon’s debate about the importance of investment and support for the different professionals who support children and families. That is all absolutely right, and I agree that that is important. Nevertheless, surely the most important resource available to us to support children and young people is their families and the communities that they grow up in. I implore the Government to think very seriously in preparing their strategy to support the conditions for success in childhood, which is about not simply the public sector professionals, agencies and institutions that are available but the strength of the informal social institutions that children and young people grow up in. I welcome the Minister’s mention of the importance of social investment, philanthropy and civil society in providing support for children and young people. This is a big boast, but I can claim some credit for the announcement that the Chancellor made on Monday. She happened to be at a charity called AllChild in Wigan, which I claim credit for having founded—although that was not on the press release, I note. The charity began life as the West London Zone, which supports children and young people and which I started back in the early 2010s, having visited the Harlem Children’s Zone in New York with the then Secretary of State Michael Gove. The Harlem Children’s Zone is a tremendously successful project aiming at much of the agenda that we are debating this afternoon, including early identification of children at risk, the provision of <span id="359" class="column-number" data-column-number="359"></span>intensive support for those children and their families on a community basis, and a place-based model for support for children and families in disadvantage. We set up the West London Zone with the help of significant philanthropy from Paul Marshall, noted philanthropist and founder of the Ark school chain, who said that we should start one here. We did it on a slightly different model from Harlem’s, which is a monolithic, single entity that provides all services for children and young people. The model we introduced in West London and is now being expanded across the country under the banner of AllChild. I pay tribute to the AllChild team, including Louisa Mitchell, who I got in early to deliver the project, because I would not have been very good at actually running it. Louisa has been a genius, and she is still running it now. This goes to the point I am trying to make: what Louisa did was recognise that in our communities there is an enormous array of really amazing resources in the form of local projects—large and small, formal and informal—that can help with the great task of bringing up a child as a village should. The mission of the project is to identify in schools—with the help of teachers and, crucially, by using the data available on attainment and attendance—those children who are likely to struggle later. Then it is about ensuring that they get the support that they need, and very much on a personalised basis. That support should come not just from the statutory system around the school—because that will never be adequate for the range of needs and different challenges that a population of children will have—but draw on the resources of the community. We started in west London, which obviously has lots of pockets of wealth but significant pockets of disadvantage as well. Even in those disadvantaged places, and certainly across the country—the project is working in Wigan and elsewhere now—we see tremendous institutions that can support children and young people. The challenge is to do so in a co-ordinated way. There is a huge opportunity not just to look to the state, schools, local authorities or health—even though bringing all those agencies together around children is important—but to think about the real resource we have, which is in our communities. We should put in place real support and resource for those foundations, whether faith groups, professional bodies of all sorts or community organisations.

   Hansard source
7. 16 Jul 2025·Parliament·Danny Kruger

   Giving Every Child the Best Start in Life

   It is funny: I often find myself in agreement with the hon. Gentleman, which is great, and not what I expected when he was elected to this place. I was about to come to my final point: the importance of family life. I do not know to what extent that really is on the Government’s agenda when it comes to the child poverty strategy. There will obviously be lots of talk of families, maternal health and so on, but the crucial determinant of success for children is the quality of the relationships they grow up in.<span id="360" class="column-number" data-column-number="360"></span> We know that from all the research done into children’s brain development. Human beings are unique among mammals in that we emerge very unformed: our brains are really blank as we emerge from the womb. The strength and health of our brains and our futures are laid down in those early years by the quality of the relationships we grow up with and experience. I know the Government recognise that because of their emphasis on early years, but the quality of the relationship in the home matters so much. I really hope that the Government will be brave enough to recognise the value of stability in the home and the value of two-parent families as a source of real strength. They are a protective factor and a predictor of success for children and young people. We should, of course, do all we can to support single-parent families—they are crucial and necessary and do amazing work, and we should give them all our support—but to tackle child poverty we must do more to support family formation and family stability. That means recognising the household as a unit. We are way too individualistic in our approach to public policy. We need to think about family health and family strength, and that means supporting couples. I welcome what the Government are trying to do, and I hope that there will be recognition of the importance of community and family life in the child poverty strategy.

   Hansard source
8. 15 Jul 2025·Parliament·Danny Kruger

   Welfare Spending

   It has been a very good debate, and I am very grateful to all hon. Members across the House who have contributed. It is still no clearer to us what the Government think or intend to do about the two-child cap, but it has been very good to hear so many strong voices from the Opposition Benches for and against the two-child limit. Of course, we do not really know what the Prime Minister himself thinks. He campaigned for the Labour leadership on a promise to scrap the two-child limit; then, in order to win the general election, he campaigned to keep it. Now, under pressure from his Back Benchers—once again, I pay tribute to the real powers in the Labour party—he is hinting that he will scrap it after all at a cost of £3.5 billion. Add to that the £4.5 billion the Government have to find because they abandoned their welfare reforms and the £1.3 billion they lost when they U-turned on the winter fuel payment, and the Government will have to find £9.3 billion this autumn.

   Hansard source
9. 15 Jul 2025·Parliament·Danny Kruger

   Welfare Spending

   I am very grateful to the hon. Gentleman for his recitation, much of which was Conservative policy now rebranded by the Labour Government and the rest was further spending commitments. The Government are incapable of cutting spending, so we know where this is headed: tax rises in the autumn. There will also be tax rises on wealth. We know what wealth is: it is the product of economic success. It is what happens when people risk their capital and make things that people want. Wealth means more jobs, higher wages and more tax revenues. It means that we can reduce debt and invest in more businesses. And wealth taxes, which are coming, will mean less of all that. That is the Labour way—circling the drain and then going down to national bankruptcy. That is where a wealth tax and welfare spending lead us to, and the rest of the House seems to support that plan.

   Hansard source
10. 15 Jul 2025·Parliament·Danny Kruger

    Welfare Spending

    I will come in a moment to the matter of child poverty, and I recognise the point that the hon. Gentleman is making. I was just referring to the fact that all the parties except ours—indeed, it is unclear what those on the Government Front Bench think—seem to support lifting the two-child cap. The Liberal Democrats cannot seem to see a spending opportunity without grabbing it with both hands. Their spokesman, the hon. Member for Torbay (Steve Darling), spent £4.5 billion just in his speech earlier this afternoon. Then we have the SNP Government, who have presided over higher economic inactivity and lower employment than in England, have missed all their targets for child poverty, and still clamour for more money for welfare. Then there is the Reform party, which is sadly absent today. I do quite like the Reform party and I agree with its Members on lots of things, but there is a problem: they would spend money like drunken sailors. I can see what is happening and I am very worried about it—they will end up in an electoral pact with the Liberal Democrats with a joint ticket to protect welfare spending. I do not know how hon. Members feel about the anticipated alliance. The hon. Member for Dewsbury and Batley (Iqbal Mohamed) and others, particularly Members on the Government Benches, have cited widening poverty rates over the past decade or more, and they repeatedly raised the issue of 4.5 million children, but they are talking about relative poverty. The fact is that relative poverty increased under the previous Government because, overall, the economy grew, as more people became more prosperous. As the median income rises, more people come under it; that is how it works. If relative poverty goes down under this Government, it will be because they shrank the economy. That is highly likely, but it is not an achievement to boast about.<span id="204" class="column-number" data-column-number="204"></span> Relative poverty is not a measure of anything except the operation of the law of averages. Therefore, what we need to look at is real poverty, absolute poverty. As we rescued the public finances and grew the economy, absolute poverty went down under the Conservatives. On children, the percentage of children in absolute poverty after housing costs fell between 2010 and 2024. We pulled 800,000 people out of absolute poverty and averted over a million more people falling into absolute poverty. We had more people in work, a higher employment rate, and fewer workless households than since records began. We should thank my right hon. Friend the Member for Chingford and Woodford Green (Sir Iain Duncan Smith) for that. Mention was made of Wilberforce and Disraeli. One day they will add the name of Duncan Smith to that great record.

    Hansard source