Labour Party MP for Plymouth Moor View since (elected). An MP continuously since .
Parliament recordVoting recordWritten questionsEarly day motions
Entries on this tracker
87
Each filed under the party they sat for that day
Register entries
5
As currently published
Declared while sitting for Labour
£4,363.63
3 of 5 entries state an amount
| Party | Office | Area | Period | Began | Ended | Source |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Labour | MP | Plymouth Moor View | – present | elected | — | Party history |
Parliament's party history for this member: Labour ( – present).
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 |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 4. Visits outside the UK | International visit to Germany between 08 May 2026 and 11 May 2026APROPOS Group | £1,398.76 | Labour | Register record | |
| 5. Gifts, non-UK sources | APROPOS Group - £1,872.25 | £1,872.25 | Labour | Register record | |
| 4. Visits outside the UK | International visit to Finland between 26 November 2025 and 29 November 2025Embassy of Finland | £1,092.62 | Labour | Register record | |
| 8. Miscellaneous | Honorary unpaid position as 'ambassador' for the HALO Trust, the UK mine clearance and conflict prevention charity. | — | Labour | Register record | |
| date registered | 8. Miscellaneous | Trustee of Gwithian Chapel Ltd, small village charity that owns and administrates a community hall. This is an unpaid role. | — | Labour | Register record |
Does my hon. Friend agree that if we think about the online world in the same way as the real world, it is a ludicrous idea that we would deliberately send children to go and interact with strangers—probably adults—in an unsupervised and unregulated environment where we would have no idea what kind of conversations were happening, and that no parent or politician would ever endorse that?
It is an honour to serve under your chairship, Sir Roger. Let us be honest: for far too long, tech companies have profited obscenely from addictive algorithms and harmful content aimed at children here in Britain. These are not British companies, but they have become absurdly powerful—probably more powerful than any Government. Generations of young people are paying the price, and we have a mental health crisis. We can all see that. This is not random; it is happening for a reason. Social media has become almost unavoidable for people growing up. They are not making a choice. As one of my colleagues said, there is no choice—they have to be on it. Young people in the UK spend an average of more than four hours a day on social media. That means that most of their free time is spent staring at a screen. We also have a mental health crisis—I think they are linked. This is fundamentally changing what life looks like, and how young people see themselves, build friendships and form opinions and world views. The consequences are apparent all around us. The incredible rise in diagnosed and undiagnosed anxiety is just startling. I had no experience of it until becoming an MP and visiting schools, where I was absolutely blown away by conversations with teachers and parents. The scale is off the charts. It is much more common among girls and people with a disability. Young people regularly describe feeling like they have no control over what they see online. Again, there is no choice here. They are being sent these things for hours and hours every day and deep into the night. In the Government’s consultation this summer, nine in 10 parents backed a social media ban for under-16s. Two thirds of young people agreed that under-16s should not be allowed to use at least some social media platforms. That is not surprising at all, given what I have seen in schools in the last couple of years. Every time I visit schools in Plymouth, teachers tell me about the impact it is having, describing levels of mental health distress unlike anything ever seen before. Students themselves tell me they want help getting off these platforms. I always ask for a show of hands: “If no one else was on this platform, would you miss it?” For most people, the answer is no—they are only on it because everyone else is on it. They do not want to be on it. I acknowledge that some would disagree with that, including around 400 of my constituents who signed this petition, but they are in the minority. We know from whistleblowers inside these social media companies that they have known for years and years that these harms were coming. It is not as though they did nothing about it; they have done something about it—they have deliberately hidden it, over and over again. Facebook whistleblower Frances Haugen told our colleagues in the US Congress that the company’s leadership knew how to make platforms safer but refused to act, “because they have put their astronomical profits before people.”<span id="283WH" class="column-number" data-column-number="283WH"></span> There is no reason to think that any of these companies will do anything different ever again. They are companies—they are trying to make money. We cannot put the wellbeing of our nation at the mercy of profit-making organisations, especially ones that reward addiction and exploitation. I am delighted that this year the Government announced decisive action to protect children from social media. I am extremely grateful for the work of my right hon. Friend the Member for Leicester West (Liz Kendall) and the Minister for Artificial Intelligence, my right hon. Friend the Member for Vale of Glamorgan (Kanishka Narayan), for getting that over the line. I am also extremely grateful to Labour colleagues who signed a letter I organised to the then Prime Minister urging him to take action. A week after that, he did indeed launch the consultation, which has now led to this decision from Government, so I thank everyone who signed that letter. Government now have to implement, and the question is how they do it. There is a duty to protect children, and I am so pleased that we are finally going to do that. There is also a duty to allow children access to the benefits of the internet and the online world. Many of my colleagues have spoken very eloquently about that today. How do we do that? A 15-year-old who wants to go on YouTube to learn French or learn the guitar should be able to do that, so there is a challenge for Government on how they do a ban. Am I suggesting that they should just trust the tech companies? No. But surely there is a world in which we are nuanced enough for Government to get a legally binding, written assurance from platforms to provide services that are not included in the ban. Surely there is a world where we are agile enough to be able to react and say, “You said you were going to do this. You have not done what you said you were going to do. You are now included in the ban,” without having to do primary legislation. I am super conscious that I grew up benefiting from YouTube. I learned the guitar on YouTube. I do not know how I would have learned it otherwise. I would have had to pay for many lessons. I do not think it is fair to tell the next generation that they cannot have those opportunities, so there is a challenge for Government. It is not as simple as just enacting this ban. It is about working out how we carry on giving access to those platforms. Those are tough conversations with big companies. On age verification, there are countless ways to verify someone’s age without handing over sensitive personal information. I know that some parts of the political agenda argue that any online regulatory action from the Government creates a privacy problem. The burden should not be on Government to do that. The burden should be on the tech companies themselves to find and implement solutions. They know all our information anyway. Those tech companies 100% know our ages. They have some of the brightest engineers in the world. Parliament and Government should set the rules, and they should comply with them.
I take the hon. Member’s point. The scale of what those companies know about us—whether we want to acknowledge that or not—really does not correspond to whether we have put our age into an online form or not. We can live in a world where we pretend they do not know that about us and our children, or we can live in the real world where they do know it, and we should just acknowledge that. It is not an invasion of privacy to acknowledge that because it has already happened. To get away from that would be a much bigger debate—not about restricting some aspects of social media for under-16s, but a much bigger conversation around the internet. I am not saying that I endorse it, but frankly that ship has sailed. I know people have concerns about the experience in Australia. Clearly, many young people are still using social media. I accept that no system is going to be perfect. Young people will find a way around restrictions. That happens with alcohol. My hon. Friend the Member for Milton Keynes Central (Emily Darlington), who is not in her place just now, alluded to the fact that young people still drink alcohol illegally. They smoke cigarettes, do other activities like not wear a seatbelt, and they probably break the law or get around restrictions in some way. That does not mean that we should just throw bans out the window.
I certainly agree with my hon. Friend; I guess we are just debating what those methods are. I fully agree that the cause of these issues is the technologies now being basically monopolised into four or five massive companies. This debate is about what we do to tackle that. I will address the cliff edge argument, where some folks suggest that if we stop young people having access to certain social media until they are 16, and then they suddenly have access, they will be super-vulnerable or in some way unprepared for the social media world. I do not think that makes sense, because it implies that exposure is the same thing as preparation—it is not. The brain in someone under 16 is developing and needs protecting. It is in a better place to deal with the harms once the person is 16 than when they are 14. I do not find any credibility in that argument.
Yes, that should be the aim. It brings me on to the final point I was hoping to make. For me, this whole agenda is not purely about people under 16 years old. This is about recognising that social media is really bad for us. It is bad for me as a 34-year-old, it is bad for a 14-year-old, and it is bad for a 64-year-old. I see my parents doomscrolling and think, “That’s probably not good for you.” How do we recognise, as a society, that something is bad for us? Let us go back to the example of alcohol or cigarettes. We know they are bad for us. We let adults use them, but we do not let children. If someone is under 18, we say, “Woah, you really shouldn’t be doing that.” Once they are 18, if they decide to do something they know is bad for them, they can do it. For me, it is the same with social media, or particularly the elements of it we are looking to get after through heavily restricting use for under-16s. I think that will lead to a really important moment. Some would call it a seatbelt moment, or a cultural shift. My parents grew up in a generation where smoking was pretty accepted. At school, we were taught over and over again, “Smoking is bad for you. You shouldn’t smoke.” I went home, saw my parents smoking and said, “Mum, Dad—you shouldn’t be doing that. That’s bad for you.” It was probably quite annoying to have a 12-year-old tell them that, but the culture changes. I hope that happens with social media. For my colleagues who have spoken about their children, I hope that in a few years’ time they might find that, in the kitchen, their 12-year-old says, “You shouldn’t be scrolling. It’s bad for you. I’m not allowed to do it, because it’s bad for you, so you shouldn’t be doing it.” It could be that the culture shifts, and that is how we get after the profits of these companies and they learn that they might have to change a bit. Who knows what comes next for technology? We do not know, but for me, this is very important to get after. I am grateful to those who signed the petition, ensuring that this debate could happen. It gives the Government another chance to set out how they will help to protect our children and cause a culture shift.
I welcome the Government’s Be Ready campaign, which I will champion in my patch in Plymouth. I thank the Minister for his continued endeavours, over the last several years, to knot together different bits of Government agenda and Departments to grow greater resilience. Can he assure the House that this will encompass AI and emerging technologies as well, and can he give us a sense of what new endeavours are being stood up, given the massive acceleration of the threat to our national resilience in that space?
My hon. Friend speaks about how it is important to deter people from coming to this country illegally. Does he share my concern at the Reform party’s notion, put forward by its chairman, that Royal Marines commandos could be encouraged to use “lethal force” against unarmed civilians? As a Royal Marines commander, I can say that that is completely unacceptable across the military. There are real concerns about that in Plymouth and across the wider military. Does my hon. Friend share those concerns?
Will the right hon. Lady give way?
I am very grateful to hear that the Minister has engaged with coastguard rescue officers in Southampton, which is typical of his diligent manner and his approach to difficult issues like this. I invite him to interact with my constituents who are part of the Plymouth coastguard rescue team, who tell me harrowing stories of supporting the ambulance service and the police—sadly, too often <span id="333" class="column-number" data-column-number="333"></span>with suicide-related issues. It is an unbelievable service and, yes, CROs deserve remuneration, but they also deserve a lot more recognition. Will the Minister agree to speak to those constituents of mine?
On that point, will the hon. Member give way?
Held . Recorded result: Lab Gain. Majority 5,604. 42,856 votes cast from an electorate of 74,724. Parties are as each candidate stood at the time.
| Candidate | Party | Votes | Share |
|---|---|---|---|
| Fred Thomas | Labour | 17,665 | 41.2% |
| Johnny Mercer | Conservative | 12,061 | 28.1% |
| Shaun Hooper | Reform UK | 9,670 | 22.6% |
| Sarah Martin | Liberal Democrat | 1,766 | 4.1% |
| Georgia Nelson | Green Party | 1,694 | 4.0% |
| Seat | Dates |
|---|---|
| Plymouth Moor ViewElected 1 time | – present |
| Committee | Dates |
|---|---|
| Defence Committee | – present |
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