Ed Davey
MP for Kingston and Surbiton · Liberal Democrat · United Kingdom
“I associate myself with the Prime Minister’s opening remarks, not least about the 25th anniversary of the horrific terror attacks of 9/11. I welcome the Government finally banning imports from illegal Israeli settlements, something Keir Starmer should have done a long time ago.”
“I thank the Prime Minister for that answer. Britain should be the safest country in the world to have a baby. We will keep raising this issue until it is the safest.”
“No mother should have to give birth in such circumstances. Does the Prime Minister agree that Musgrove Park cannot wait until 2033 for work to start on a new maternity unit? Will he offer a meeting to local MPs, so we can move it forward? And will he make fixing the maternity scandal across our country a top priority of his Government?”
“I hope at that summit the Prime Minister will negotiate a good deal for our country, our economy and our defence, and that means rejoining the single market. North Devon’s maternity unit has been closed for three weeks due to staff shortages, so women now have to travel for up to two hours to give birth.”
“The Prime Minister said yesterday that Brexit ushered in “a decade of low growth and stalled regeneration.” —[ Official Report , 1 September 2026; Vol. 790, c. 27.] He is right. Our economy is stuck in this mess thanks to the Conservatives—and the leader of Reform UK—and their terrible Brexit deal.”
“There are so many more problems in our political system: too much power in the hands of social media barons who interfere in our politics and crypto billionaires who use donations to buy influence; and too little power in the hands of our people.”
The complete record
Every one of 6,005 lines we hold for Ed Davey, in date order, each linked to its source. Free to read, in full, without an account. Page 31 of 121.
“If we truly want to end health inequality in our country, we have to start with end-of-life care for the homeless, because the people this Bill is trying to help are currently experiencing the worst health care and outcomes of any group in our country. Homeless people can find it difficult or even impossible to advocate for themselves, but with three quotes I want to let three homeless people speak to the House now: “Bad death is being lonely...no friends around you when you’re passing away. Well, death is never really good, but at least it’d be better with friends around....you know, someone to hold your hand and whatever.” “I think when you’re homeless and you’re out on the street so long, you’re surrounded by grief and death and a lot of stuff. It makes you cold. It makes you unfeeling towards people.” “End of life?”
“Homeless people can present with some of the most challenging health issues imaginable: a wide variety of mental health problems, drug and alcohol addictions and severe respiratory conditions. The evidence also suggests that the homeless often lose trust in people—in the hospital doctors who had no choice but to discharge them back on to the streets and in the family members from whom they have become estranged. Their past use of the NHS can make it difficult to patch together a full medical history. They might have self-discharged from hospitals to feed an addiction, or because the institutional setting proved just too much for them. But it is the complex nature of the health and social needs of many homeless people that demands that we act.”
“In discussion with Emily and other housing lawyers, it became absolutely clear to me that the existing law does not go far enough. Dying homeless people need a new basic and automatic right to housing and care that their GP can trigger and that the council cannot question. The right that I am proposing is for appropriate housing, so the local authority will not be able to fob the person off with a bed and breakfast miles away. Indeed, under the Bill, the authority’s social services department would have to get involved, too, by liaising with the GP and other parts of the health service to ensure that the right care and support is there. I do not want to pretend to the House that implementing this will be easy.”
“In many ways, what I am asking for is only a small change, but I believe that it could have profound effects on the lives and deaths of many homeless people. It would force housing departments in councils across England, and their social services departments, to act without question. I think that the Bill would add to the excellent work of the hon. Member for Harrow East (Bob Blackman), who piloted his Homelessness Reduction Act 2017 through the House. His Act will force councils to think harder and longer about preventing homelessness in the first place, and my Bill would force them to prevent people dying without a home. The original idea for my Bill came from my wife, Emily, who is a housing lawyer specialising in social housing issues.”
“In discussing the detail for this simple idea with housing lawyers and palliative care experts, we soon focused on what would count as terminally ill, because estimating when someone is going to die is hardly an exact science. Moreover, we hope that good palliative care will extend life. The test we went for therefore comes from the best practice that GPs are being encouraged to adopt for all their patients—namely, that they should set up a palliative care register. GPs add patients’ names to their palliative care register if they expect that they are at high risk of dying within the next 12 months. The trigger I am proposing for these new rights for seriously ill homeless people would therefore use a system that most doctors already have.”
“In my experience as a constituency MP, the vast majority of so-called intentionally homeless people want nothing more than a roof over their heads. However, this intentionality test has survived at the legal centre of most decisions on homelessness for over 20 years. Today, I am saying that the test should disappear for homeless people who are terminally ill. In future, if a doctor diagnoses a homeless person with advanced ill health and certifies that they expect that person to die within the next 12 months, that person would have an automatic legal right to appropriate housing, along with an appropriate package of care and support for their needs.”
“I do not believe that legislation alone can ever deliver the lofty aims that we in this House often seek. The Bill alone will not be a magical cure. To reach the goal of good end-of-life care for society’s most marginalised people, we will need better integration of services and new types of accommodation—most likely including specialist hospice hostels—and we will need to train staff, in the NHS, in homeless hostels and in hospices. But the law can help, not least as a huge catalyst for change. My starting place is the current housing law that states that somebody has no right to housing if they are “intentionally homeless”. That is a curious legal phrase—cruelly curious—because, in truth, very few people deliberately aim to be on the streets.”
“There are charities, GP practices, hospices and hostels around our country that are helping seriously ill homeless people, and showing what is possible when groups of professionals, volunteers and researchers come together and resolve to find solutions. Yesterday, I visited the Royal Trinity Hospice by Clapham common to see how one of Britain’s amazing hospices has reached out to homeless hostels in its area to share the excellent palliative care it can provide. My first message to the House today is a positive one: we can give decent end-of-life care to everyone, including the most marginalised homeless people, if we resolve to do so. We can as a Parliament say that no homeless person in this country, whoever they are and wherever they are from, need die on our streets.”
“I have spent a fair bit of time since last June’s election finding out more about this horror, thanks to amazing organisations such as Pathway, St Mungo’s, Hospice UK and Shelter, as well as some new work by the Care Quality Commission and some hard evidence and research by a range of academics, especially at University College London and the Faculty for Homeless and Inclusion Health. Listening to these experts and reading their work, including many interviews with homeless people themselves, I have been genuinely shocked about the wave of suffering right under our noses that we continue to ignore. These same organisations are also doing incredible work to tackle this suffering.”
“Although it is difficult to give precise figures on how many people are dying like this, the evidence we have from those working on the homeless frontline is that it is happening time and again. Homeless people are dying alone in pain in Britain in 2018. Let us look at some of the figures we do have. The average age at death of a homeless person is about 47 years. Homeless people are attending at A&E departments six times as often as people with a home. They are admitted to hospital four times as often, and they are staying three times as long.”
“I beg to move, That leave be given to bring in a Bill to make provision about end of life care and support for homeless people with terminal illnesses, including through the provision of housing for such people; and for connected purposes. Not having a roof over your head at night and being homeless on the streets must be frightening—cold, lonely, depressing. To be seriously ill, as well as homeless, seems to me to be beyond frightening, with people wondering when they will die, when the pain will stop and whether anyone will care or even notice. Yet homeless people are dying on Britain’s streets, in our parks, in doorways or, if they are lucky, in ill-equipped hostels.”
“I thank the Minister for giving way and for allowing me time to recover. He keeps making a point about police reserves, but for the benefit of good public debate, will he tell the House—either today or in a letter—what the recommended level of reserves is? What do the Chartered Institute of Public Finance and Accountancy and Her Majesty’s inspectorate of constabulary set out? Will he tell us the right level of reserves so that we may judge the comments that he keeps making?”
“With this chaos and delay, is not one thing increasingly clear: the Government’s promise to give EU citizens, and their families and employers, the legal certainty that they deserve is now totally broken? When will 3 million EU citizens get more than warm words and unfinished negotiations from this Brexit Conservative Government?”
“Thank you, Mr Speaker—that was a difficult choice for you. The Secretary of State has today acted when a franchiser overpaid, hitting its shareholders. Will he commit to the House that when a franchiser under-delivers, hitting the passengers, he will also act?”
“The right hon. Gentleman is a fantastic campaigner on such issues and I congratulate him on bringing the issue to the House of Commons. In my constituency, Kingston Hospital just announced with no consultation that it will impose parking charges on blue badge holders, citing that people are doing it everywhere else in the NHS and that it is an NHS-wide issue. Does he therefore not agree with me that it is up to the Government to give a clear lead and, at the very least, get rid of parking charges for blue badge holders?”
“The hon. Lady is being generous in giving way. I strongly support the Bill. She made an important point about enforcement. The House is good at making regulations, but often they are not enforced properly to help the most vulnerable people, and I believe that enforcement agencies and local authorities need more support. She made a point about retaliatory evictions when local authorities take action, and in my experience local authorities that take action often do not also help the tenant to ensure that the landlord does not behave badly. I would welcome the hon. Lady’s comments on that.”
“May I ask the hon. Lady a question that I asked the hon. Member for Westminster North (Ms Buck)? Does she agree that we need to ensure that local authorities are enforcing these and other rules in order to protect our most vulnerable citizens, and that the Government should monitor and compare authorities to establish which of them are going after the rogue landlords, and should name and shame those that are not?”
“It is important that the House understands that our predecessors have tried to act on this: this Bill rightly links back to the Landlord and Tenant Act 1985, and I served on the Housing Bill Committee of 2003-04 with the hon. Member for Westminster North (Ms Buck) when we reformed some of these laws and introduced the housing health and safety rating system, which has proved rather complicated. The experience of that attempt to regulate rogue landlords is the reason we have gone back to some of the laws of the past which the hon. Lady is rightly bringing to the attention of the House today. There is a history here, and we need to understand that.”
“The hon. Gentleman missed out one regulation from his list—the one on minimum energy efficiency standards in the private rented sector, which I brought to this House and which it passed, and which can be a huge attack on fuel poverty. Will he join me to ensure the Government go ahead and implement those from April this year, so that we can tackle fuel poverty and the worst examples of uninsulated homes in the private rented sector?”
“I welcome the statement and the Lord Chancellor’s decision to widen the review’s remit. That will command support on both sides of the House. Has he been informed whether the Crown Prosecution Service and police are reviewing the many other serious allegations against Worboys and whether there is any chance of further charges being brought against him before he is released? This is the question that many of the victims really want answered.”
“I thank the hon. Gentleman for giving way; he is making an excellent point about an excellent report. May I give him one example of where we need to see more short-term accommodation and where we need the certainty of the financial models that he is talking about? A lot of homeless people suffering from terminal illness have a right to accommodation, but when local authorities and others get together to provide that accommodation, it is exactly the sort of accommodation that he has been talking about. That accommodation, which is so needed in many communities, will not be provided unless this problem is sorted out.”
“On that key point, those in the Treasury always want to control everything and to ring-fence funds, so that nothing more can be used. However, if the funds run out, the need of the people whom we are talking about is still there. We need to get that point over to Treasury Ministers, and I am sure that the Minister would wish to do that, so this is supportive of her case to the Treasury. It seems to me that expenditure should be demand-led, not Treasury-capped and controlled. The idea that we would exclude people who are among the most vulnerable in our society because the money had run out seems to me absurd and wrong.”
“May I congratulate the Home Secretary on having just made a positive economic case for immigration? However, how does she think that the message given by the immigration cap, Brexit, a hostile approach to immigrants and the general rhetoric of many of her Conservative colleagues help to make that case?”
“I congratulate the right hon. Lady and her Committee on this excellent report. She makes a powerful point on local authorities. Is it not even more powerful when we consider that local authorities are best placed to engage with the local community in order to provide support for those asylum seekers? There are many local communities, churches and other faith communities who will want to be beside and support those people, who, we should remember, are basically destitute. By not using local authorities in that way, we are preventing that extra community support from being given.”
“I am sorry to intervene on the right hon. Lady again. She is talking about contracting; does she think it is an interesting idea to open it up to local authorities, perhaps working through strategic migration partnerships, so that they could compete? We might even see several different types of contract with several different types of provider, so we could learn lessons.”
“My experience of asylum seekers, and I deal with quite a lot in my surgery, is that they want to be involved, to give and to contribute, and when they are stopped from doing that, they are frustrated. Guess what? It does not help their health, their relationship with other people in the community, or the taxpayer—it does not help anybody. Why do we put barriers in the way, particularly of this group? People say different things about illegal immigrants or whatever, but we should surely be allowing this group to engage in activity, whether it is paid work or voluntary.”
“There is a big point about how we change the nature of the discussion, the debate, about foreigners in our country. I am really worried, not just because of Brexit, but because of other things we see, that we are seen as an uncaring, unfriendly and unwelcoming country, which is completely against British traditions. If we reorganise many aspects of policy, and this is a good one to start with, we can begin to change that. That brings me to my final two points. I know this point is not directly within the remit of this report, but it links to it, and the right hon. Member for Normanton, Pontefract and Castleford (Yvette Cooper) mentioned it. The point is the right of these particular asylum seekers awaiting decisions to be able to engage in work and voluntary work in the community.”
“Given that the Government are seeking more local authorities to step up to the plate, her experience, and what she did with others, is quite telling. They went out and petitioned in the streets. They asked the people of Lancaster, “Would you like to see Lancaster as a city, and our overall community, welcome asylum seekers and refugees from Syria and elsewhere?” Although, of course, a few people did not want to sign the petition—you will not be surprised by that, Mr Hanson—the vast majority of people did. The people in Lancaster—I do not represent it—said “Yes, the local authority and our community should be moving forward and offering to the Government that we should be part of it.” That is the point I am trying to make: if we give that opportunity to people out there, they will be far more welcoming than, say, the Daily Mail .”
“We all know that civil servants in Whitehall like to have one organisation to deal with. They do not like lots of organisations, as that is all too time-consuming and complicated. I am sorry, but they are going to have to get used to dealing with more than one organisation. Given that we have these 12 strategic migration partnerships, at least they have a model that means they do not have to deal with every single local authority in the country. I want to stress the point about involving people in civic society. I recently visited Lancaster where I met a wonderful lady called Mo Kelly from the local Quaker movement. She was looking at how refugees were welcomed in her city. She found that there was no real provision of accommodation or services, because the local authority had not thought that it should volunteer.”
“They were a good policy innovation, but they need to be developed further, because they will solve many of the Government’s problems, as well as making the experience of asylum seekers and refugees far more acceptable and improving quality. I think there is a huge appetite in local authorities and local communities to do more and be involved, but at the moment they are excluded. That is not sensible policy, is it? If there are people out there who want to get involved and play an active, positive role, we should try to facilitate that. The current contracting model militates against that—it excludes. I do not think it increases accountability, far from it, it is the reverse. Accountability is not direct through the Home Office, but to the people and the communities. If they are more involved it will be a much better system.”
“I am sure it is, but it would be very helpful to have it on the record that the approach is very different from the hostile environment approach seen elsewhere in the immigration system. That is important as we approach the issues raised by this excellent report. There has been some discussion about how we organise asylum accommodation in the future. The report goes very much in the right direction, away from a centralised, private contracting approach to a different model. In many ways, the report could have gone even further, but its stress on involving local authorities is absolutely right, and the idea of strategic migration partnerships at the heart of the system is vital. Those partnerships are beginning to bear fruit.”
“Again, I welcome the report. I will start my brief remarks by talking about the Government’s overall approach to asylum seekers and refugees. I want to ask the Minister whether he will say on the record that it is a different approach, a different philosophy, from that for dealing with illegal immigrants. The Government have developed what they call the “hostile environment” approach to illegal immigrants. We can debate the wrongs and rights and the shape of that, but the hostile environment policy would clearly be wrong if applied to asylum seekers and refugees. Our country should be adopting an approach of welcome and caring. I invite the Minister to say that that is the Government’s policy and approach.”
“His wife, having had huge mental health problems, is now working in our NHS. If we engage with people as human beings—guess what—they want to give back and act as human beings, and be part of our society. We have to do everything to enable human beings to be human.”
“I do. I can give an example from my own constituency from a few years ago of a gentleman from Kosovo who, with his wife, had suffered terrible trauma in that country during the troubles. It took me three years to get him the right to work. When he got it he went off very happy. He came back the next week in tears, because he had applied to work as a bus driver and the bus company wanted him to be there for 12 months to justify the training. I had to ring up the bus company and say, “I will personally guarantee your training costs, just give him a job!” He got a job. He was one of their best bus drivers; he took all the overtime, and helped old ladies on and off with their shopping. He then set up a business and now employs other people. He pays more tax than I do.”
“They had no support, no right to work, but they existed as human beings. We need to think about that group of people, because they are the most destitute and vulnerable people living in our country today. I do not know whether they can be included in a new approach to asylum accommodation, but I think they should be considered as the Government review this area. I thank the right hon. Member for Normanton, Pontefract and Castleford and her Committee for this report, and I hope the Government respond positively to it.”
“The hon. Lady is absolutely right. We have been talking about mental health for all people in this country, but the people who have been traumatised and tortured, escaping violence and persecution, suffer the most. I will end on one further point, which is not about asylum seekers, but about failed asylum seekers, specifically those failed asylum seekers whom the Home Office rightly does not want to send back to their country, because their country is benighted. It is a very odd class of people, but they exist in quite large numbers. I had a lot of cases of people from Zimbabwe in this situation in years gone past. They did not meet the Home Office tests as an asylum seeker, but we were not sending them back, because of our concerns about what Mugabe and ZANU-PF would do to them. Those people were in limbo.”
“Members today about constituents across our country whose lives have been blighted by this. Why continue? The Minister has to stand up to the official briefings he is getting. He has to stand up to the nonsense of continued obfuscation and cover-up. Surely he must stand up and say at the Dispatch Box that he will support the motion, and that the Government will set up a judicial inquiry as soon as possible.”
“The minute is dated the next day and states: “The meeting…was arranged by Dr. Detering in Berlin in order to determine Professor Tuchmann’s general opinion on the validity and quality of the work that had been carried out on Primodos.” According to this minute, the first question posed was: “Did we, as a Company, carry out all the studies that we were supposed to?” The answer was: “In Professor Tuchmann’s opinion we should have done much more. He expressed the view that after discovering that a certain dose was embryolethal in rabbits and in rats, we should have certainly carried out teratological studies in primates in 1968.” This is a scandal. They knew. The lawyers were saying that the company would be liable, and that it would be found guilty in a court and would have to pay. Why does this continue? We have heard from many hon.”
“Page 7 of the memo states that Mr Clothier told Schering “there were 2 alternatives open to us—one is to establish a voluntary scheme of compensation in which a justifiable claim will be given compensation without proof of liability but simply accepting moral responsibility.” The other alternative was to take such claims to court. Dr Detering of Schering said he was “hesitant in establishing a scheme as the product is marketed world-wide. If we introduce this scheme in one country, we should introduce it in other countries.” Back in 1977, people were trying to escape their moral responsibilities. Other prime issues were raised in this minute but, because of the time, I will go on to the other minute, which is the report of a meeting with Professor Tuchmann-Duplessis, a scientist from Paris, on 16 February 1978.”
“Mr Clothier went into this letter in some detail and suggested that it would be dynamite in the hands of the claimants.” Another memo from Dr Pitchford to Dr Friebel, dated 22 July 1969, was raised by Mr Clothier. This memo was a summary of events and stated that Schering should abandon the product for use in pregnancy testing. Mr Clothier wished to know what had been done on the Schering side in response. No answer. Mr Clothier felt, if the case were tried to the end by a judge, the chances were that the company would be found to be in neglect of its duty. Clothier stated that there seemed to be a 5:1 chance that, if there were a malformation in a child and the mother took Primodos while pregnant, it was the fault of the drug.”
“I particularly want to refer to documents that he found in the national archives in Berlin, which include minutes of meetings between the company, Schering Chemicals Ltd, its lawyer and a scientific adviser. I will read extracts from the minutes of meetings held on 20 and 21 December 1977 at the Goldsmith Building, Temple, London, where Schering was getting the legal advice of a Mr Clothier, QC. The extracts will show that there has been a cover-up over years, and it has to stop here, today. We have to pass this motion and the Government have to act—no more cover-ups. The minutes state: “Mr Clothier then went on to the letter written by Dr. Pitchford and Dr. Bye to Dr. Friebel in Germany (6th June 1968) requesting that… it was important that something more must be done.”
“I am here because of my constituent Sue Illsley, who took this drug when she was a teenager. She believes that her daughter has suffered disabilities as a result, and that has obviously affected her whole life. I pay tribute to the right hon. Member for Hemel Hempstead (Sir Mike Penning) and the hon. Member for Bolton South East (Yasmin Qureshi), and I hope that the Minister will read their speeches, because they made some powerful points about the evidence, and he needs to ensure that his officials look into that in detail. I want to use some evidence given to me by Jason Farrell, an investigative news reporter at Sky News who has done a fantastic job over many years to bring this matter to light.”
“It is good news that the Prime Minister is attending President Macron’s summit on climate change in Paris today, but may I warn the Secretary of State that President Macron is positioning Paris as the world’s leader in green finance? To tackle that threat and to protect London, Ministers must back the Bank of England’s taskforce on climate-related financial disclosures and bring in new mandatory corporate requirements on fossil fuel assets.”
“Will the Minister ask NHS Improvement to produce a report on what has happened at King’s, so that Parliament can look at the report to learn the lessons and to find out who was right?”
“The Secretary of State might not be aware of this yet, but on 4 December I wrote to her to ask for an urgent meeting to discuss the funding of high needs in Kingston. Kingston’s high needs budget is set to be overspent this year by £6.5 million, or 35%—the worst in London. Will she meet me as soon as possible to discuss this?”
“The Foreign Secretary is right to say how shocking the war in Yemen is: the humanitarian catastrophe there is on a biblical scale. Will he tell the House what discussions he had with Sultan Qaboos bin Said about how to end the conflict in Yemen? What role does he see Oman playing in bringing about peace?”
“Will the Minister confirm to the House that it is his policy that the European Court of Human Rights will still have jurisdiction over Britain after we leave the EU?”
“I strongly agree with the Home Secretary that all our thoughts are with those affected by and suffering from these vile crimes. In September, the Met Police Commissioner, Cressida Dick, said that counter-terrorism work “puts a strain not just on counter-terror police but neighbourhood officers and all our officers and staff”. Does the Home Secretary agree with the commissioner?”
“I welcome today’s big message that our railways work better when track and train are operated together and the fact that the Secretary of State is now trying to correct the big mistake in the original rail privatisation, when his party separated track and train ownership. May I ask him, on behalf of my constituents in Surbiton, to consider the urgent safety case for a new staircase at platforms 3 and 4 at Surbiton train station, given how dangerously overcrowded they can become during the evening peak?”
“I am prepared to accept the Government’s stated position that they will ensure that many EU citizens living here will stay after this negotiation. I am sure that that is the case. However, I hope that the Minister will have the frankness and honesty to accept the facts and figures that show that many EU nationals have already left since the referendum, which is damaging many aspects of our society and economy.”