Liberal Democrats MP for North Devon since (elected).
Parliament recordVoting recordWritten questionsEarly day motions
Entries on this tracker
166
Each filed under the party they sat for that day
Register entries
0
As currently published
| Party | Office | Area | Period | Began | Ended | Source |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Lib Dem | MP | North Devon | – present | elected | — | Party history |
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.
Not yet retrieved from the register. Parliament's register page
Now that the Government have withdrawn plans for local government reorganisation in Devon, the law still requires councils such as North Devon to change from a committee system to a cabinet system by June 2027. Six months have been lost and the Secretary of State can grant only a year’s extension. Can the Minister tell us whether councils such as North Devon will be given extra time or extra funding to help make that change?
Ilfracombe, Lee and Combe Martin on the North Devon coast continue to stand out as areas where residents are suffering repeated problems with postal deliveries. I want to highlight the reality on the ground. A constituent wrote to me on 17 September to say that, after weeks without a Royal Mail delivery, she had driven several miles to the sorting office to collect her <span id="105" class="column-number" data-column-number="105"></span>own post herself. She collected no fewer than 16 undelivered letters, including—as we have heard from many Members —notification of an NHS appointment. That letter was already a full week behind not just the date on the letter, but the actual appointment. The oldest letter in the bundle was from 14 August—nearly a full month out of date! I have visited that sorting office myself. The staff I met there were hard-working and dedicated, and I really struggle to believe that repeated Royal Mail service issues like this are their fault when similar issues are being reported right across the country, as many Members have stipulated tonight. Local residents in Ilfracombe found it especially frustrating that mail posted to engage people in the town’s successful nomination for the title of UK Town of Culture 2028 did not reach residents in time. There is a pattern of post going undelivered owing to short staffing, parcels being given priority, and bundles of overdue letters turning up at a later date. Missing post can have terrible knock-on effects if people miss GP appointments, or cannot act on important legal or financial letters. A reliable service is important for farms and remote rural communities, which often suffer poor internet access and where people cannot easily visit their local high street. Along the north Devon coast, the postal network is heavily dependent on vehicles, and relies on retaining posties with strong local knowledge.
I thank the hon. Lady for describing so eloquently what is happening in her constituency. I think that Ofcom needs a few more teeth to enable it to engage with Royal Mail and hold it strongly to account. I have met representatives of Royal Mail who insist that these problems are being ironed out, but it is clear that the postal service is falling well short of its obligation to deliver post on time in areas such as mine. I hope the Minister can answer the following questions. Do the Government believe that Ofcom has the enforcement powers that it needs to push Royal Mail on its quality of service? Does the Minister have a picture of whether certain areas or postcodes are particularly badly affected? What assurances can she give us that Royal Mail is being held to account over staffing levels? I am being told by posties that staffing is a big issue. What remedy do service users have when Royal Mail persistently fails to deliver the service that customers have paid for and residents deserve?
On Monday, the senior management of the Royal Devon University Healthcare NHS foundation trust will meet again to make an important decision: whether enough consultants can be found to reopen maternity services at North Devon district hospital. North Devon’s desperate maternity staffing crisis is entering its 10th week, with all births still being diverted two hours to Exeter. Hundreds of families in my constituency deserve answers. NHS maternity services across the country face massive pressure, but the timeline of the past 10 weeks makes for sorry reading. On 27 July, the trust announced that it was about to fall below the minimum staffing level of obstetrics and gynaecology consultants needed to keep the Ladywell maternity unit open. From 11 August, all births were suspended, and the trust began sending expectant mothers to the Royal Devon and Exeter hospital until further notice. What followed has been agonising. The fear and anguish of frightened local mums has played out in regional and then national media. The outcry from the public has been furious: hundreds gathered in Barnstaple town square for the first of several Maternity Matters protests, more than 15,000 people signed my petition to get the unit reopened, and our TV and radio appeals have been answered by doctors as far afield as Australia. I have written to more than 50 maternity authorities, NHS public bodies, charities and women’s health organisations to ask for help in recruiting new consultants and holding the trust to account for its decisions. The suspension was extended again on 14 September, with seemingly no end in sight. Even as new doctors were found, I was on the phone to local landlords desperately trying to find them somewhere to live in North Devon, and getting the Home Office to urgently extend work visas. The tier 2 registrars rota has now been filled with two new permanent doctors. A new consultant locum started last week, and one candidate is in discussions to fill the final vacant post. Even if that is achieved, we are not out of the woods yet. When North Devon was merged into a wider trust back in April 2022, that was justified partly on the basis that it would make both trusts more resilient. We were told that medical staff in North Devon could be cycled through Exeter to boost training, and staff could be shared between North Devon, east Devon and Exeter to deliver extra resilience in a crisis, yet three years down the line we discover that the consultant rotas in Barnstaple and Exeter are not even interchangeable, and our maternity unit is still dangerously fragile. North Devon district hospital is the remotest acute hospital in mainland England, serving hundreds of square miles of north Devon, Torridge and north Cornwall. My constituents and I are left wondering whether senior figures in Whitehall, NHS England and even our own hospital trust actually understand the basic reality of the geography we are talking about.
I agree with the right hon. and learned Member and thank him for those comments. I hope the Minister has made a note of them. It is a 53-mile drive from North Devon district hospital to the Royal Devon and Exeter hospital. We are talking about a catchment area larger than Greater Manchester without an open maternity unit.
I agree with my hon. Friend. That is precisely the point I am making about rurality and the remote services that many people experience. Many of my constituents would not reach the Royal Devon and Exeter hospital inside two hours. If a hospital shuts down in London, neighbouring units can absorb some extra workload without a dramatically heightened risk to mother or baby, but in this case, no neighbouring hospital exists. Most of the road route is not even a dual carriageway. In terms of journey time, it is like announcing that women cannot have their babies delivered in London and that mothers going into labour must be diverted to Bristol. It is little wonder that would-be parents across northern Devon and Cornwall are terrified at the extra pressure of getting to Exeter. I have recently been able to get the trust to agree to move some of the triage back to Barnstaple for women over 37 weeks with suspected broken waters, but many of those warned to travel early to Exeter have ended up being sent back to North Devon—a round trip that takes many hours. Official trust figures record no “incidents” and fewer than five “births before arrival” over the past nine weeks. Will the Minister tell me the NHS’s official view on that? Is it credible to claim that a baby born in an ambulance or non-medical area of a hospital should not qualify as an “incident”? The <em>Daily Mirror</em> has reported that two babies have been born in the back of <span id="1362" class="column-number" data-column-number="1362"></span>ambulances, two in accident and emergency, and one in a hospital reception, although I have not been able to verify that. The trust is clear that it reviews every one of those “births before arrival” carefully, and cannot give a more exact breakdown without breaching patient confidentiality. However, it also insists that: “There is a difference between the NHS definition and a patient’s definition of experiencing an “event-free” birth.” I am a father and a grandfather who remembers those tense few hours well, and I understand why trust senior management feel the need to be dispassionate about a baby arriving early, but when expectant mothers are travelling so far by ambulance, that kind of statement surely stretches the credibility of NHS guidance to breaking point.
I totally agree with my hon. Friend that the problem is extending and forcing problems on to neighbouring maternity units. I know that the maternity unit in Exeter is now under pressure because it is having to cope with the births coming from North Devon. I appreciate the Government’s maternity adviser meeting me last week. She speaks passionately about fixing the crisis in our maternity units across the country. When the new Prime Minister addressed this question in this House, he was up front that North Devon is just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to structural weaknesses in NHS maternity services. Things have clearly come to a head in the south-west. First, Yeovil maternity unit suffered a staffing crisis and closure last year, and now Barnstaple has suffered the same. In Yeovil's case, a full reopening took almost a year. I am told privately by senior figures that there are other NHS trusts around the country that are also perilously close to something similar. Just like North Devon, their maternity units hang in the balance. The national maternity and neonatal taskforce’s new action plan is due in December, and I want the Government to treat this sorry episode as a case in point. Maternity units should not be suddenly suspended out of the blue. Our trust wrote its own continuity plan for our maternity services, set its own staffing benchmark below which closure would be needed, and decided its own reopening criteria. If the unit at North Devon district hospital can reopen with a fully staffed doctors’ rota, we are at least protected against this happening again in a few weeks’ time, but without national guidance on when suspensions should happen, we are running this unit on an operational cliff edge of the trust’s own design. We know that the trust was struggling with maternity recruitment since at least December last year, which continued right through to the spring. It is no wonder that my constituents are angry; it seems impossible that no emergency alarm was ringing months ahead of this crisis reaching boiling point. Why does it take a sudden <span id="1363" class="column-number" data-column-number="1363"></span>suspension and a national media backlash, driven by me and local Maternity Matters campaigners, to get this issue to the very top of the chief executive’s to-do list? Secondly, the Government’s workforce plan is already overdue, and it needs to have a special focus on maternity services in at-risk areas. For example, I am told that when the deanery decides placements for trainee consultants, especially in their final years, the trend is towards large urban centres that offer them more specialised teaching. The unintended consequence is that many of those candidates stay in whichever area they last trained and already know well. That boosts the ability of urban hospitals to recruit, even while hospitals in remote areas such as North Devon are crying out for doctors. I ask the Government to work with deaneries to ensure that trainee consultants are able to do their final years in rural and coastal acute hospitals. I believe that that would help to tackle the maternity workforce crisis in smaller maternity units. On 2 October, North Devon district hospital’s consultant body passed a vote of no confidence in the trust’s senior management. When senior NHS staff with years of experience and dedicated service say that something is wrong, it should be a wake-up call. I am shocked to learn that senior figures in the trust have not even taken the opportunity to win hearts and minds by being present on site at North Devon district hospital during the crisis. Such things are completely symbolic, and that is entirely the point. Thirdly, my constituents are owed a full, independent review into how this crisis came about. We need the official record to show what led to the suspension in North Devon, what happened, how it might have been averted and how we ensure that it never happens again. The trust has appointed Audit South West Assurance to conduct the review, but a letter that I received from the trust’s chair of the board on 12 October implies that the terms of reference for a review are being set by a sub-committee of the trust’s board of directors. If that is true, I ask the Minister if the Department of Health and Social Care has an official standard for the impartiality of reviews such as that one. Many of my constituents will suspect the tell-tale signs of a whitewash in the making—something that does not improve health outcomes for anyone—and I hope that we can count on the Government’s support. Fourthly, what accountability exists for strategic failings in the NHS? A well-established structure exists to pursue clinical negligence and medical malpractice, but how can the NHS stamp out corporate failings, bad decision making or simply a lack of attention given by senior managers? I have asked that question of many organisations already, but I am yet to get a clear answer. If this crisis had been even worse, as it might be at someone else’s local hospital next month, what recourse would the public have? I was utterly shocked this week to read that the NHS Alliance’s lead director for acute care had told <em>The Guardian</em> that as many as 20 NHS maternity units across the country may be forced to close entirely. In more remote parts of the country, that should be unthinkable. When services are centralised again and again, it is always remote communities such as mine that pay the price. There are many more questions that my constituents need answering, but above all, the question is: how can <span id="1364" class="column-number" data-column-number="1364"></span>it be that senior NHS figures feel less publicly accountable for suspending maternity services entirely than they do for staffing an open maternity unit? To answer that question, I am forced to turn to the ultimate policymakers in government. Short of defending this country from attack, I can see no greater duty for the British state than ensuring that the next generation can be born safely. Most people would struggle to think of any NHS spending that should take priority over that sacred responsibility. As such, my final question is whether the Minister understands that in remote rural and coastal communities such as mine in North Devon, which has suffered this nightmare for the past nine weeks, losing maternity services would be seen as the beginning of the end for the national health service itself.
Does the Minister agree that it is simply unacceptable for farmers to be expected to deliver the Government’s environmental ambitions when they have less than six hours to secure the funding to do so? Will she commit to a fairer system for the SFI scheme, with sufficient funding and guaranteed opportunity to apply—for North Devon farmers especially—instead of leaving farmers’ livelihoods subject to a scheme operated on a first come, first served basis?
<Question HRSContentId="{23DA8196-CA87-4040-BD27-92209CB630C8}">13. <QuestionText HRSContentId="{B3B5EFA4-564E-4B69-97E4-2DF7D7025992}">What steps her Department is taking to improve NHS maternity services in Devon. </QuestionText></Question>
I thank the Secretary of State for her earlier answer to my hon. Friend the Member for North Shropshire (Helen Morgan) about North Devon maternity unit. As the local MP, I can attest to how urgent reopening the centre is to the local community. I heard what the Secretary of State said about the plans under way to improve local recruitment. Will she meet me to update me on the work that is under way and will she update the House on the national workforce plan, which is long overdue?