Parliament's party history for this member: Labour ( – present).
Register of interests
Every entry the member has in the Register of Members' Financial Interests, as Parliament currently publishes it. The wording and values are the member's own declarations; nothing here has been assessed by this site.
Totals add only the entries that declare an amount received: payments for work, donations, gifts, and funded visits (register categories 1.1, 2, 3, 4 and 5). Ongoing employment is listed but not added, because its figure is a rate rather than a sum received. Each entry is dated by when the benefit happened, not when it was registered, and placed under the party the member sat for on that date. A member who changed party therefore has a separate total for each.
Date
Category
Entry
Declared value
Sitting for
Source
3. Gifts, UK sources
Richard Phelps - Chair of the Henley Royal Regatta - £360.00
Last year, we provided the Scottish Government with a record spending review settlement, and last week at the Budget, we gave the Scottish Government a further £600 million through Barnett consequentials. We also announced £18 million for a UK advanced chip design academy led by Edinburgh University, £6 million to support the expansion of Glasgow’s Scottish event campus and £10 million of co-funding, with the Scottish Government, for two defence technical excellence colleges.
I agree with my hon. Friend. As she says, at the Budget we gave the Scottish Government an additional £600 million through Barnett consequentials on top of a record spending review settlement. Now we need the SNP Government to act to improve public services in Scotland with that money.
As my hon. Friend says, the Chancellor last week froze business rates in real terms for high street businesses, and has taken 70,000 small businesses on the high street in England out of paying business rates altogether. We have given the devolved Government in Scotland the Barnett consequentials for that, and I urge them to follow our lead.
I reassure the hon. Lady that we continue to support the Acorn project. The initial grant funding that this Government are providing until the end of 2026 remains in place, and we are exploring delivery through private investment and Government loans or equity investments in the future.
Can I take this opportunity to congratulate my hon. Friend on her election as Chair of the Justice Committee? As she rightly says, we inherited a prison system at breaking point after 14 years of Tory mismanagement. At the spending review, we significantly increased the funding for the Ministry of Justice, with an additional £550 million for probation, £450 million for courts and £7 billion for prison places. We have already delivered 3,000 new places through the largest prison building programme since the Victorian era. I will continue to work with the Justice Secretary on the issues mentioned by my hon. Friend.
The hon. Gentleman will know that an EU summit is coming up on 20 November, and we are still negotiating with the EU. We are putting right the botched Brexit that we inherited from the Conservative party, which put frictions at our border and increased costs for farmers, family businesses and others.
I remind the hon. Lady of her party’s role in trebling tuition fees when it was in coalition with the Conservatives. We have helped this year by capping interest rates at 6% for plan 2 and 3 loans, and from the academic year 2028-29, we will reintroduce targeted maintenance grants to support students from low-income households.
I will ensure that my hon. Friend gets a meeting with the relevant health Minister. More broadly, the Chancellor announced last week that in the spending review next year, we will set out a new preventative departmental expenditure limit spending category to get ahead of problems before they get more expensive, because we recognise that preventing problems before they arise is a good use of taxpayers’ money.