Dame Siobhain McDonagh

IN THEIR OWN WORDS

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2,976 lines on record for Dame Siobhain McDonagh, in date order, each linked to its source. Free to read, without an account. Most recent 500 lines shown. Search to find more. Page 7 of 10.

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1. “I ask him personally to be up to that challenge, to stand up to the status quo and the establishment in the medical profession and pharmaceutical companies, and to consider our glioblastoma manifesto. First, we need a target of getting 200 glioblastoma patients into clinical trials each year on a drug that has the potential to change the course of the disease. That would be 1,000 patients over the lifetime of a Parliament. With those trials, we can begin to understand what works and what does not. Secondly, the NHS should trial on brain tumours every drug that gets licensed to deal with other tumours, as long as there are not indications that it would be dangerous. Repurposing those drugs would be a cheap way to make a huge difference. It is sometimes the only way that makes a difference.”

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2. “That has simply not been happening with glioblastoma, for which there has been no improvement in 40 years. The drug companies will not change on their own. Unless we demand that they invest in those drugs, nothing will ever change; it will go on and on. Believe me, I do not want my worst enemy to go through what we have over the last 18 months. After speaking to some of the experts in the field and having conversations with all the main brain tumour charities, we have been able to develop a four-point manifesto that will make a real difference. As it happens, it will not cost very much either. I would be very grateful if the Minister could respond to that point. On a personal level, I understand that the Minister is standing down at the next election. He has a year to 18 months to leave a real mark on this area of work.”

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3. “But why did it take a letter from somebody like me to get the drugs for a new clinical trial, instead of the other pharmaceutical companies responding to Europe’s expert on brain tumours? It completely baffles me, but I suppose that is the world we live in. This experience tells me that the market is not working. It tells me that because only 3,200 people are diagnosed with a glioblastoma every year, it is not profitable for the pharmaceutical companies to invest in glioblastoma treatments. The market is very small, so it is not worth their while. As policymakers, it is our job to see where the market is working and where it is not. As legislators, it is our job to change, cajole and, ultimately, legislate to make sure that it does work.”

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4. “There are many reasons why survival rates have not changed for brain tumours in 20 years, but one is in the title of this debate: there are nowhere near enough appraisals for new brain tumour drugs and nowhere near enough clinical trials. I will give an insight into how difficult it is to get a new drug on the market for glioblastoma. When my sister’s brilliant oncologist, Dr Paul Mulholland, set up a new clinical trial, he could not get the pharmaceutical companies to give him the drugs he needed. As a result, he had to rely on me, a Member of Parliament with no medical training, to write to the pharmaceutical chief executives asking them to donate to his trial. We were successful. We met senior members in four drug companies, and Roche was absolutely brilliant in its response.”

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5. “The five-year survival rate for bowel cancer has gone from 58% in 2010 to 60% in 2020. I do not in any way mean to take attention away from those cancers. I am absolutely delighted that survival rates have increased, that there is innovation and that there are trials across the board. However, when I meet constituents who have had a cancer diagnosis for something other than a brain tumour, I regularly hear that they have had access to experimental trials. I appreciate that that is because I have a south London constituency and we are close to the brilliant Royal Marsden. When it comes to brain tumours, it is not that there are only a few trials; there are zero, with not many on the horizon.”

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6. “Although there are other treatments and drugs on the market for other cancers, the 3,200 people who are diagnosed with glioblastoma each year have had almost no improvement at all. The average life expectancy for someone diagnosed with a glioblastoma is nine months—do not believe the figures that suggest it is 18 months. The five-year survival rate is only 12.9%—just 1% better than the five-year survival rate in 2010. For other cancers, the story is very different. For someone diagnosed with lung cancer in 2010, the five-year survival rate was 10.3%—not dissimilar to the survival rate for glioblastoma. The difference is that by 2020, the five-year survival rate for lung cancer had doubled to 21%. For some undiagnosed with breast cancer in 2010, the survival rate was 83.2%. By 2020, the five-year survival rate was all the way up to 85.9%.”

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7. “My contribution is grounded in the year and seven months I spent caring for my sister, experiencing what the NHS treatment is like at first hand, and suffering as it became clear that over the past 40 years there has been no improvement in the treatment of glioblastoma—a brain tumour. The drug used to treat glioblastoma today, temozolomide, is the same drug that has been used for the past 20 years. That is not a national policy challenge; it is a frustration that I have lived. When a person is diagnosed with a glioblastoma, they get six weeks’ radiotherapy, followed by six months’ chemotherapy with temozolomide if they can manage it. The drug was introduced in 2005, and it is called the gold-standard treatment in our NHS. That is a bastardisation of the English language. It is not a gold standard. It is not even a plastic standard.”

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8. “It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mrs Harris. I thank the hon. Member for Strangford (Jim Shannon), who is the closest thing this House has to a national treasure, for securing a debate that is so important to me. This debate is about appraisals for cancer medicines. As with any debate about cancer in the House of Commons, there will be Members who have a personal connection to the issue. I will not spend a lot of time explaining my family’s situation, but for me this debate is different. It is not like the other debates that we take part in as parliamentarians. For some, we are experts in the field; for others, we are explaining the experiences of our constituents; and for others, we are speaking about what we have heard from stakeholders.”

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9. “Does the hon. Lady agree that it seems crazy that in a system as universal as the NHS there should not be access to outcome data? To give just one example, South West London Elective Orthopaedic Centre at Epsom Hospital is the largest hip and knee replacement centre outside of America. It is the lowest for blood risks, and has the lowest infection rates and quickest turnaround. It has its own small charity and keeps the data, making £1 million a year from it. That could go some way towards paying for the latest cancer drugs.”

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10. “Those 91,000 did not include people suffering from a glioblastoma. We are not anywhere near NICE. We have not got that far. The drugs are not there. There is nothing. None of this works for people with glioblastoma. I do not want to mislead the Minister into thinking that I care only about my sister, Margaret. I draw hon. Members’ attention to early-day motion 1233, in my name, to commend the life of Laura Nuttall, a young woman diagnosed with a glioblastoma aged 18. She died on 22 May. I want to pass on all our condolences to her mum, Nicola, her sister, Gracie, and her father. Laura was a shining light and an ambassador for the Brain Tumour Charity. Although she was told that had only a year to live, she managed to live for four and a half years and secured a 2:1 in her degree.”

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11. “My constituents Mrs L and Mr M, from Hong Kong, came to the UK on a British national overseas passport. They came to see me because they had been paying into a pension for the whole of their careers and sold their home before coming to the UK, but because of their BNO visa status, their bank account was frozen at the direction of the Chinese state, in contradiction to Hong Kong law. They are not alone; the Home Office has issued BNO visas to more than 160,000 Hongkongers who have moved to the UK. Does the Home Secretary think it is right that at the behest of the Chinese communist party, BNO passport holders are being denied access to their own money, from their own bank accounts—”

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12. “The NHS special school eye care service was created after a shocking statistic came out: children with learning disabilities are 28 times more likely to have a sight problem than other children. Four out of five children with a severe learning disability attend a special school, and decades’ worth of studies and reports have all identified higher levels of sight problems in children who attend special schools. We found out that 40% of children in such schools need glasses, but because children have complex needs, they are often unable to get a check-up. Their behaviour makes it hard, and families are hard pressed to attend all the appointments.”

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13. “It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mrs Harris. I thank my hon. Friend the Member for Battersea (Marsha De Cordova) for securing this debate, which is about such an important issue. I know that the debate is about a national eye health strategy, and I agree with all the important points raised by my hon. Friend, who continues to be an inspirational campaigner on disability rights. I would go so far as to agree with all hon. Members who have contributed to the debate so far. But I want to focus on something more specific. In April 2021, the NHS started a scheme that provided sight tests and dispensed glasses to children in special schools in the familiar surroundings of their own schools.”

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14. “Given that there are only a few weeks before the service will have to start making staff redundant, I urge the Minister to publish the evaluation as soon as possible, so that parents, children and everyone involved has the certainty that they absolutely deserve.”

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15. “Reshma Hirani, assistant head, says: “This service should be part of the NHS core offer so that it never stops. My pupils have struggled to access eye care in the community and now they have, quite rightly, something that is going to transform their lives. Well done NHS England for thinking about schools like Kingsley and our children. As a Qualified Teacher of Children and Young People with Vision Impairment I can now put in the support that children need, with the confidence that I have all the right information to hand. It really is the gift of sight.” I reiterate that NHS England’s evaluation still has not been published.”

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16. “I know that the Minister recently met charities and eye care bodies to hear about the service, but it still is not clear what NHS England will do. I do not have many huge asks of the Minister today. I just want a very simple fix that will give certainty to parents. Will he publish the evaluation as a matter of urgency? If he can make sure that the evaluation is published, I have no doubt that it will provide evidence of the clinical need for such a service. Once we have the evaluation, we can start to look to the future of the scheme. I am convinced that NHS England should continue the day school service after July; I hope that he can see why that is absolutely common sense. I conclude with a quote from a new special school, Kingsley High School, which has used the service.”

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17. “It is important that I can show him how the scheme looks on the ground. After the scheme was extended to 83 special schools, giving 9,000 children eye care that they might not otherwise have had, the further roll-out of the scheme was halted in August 2022 for an evaluation, which has not yet been published. The NHS now says that the scheme is just proof of concept, and that the proof-of-concept service will end in July—in two months’ time. Parents, schools and eye care providers are absolutely gutted. More than anything, they are confused about what will happen next. There is still no sign of the evaluation, so there is a very real prospect that there will be no eye care services at all in schools after September 2023. I hope that will not be the case.”

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18. “In 2015, I visited my local school for children with severe special needs, Perseid School in Morden—an all-through school for three to 18-year-olds led by the inspirational headteacher Tina Harvey, who retires after 20 years in July. I thank her on behalf of all her pupils and families and our entire community for her tireless and brilliant work in her school, which is rated outstanding by Ofsted. At the school, I met Alyson, a mum, who told me that her daughter Ellie was getting used to eye care in the familiar environment of her school, and not having to take time out for hospital eye clinic appointments. That gave Alyson one less thing to worry about as a parent, and had greatly reduced Ellie’s anxiety. I invite the Minister to come to the school to see the work being done there; his predecessor has visited.”

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19. “It was just common sense: bringing eye care into special schools solves the problem of missed appointments and ensures that thousands of children who would have had their eyesight disability ignored get the healthcare that they deserve. That value cannot be overstated. Children with special needs have enough on their plate; if they also suffer from eyesight problems, but cannot explain what is wrong and can never get the problem checked out by a doctor, it must be awful. Parents and special schools have praised the scheme, because school is a familiar place for children and the service is also cost effective for the NHS. It is one solution to many of the problems in eye care: it helps to get children out of hospital services, and it addresses health inequalities for this patient group for just tens of pounds.”

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20. “The hon. Member is absolutely correct, and we know from the special school eye care service that so many pupils’ behaviour improves as a result of having glasses. As I have already said, many people with severe learning difficulties find it very challenging to go to appointments or have their eyes examined. We have learned that attending an eye care appointment has been such a stress that 55% of children with special needs miss the appointments that they have had booked. That is not just an extra and unnecessary stress on the NHS, which certainly does not need that at the moment; it also means that the children are not getting the eye care that they need. That is where the NHS special school eye care service comes in.”

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21. “In the last year, we have had 72 two-bed, 34 three-bed and two four-bed properties to let, with 10,000 families on the waiting list. That tells me that we are not building enough new homes or doing enough to encourage new developments. The dominance of huge building firms, and the decline of small and medium-sized builders, is part of that story. We need to do something different, and we need to do it now.”

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22. “The best example is, of course, Jeff Fairburn of Persimmon, who got a bonus of more than £100 million when the company’s sales had been 50% financed by Help to Buy, or the British taxpayer. Whatever we have been doing as policymakers, it is clearly not working. Home ownership is lower than it was in 2003. On the current trajectory, it is unlikely to increase. Since the Conservatives came into power, 800,000 fewer households under 45 own their home, and nearly 1 million more people are renting. Fewer than 7,000 social homes were built in England last year, and 1.6 million households are waiting for social housing. Over the past 40 years, the overall social housing stock has declined by 1.4 million homes. Big numbers often mean very little, but I will talk about my borough of Merton, which is a small, outer London authority.”

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23. “The job of the Government is to ensure that the houses that are needed are built. Let me turn to Help to Buy. I did think, “Dear God” when I read that the Government might be thinking of bringing back Help to Buy, which they sold to us as an equity loan to help first-time buyers get cash together to get on the housing ladder. Along with so many other policies, the most well-off have benefited the most. Instead of opening up home ownership to the next generation, all the scheme has done is to speed up slightly the purchase date for people who were already likely to buy, often via family help. More people on high incomes—those earning more than £80,000—have used the Help to Buy scheme than lower earners. The main effect of Help to Buy has been to inflate house prices and give very large bonuses to chief executives.”

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24. “If we add the FTSE 350 house building companies, the collective land bank was a staggering 470,068 plots, and yet those companies completed just 86,685 homes in the previous year. Where is the punitive or preventive action to prevent this from happening? It is not the small and medium-sized firms that are doing this. Barratt Homes is Britain’s biggest land banker, and as of 2020, Barratt owned 80,324 land bank plots. Second on the list is Taylor Wimpey, which owns 77,000 land bank plots, and third is Persimmon, with 67,205. I do not blame Barratt or Taylor Wimpey or Persimmon. I blame the Government for creating an environment where it pays to leave land empty and undeveloped. The job of a private property developer is to make money. That is what we expect of a private business.”

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25. “It is incredibly important to bring them back, and I am glad that the Labour Front Benchers have committed to doing just that. The Government might think that they are keeping nimbys happy and protecting local authorities, but I would like to give them some advice. They are betting current political support against the future. Current estimates suggest that only a third of the children born today will ever become homeowners. The English housing survey says that the proportion of homeowners aged 45 to 54 fell from 74% in 2009-10 to 65% in 2021-22, and it is estimated to fall to 30% in the year 2070. For young people aged 25 to 34, home ownership has fallen from 70% in the mid-1990s to 40% today. We must deal with land bankers. In 2019, the FTSE 100 house building companies were sitting on land banks of more than 300,000 plots between them.”

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26. “There are 19,334 hectares of unbuilt green belt land within a 10-minute walk of a London train station, where there is enough space for 1 million new homes. We should be building affordable, good-quality homes on the land. Our best national estimates show that around 1.6 million households are waiting for social housing. Over the past 40 years, the overall social housing stock has declined by 1.4 million homes. We have a shortage of homes in this country and we cannot afford to prevent developments on land that is not really green. Previous speakers have already referred to housing targets. We all remember when the target of 300,000 new homes was scrapped. The Government gave in and scrapped mandatory house building targets for local authorities.”

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27. “They house 10% of London’s population—that is one in 10 people in all homes, not just the rental market. The problem is that giant firms can buy land and sit on the asset for a number of years, whereas smaller firms do not have the funds for that and are much more likely to go out and get planning permission quickly so they can develop. To encourage those kinds of firms, we need to prevent the few large developers from dominating the market. We need to give smaller firms the planning support and access to finance that will give them a chance to compete. Much is being said about the green belt, but not all green belt is green. I do not mean the genuine rolling fields, ancient woodland or areas of substantial natural beauty. I am talking about the car washes, the waste plants and the scrubland that no one would ever dream of calling green.”

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28. “At the heart of why small and medium-sized building firms are struggling is that they cannot compete with a few huge firms that have the scale and monopoly power to keep them out of the market. The eight largest house builders build more than 50% of all the new homes in the country, and the latest research suggests that small builders now produce just 10%. That was not always the case. In the 1980s, small firms were responsible for around two thirds of new homes, but since 2007, the number of small and medium-sized house builders has halved. The picture is similar in the housing association sector. Some 20% of housing associations account for 95% of all registered housing stock in the country. The top housing associations, known as the G15, dominate the London property scene and build one in four of all new homes in London.”

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29. “I am making the point that the Government cannot possibly expect to deal with a housing crisis while constantly churning through housing Ministers. How can they possibly run the country’s plans to build housing and meet targets if there is a new housing Minister, on average, every nine months? When we debate the important question of why small and medium-sized house builders are struggling, a reasonable person might think it had something to do with the fact that we have had 14 housing Ministers in 10 years. I am having a great deal of fun doing this, as you can tell, Mr Robertson, but I want to be more constructive. In other words, I believe we should be taking on the big house-building monopolies.”

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30. “Member for Esher and Walton (Dominic Raab), six months; the right hon. Member for North West Hampshire (Kit Malthouse), 12 months; the right hon. Member for Tatton (Esther McVey), six months; the right hon. Member for Tamworth (Christopher Pincher) an unprecedented 23 months; the right hon. Member for Pudsey (Stuart Andrew), four months—back to normal business—the right hon. Member for Nuneaton (Mr Jones), nearly two months; the hon. Member for North East Derbyshire (Lee Rowley), nearly two months; and the right hon. and learned Member for South East Cambridgeshire (Lucy Frazer), three months. I welcome the hon. Member for Redditch (Rachel Maclean) to her role. She is already a veteran housing Minister compared to those on that list.”

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31. “It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mr Robertson. I thank the hon. Member for Northampton South (Andrew Lewer) for securing a debate about such an important issue, and it is good to see the housing Minister in her place today. I have taken part in a lot of Westminster Hall debates about housing under this Government and spoken to a lot of different housing Ministers over the past decade—14, to be precise. Since 2013, we have had the former Member for Hertford and Stortford, Mark Prisk, who lasted 13 months; and the former Member for Keighley, Kris Hopkins, who lasted 10. Impressively, the right hon. Member for Great Yarmouth (Brandon Lewis) served a whole 24 months. The former Member for Croydon Central, Gavin Barwell, lasted 10 months; the right hon. Member for Reading West (Sir Alok Sharma), six months; the right hon.”

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32. “I commend my hon. Friend on his speech on this really important issue. Does he agree that language is very important and that the word “affordable” suggests something that people on a normal income could afford? However, we all know that the word “affordable” in housing circles actually means 80% of market rent, which is unaffordable for most people. In some of the constituencies represented by Members present, that is unaffordable even for the Member themselves.”

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33. “And the ants are obvious, crawling across the floor. Last week, when we beseeched the homeless department to move them somewhere else, the only place that it had to offer was in Reading. That family chose their ant-infested home over having to be moved many miles away from where they had any support or help. I give that example not because it is unique, but because it is absolutely appalling. Unless we do something, we will have more children die of damp and mould growth, and we will have more desperate families. We will pay for that not just in human lives but in taxpayers’ money well into the next century. It is time to do something now.”

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34. “Once we remove a desperate, vulnerable family from their environment, there are consequences for the children in school attainment and attendance, and all sorts of other things. I say without any pleasure at all that, in the statistics of child mortality between 2019 and 2022, 34 children’s deaths were seen as a direct consequence of their temporary accommodation. I am happy to take the Minister to the temporary accommodation that many of the families that I represent have to live in. I will talk to the House about Mr and Mrs N. They live in a shed in the garden of a house in multiple occupation. They have the benefit of the fact that it is in Streatham, so only around the corner from my constituency. They have two rooms and four children. The smell in the bathroom is so appalling that, put simply, no one would want to enter it.”

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35. “Also, when we use the word “temporary”—as I said earlier, language is important—at the moment it means five years. By the time we get to the end of five years, it will mean 10 years, or maybe 15 or 20 years—we just do not know. There is simply no way out of this appalling struggle. Currently, in England, 99,000 families—including 125,000 children—live in temporary accommodation. That is an increase of 71% between 2012 and 2018, and a further 41% between 2018 and 2022. I give hon. Members those figures so that they have some idea of the scale of the problem we are experiencing. In June 2022, 26,130 of those families were placed in a borough outside their home, taking their kids out of school, their families away from their support networks, and individuals from jobs and away from NHS facilities that they might desperately need.”

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36. “There is a consequence to not building homes other than the numbers, and that is families living in temporary accommodation. That currently costs the UK taxpayer £1.6 billion a year. I do not know about other hon. Members in this Chamber, but I can think of a lot better ways to spend £1.6 billion. I stand to speak out of desperation from what I see every single Friday at my advice surgery. I represent half of the London borough of Merton, which is certainly not the London borough under the greatest pressure for housing or temporary accommodation, but since last April even Merton has seen a 41% increase in the numbers of people in temporary accommodation. The numbers are tiny in comparison with the 3,000 in Hackney, but our numbers have increased from 243 to 343 units.”

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37. “One in eight of the staff in our nurseries is paid £5 an hour because they are too young for the national living wage. That is how nurseries manage to keep going.”

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38. “The money offered by the Government for the current proposal is £240 million, but the Women’s Budget Group says it will cost £1.8 billion, and that famously Trotskyist organisation the CBI reckons it will cost £1.6 billion. The Women’s Budget Group believes that the total cost in September 2025 will be £9.4 billion. The amount paid by the Government will be £4.2 billion, so it will need more than half as much again to make the scheme work. We are either going to collapse the nurseries that currently exist because they will not have anybody to cross-subsidise with, or the places will not be there for those children. It is not about the mums and it is not about the nursery, so is it about the staffing? Our childcare works on the back of very young women being paid very little.”

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39. “This scheme benefits only 600,000 of them, and more—729,000 of them—will have no benefit from these proposals. However, it is not just the mums and the families who are going to have a problem. The nurseries—the providers themselves—already have problems. We know that 5,400 nurseries have closed since 2021, because they simply could not make up for the increasing cost of gas, electricity and staffing or for the fact that the current free hours are not free to the provider. It costs about £7.49 an hour to keep a child in a nursery, but that is only subsidised to the tune of £5.50 by the Government’s plan. Promises have been made that the difference will be made up to prevent more nurseries from closing.”

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40. “Friend the Member for Newcastle upon Tyne North (Catherine McKinnell) said, find nothing in these proposals that is going to assist them, because they really click in in September 2024 and September 2025. We could cynically ask whether those dates have been arrived at because they will be after the general election and the current Chancellor may not have to deliver on the promises. More worryingly, the Sutton Trust has found that only 20% of the poorest third of families will benefit from the proposals. Those are the women and the families who need to work to improve their chances. We all agree that working is the best way out of poverty, or at least that it should be. In September 2024, there will be 1,369,000 children between the ages of nine months and two years.”

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41. “At a time when we know that we need more people in the workforce, mothers are not entering it because they cannot afford to do so, even if they want to carry on working to develop their skills, they hope for a better career in the future or they simply need the money. Something that makes all of our constituents cynical about politicians and Government is when much is promised and little is delivered. When my friend Natasha and her husband Pete were watching the Budget, hoping for help with childcare costs for their two-year-old son Noah, they found none. They pay more in childcare than they pay on their mortgage. There will be many women who, as my hon.”

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42. “At that point, another Labour MP who is no longer in this House turned to the Duke of Edinburgh and asked him to take a photograph of me, Betty and himself. I thought I was going to die—at least, I thought I was going to stop breathing. Everybody was silent, until Betty opened her arms and sprang into a rousing chorus of “A Nightingale Sang in Berkeley Square”, while one of the Duke’s aides took him away so that he would no longer be offended. She was a character, and we all came along behind on her coattails. Just because Betty achieved, it does not mean that everybody could achieve. We know that the number of working mothers in our economy is in decline in the 21st century.”

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43. “Woe betide anyone who did not respond to her invites within 48 hours, because the invite would be promptly withdrawn. I do not know whether it is apocryphal, but rumour had it that she stood at the door of her social evenings and watched you come in, and if you were not appropriately dressed, you were asked to leave. I have one last story about Betty. It was an extraordinary time in 1997, and we were all invited by Queen Elizabeth to go to Buckingham Palace. I do not know whether my right hon. Friend the Member for Doncaster Central (Dame Rosie Winterton) recalls it, but we arrived terrified. I walked into a room and I saw Betty Boothroyd. I knew that I knew her, so I could talk to her.”

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44. “I wanted to start by saying a few words about the late Baroness Betty Boothroyd, because I think I may be the only Member currently in the Chamber who was here when she was Speaker. She was an extraordinary, indomitable, wonderful, tough and completely terrifying person to a new young MP—one of the 101 Labour women elected in 1997. She smashed her way through every glass ceiling that ever stopped her. She was a working-class woman, proud of her roots and of who she was, and she would let nothing get in her way. Betty led a very different House of Commons. When you came here in the morning, you did not know what time the House would go on to in the evening. You would be terrified to get one of the invites to her many social occasions; you had to be sure you had the appropriate outfit on the back of your door in case she did invite you.”

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45. “Well-qualified and well-trained staff need to be paid properly. Childcare should not be the service that is provided on the back of the least well educated and the least well paid.”

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46. “I completely agree with the right hon. Gentleman. I am sure that, like me, he gets emails from parents who are absolutely desperate because nurseries are closing at short notice and no alternatives are available. We think we have a problem in outer London, but the problem in Newcastle is even tougher. Some 90,700 staff have left the profession since 2018. The Women’s Budget Group—we thank it for all its efforts in getting these details—believes that for the Government to meet their plan, they need 38,000 more childminders and nursery workers. That does not happen by magic. It requires intervention. It requires the intervention of the businesses, but also the intervention of Government. We know, and we have known for years, that children benefit from the most well-qualified and well-trained staff.”

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47. “I am sure the right hon. Member is also aware of allegations that a number of the people sanctioned have moved their money around into trusts to give to their children in order to avoid having their assets taken. Does he agree that the Economic Crime and Corporate Transparency Bill should be strengthened to require sanctioned individuals to disclose assets that were owned six months prior to their designation? That would prevent oligarchs such as Roman Abramovich from moving assets around and evading the sanctions.”

    House of Commons14 March 2023Contains Parliamentary information licensed under the Open Parliament Licence v3.0Source ↗

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48. “The right hon. Gentleman was kind enough to participate in my Adjournment debate in Westminster Hall the other day. This is not just about oligarchs; it is about companies that are sanctions busting. I am aware of a Belarusian company that imports goods through Russia in order to undermine and take customers from a business in my constituency. Does he agree that, whether it is an oligarch or a business, the Office of Financial Sanctions Implementation and the Foreign Office should be adaptable and able to react to rogue actors, who will do everything possible to avoid the sanctions regime?”

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49. “My right hon. Friend refers to the average length of survival as being 18 months. Actually, it is nine months. His figure suggests that everybody completes treatment. Nine months is the life expectancy of somebody diagnosed with glioblastoma.”

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50. “It is what I have learned from my family, what I have learned from my faith, and what I have learned from my politics. I accept my responsibility. All that I want is for the NHS, cancer research charities, and pharmaceutical companies to stand up and accept their responsibility, and give some hope to the 3,200 people who will be diagnosed with a glioblastoma this year.”

    House of Commons9 March 2023Contains Parliamentary information licensed under the Open Parliament Licence v3.0Source ↗

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