Labour Party MP for North West Cambridgeshire since (elected). An MP continuously since .
Parliament recordVoting recordWritten questionsEarly day motions
Entries on this tracker
180
Each filed under the party they sat for that day
Register entries
10
As currently published
Declared while sitting for Labour
£1,043.50
9 of 9 entries state an amount
Declared outside these periods
£0
0 of 1 entries state an amount
| Party | Office | Area | Period | Began | Ended | Source |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Labour | MP | North West Cambridgeshire | – 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 |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 3. Gifts, UK sources | Parliamentary and Scientific Committee APPG - £65.00 | £65 | Labour | Register record | |
| 3. Gifts, UK sources | Parliamentary and Scientific Committee APPG - £65.00 | £65 | Labour | Register record | |
| 3. Gifts, UK sources | Parliamentary and Scientific Committee APPG - £65.00 | £65 | Labour | Register record | |
| 3. Gifts, UK sources | Parliamentary and Scientific Committee APPG - £65.00 | £65 | Labour | Register record | |
| 3. Gifts, UK sources | Parliamentary and Scientific Committee APPG - £65.00 | £65 | Labour | Register record | |
| 3. Gifts, UK sources | Parliamentary and Scientific Committee APPG - £65.00 | £65 | Labour | Register record | |
| 3. Gifts, UK sources | Parliamentary and Scientific Committee APPG - £65.00 | £65 | Labour | Register record | |
| 3. Gifts, UK sources | Burghley House Preservation Trust Ltd - £27.50 | £27.50 | Labour | Register record | |
| 3. Gifts, UK sources | Burghley House Preservation Trust Ltd - £561.00 | £561 | Labour | Register record | |
| date registered | 8. Miscellaneous | Cambridge City Councillor, (unpaid since 18 July 2024 and previously registered under Category 1) | — | — | Register record |
My hon. and learned Friend is being very generous with his time. Does he share my concern that the Molly Rose Foundation’s research shows that 61% of Australian 12 to 15-year-olds are still accessing the platforms from which they are supposed to be banned? Does he agree that this potentially exposes some weaknesses in the concept of a platform-based ban and that a functionality-based ban should be considered instead?
It is a pleasure to serve under your chairship, Sir Roger. The petition calls for the Government to rethink their ban on social media for under-16s. I want to set out why I agree with the aims of the petition and substantially with the 457 of my constituents who signed it. I recognise that the Government’s policy was brought in with the best of intentions, but I have serious concerns that it will not be workable and that it will take away a lot of value. I am glad that Parliament has spent a lot of time recently debating the harms caused by poorly regulated social media. Urgent action is needed but, in looking at the current state of the online world, we have lost sight of what social media could and should be. I will, and do, strongly criticise how tech companies have increasingly sought to make social media addictive, and have turned a blind eye to horrific exploitation and abuse online, as well as to deeply harmful content along the lines of what my hon. Friend the Member for Camborne and Redruth (Perran Moon) just mentioned. We must force them to act in those areas, but their failure to do so to date must not lead us to conclude that social media itself is an unfixable problem, when it can bring positives to people’s lives.
I absolutely agree with my hon. Friend that social media companies having denied a lot of the problems and treated this as a non-serious issue is deeply wrong and alarming. I hope he will agree with some of my proposals for how we may look at that. The petition emphasises the community and connection that social media currently offers young people. I have personal experience of that. I have spoken about this in debates before, but when I was about 13, I realised that my sexuality was not like that of those around me; I was not straight. But living in a rural area and growing up in quite a homophobic, close-knit religious community, I had few people to talk to about that. Social media was such a valuable tool for me to be able to connect with <span id="270WH" class="column-number" data-column-number="270WH"></span>other LGBT people in similar situations. Had I not had it, I would have been far more alienated and alone, and lacking peer support. I fear that a blanket ban on social media could risk making that a reality for many and I cannot support that—not after the lifeline that online conversation gave me when I was growing up. That does not just go for LGBT people. Growing up in a rural area more generally can create barriers for children, whose friends may live some distance away. If used properly, online spaces can help to widen social circles and maintain friendships made in the real world. I do not want young people to lose that because of the way tech companies are acting. Without a doubt, we need to seriously strengthen safeguards. Clearly, significant work needs to be done to keep children safe online. However, a blanket ban would be clumsy and risks being completely ineffective. I worry in particular that the proposed named-platform approach would result in a constant game of whack-a-mole between children and Ofcom as the former migrate to new platforms as the old ones are made unavailable. Young people are far more digitally literate than older generations have sometimes grasped and they move faster than I believe any regulator could. Although well meaning, a blanket ban could drive children to fringe platforms that are even less well regulated, where extreme content could be even more prevalent. That is an outcome that I am sure nobody wants. Earlier this year, the NSPCC, the Centre of Expertise on Child Sexual Abuse, the Molly Rose Foundation and a long list of other child safety experts signed a letter to the Government warning that a blanket ban was a “blunt response”. They are united in calling instead for more accountability from the big tech companies. The NSPCC, for example, has been clear that the Government need to stop companies designing their platforms in a way that is addictive to children, and use the full force of the law to make sure that social media platforms are safe for children to use. I support a functionality-based approach: limiting certain features without creating a situation in which children—who will find a way to use social media regardless —are led on to more extreme platforms. We are seeing some of the risk with this right now in Australia, which has had a social media ban in place. According to research from the Molly Rose Foundation, 61% of Australian 12 to 15-year-olds are still accessing platforms that they are meant to be banned from. That is clear evidence, in my mind, of why platform-based bans are not the answer and why we must change course. A functionality-based approach would benefit users of all ages, frankly, by limiting the addictive and AI-generated content that has increasingly plagued the major sites in recent years. I say that because addictive content affects adults, too, and not just children. Targeting functionalities could also stop the race to the bottom when it comes to short-form content. The popularity of short-form videos exploded with TikTok a few years ago, and now pretty much every platform has a shorts feature. Even LinkedIn has experimented with one. It seems that many platforms have felt the need to introduce a shorts feature in order to remain competitive, even when it does not quite seem to fit—take YouTube, which was always designed for long-form <span id="271WH" class="column-number" data-column-number="271WH"></span>content, or Instagram, which has increasingly promoted its Reels function over the more traditional posts feed that it was known for. I think that a lot of short-form content has exacerbated a lot of underlying problems, particularly in relation to algorithmically driven harmful content, which we need to bear in mind. However, I can certainly envisage a scenario in which several platforms would probably not really have an issue with getting rid of their shorts features —which have led to so many of the problems that we are talking about—if others did so too. That is where regulation could step in. Any regulation of social media companies needs to take into account the decisions that they are making and why they are being made, so that we can force them to do things better. On the subject of YouTube, I would like briefly to highlight the fact that it is explicitly included in the ban. I think that is particularly difficult. There are of course problems with it as a platform—I have criticised it too—but it has a lot of educational content, for example. I would argue that there is an equality angle here, because although that is valuable for anyone, removing it could be a real blow for students who are trying to improve their school grades but do not have the funds to pay for private tutors. It is a real possibility that this type of ban could create significant inequalities in access to resources.
Absolutely. I welcome my hon. Friend’s contribution, and I know that so many parents are grappling with and having a lot of trouble with this issue. We need to hear their voices and what would work for them, and support them, as well as the users that we are talking about. The enforceability of a ban is also damaged by the fact that, particularly with YouTube, a lot of viewing is done on TVs. Do the Government have any thoughts about how parents might grapple with that in a home situation, and about the enforceability of a ban in that circumstance? Ultimately, my concerns are that a blanket ban lets the big companies off the hook and will likely prove ineffective at keeping children safe. Children will still get on to online platforms, and if they are on platforms that are not well regulated, or if social media companies can argue that children are not using them when frankly they still are, they will stop focusing on child safety at all. I want to touch on online gaming, which is underdiscussed in these conversations, with many people not necessarily recognising the social features associated with those spaces. For example, Roblox is a massive online game aimed at children. It is such a hotbed for predators that vigilantes have taken to conducting paedophile sting operations in-game, as the company’s <span id="272WH" class="column-number" data-column-number="272WH"></span>response to online abuse has been so atrocious. One such vigilante, known online as Schlep, managed to get six child predators arrested. Roblox responded by banning him and threatening legal action. So it takes no action to stop predators, but it takes strong enforcement against people who are trying to stop them. We cannot encourage vigilantism, but the priorities there are clearly so wrong. That is not the only example of abuse in online gaming. I have met the Breck Foundation, which was formed in 2014 after the tragic death of Breck Bednar—a 14-year-old boy groomed and murdered by someone he met while playing “Battlefield 3”. The groomer lied and manipulated Breck to gain his trust and lure him to his flat. The foundation goes into schools to improve the digital resilience of children across the country. It provides invaluable resources to help keep children safe, but crucially, it is not in favour of a blanket ban. In Breck’s case, removing his access to technology only drove the abuse underground, with a secret device provided by the abuser. I agree with the foundation that a ban risks narrowing a complex conversation. Indeed, online gaming is a fun hobby for many children and adults, and it can be very pro-social and support the development of creative skills. The current proposals do not ban online gaming for children, which is right; any attempt to do so would be devastating for people who enjoy it and they would inevitably end up in less regulated spaces, if mainstream platforms and games were clumsily cut off to them. But the proposals also do not really tackle the issues in the online gaming space, and I would like to see more recognition of what we need to do in that area. The Breck Foundation, like other safeguarding organisations, has called for greater accountability from big tech companies. That is where we need to be. A blanket ban will not work; it would allow predators to ruin it for everyone else and essentially let them win. We need to protect the benefits that social media and online gaming can offer young people while ensuring that the companies behind them take safety and security far more seriously. As the youngest MP, I know more than most how interwoven the online world is with growing up. We need to regulate those spaces, not hope they will magically go away—they will not.
Does my hon. Friend agree that the current proposals to have a hard cliff edge at 16 create a problem in terms of people suddenly being exposed to all of that world, having not really had the opportunity to develop the skills to be able to deal with it?
My hon. Friend and I clearly have different solutions in mind, but what unites the Chamber is our clear demand that these tech companies sort out what they are doing. Does he agree that their atrocious behaviour is the root cause? Until that changes, and until the Government bring in methods to make it change, we will not get any further.
I appreciate the Minister’s tone and the different considerations he is bringing in, but does he agree that it is very difficult to define social media? We have a definition in the traditional sense, but there are social platforms now that operate primarily on an anonymous basis instead of having identities behind them, and there are online gaming platforms and so on. How do the Government propose to deal with the fact that social media is a very loose term now?
<Question HRSContentId="{88C97A5D-5160-4680-BC70-CDC78EF62E85}">16. <QuestionText HRSContentId="{87C66B25-874D-4524-A144-72E965966D9B}">What steps she is taking to support tenants in the private rented sector.</QuestionText> </Question>
Too often, constituents contact me about horrific behaviour from private landlords and lettings agencies. One lady told me recently that she had been left with broken heating for six months, and that, as a result, her daughter had developed pneumonia. Adding insult to injury, the lettings agency has continually refused to provide my constituent with her landlord’s contact details, in violation of the law. Will the Secretary of State set out what this Labour Government are doing to crack down on rogue landlords and lettings agencies that are totally failing in their responsibilities?
Councils across Cambridgeshire and Peterborough have worked collaboratively throughout the whole local government reorganisation process, even when they have disagreed. I have long advocated for our region to have three unitary councils, not just two, and I hope the Government will agree, but there are of course questions about where boundaries should lie. What avenues will be available, or are available, for councils to submit modifications to proposals if consensus can be built on improvements?
Held . Recorded result: Lab Gain. Majority 39. 44,424 votes cast from an electorate of 75,915. Parties are as each candidate stood at the time.
| Candidate | Party | Votes | Share |
|---|---|---|---|
| Sam Carling | Labour | 14,785 | 33.3% |
| Shailesh Vara | Conservative | 14,746 | 33.2% |
| James Sidlow | Reform UK | 8,741 | 19.7% |
| Bridget Smith | Liberal Democrat | 3,192 | 7.2% |
| Elliot Tong | Green Party | 2,960 | 6.7% |
| Seat | Dates |
|---|---|
| North West CambridgeshireElected 1 time | – present |
| Committee | Dates |
|---|---|
| English Devolution and Community Empowerment Bill | – |
| Public Administration and Constitutional Affairs Committee | – present |
| Renters’ Rights Bill | – |
Website
X (formerly Twitter)
Only the details Parliament publishes for this member. Contact page on Parliament's site
Profile data retrieved from Parliament on .