Damian Hinds
MP for East Hampshire · Conservative · United Kingdom
“There are moments in debates like the one we have had today that are difficult to sit through and listen to, but it is the most immense privilege to be a Member of Parliament and to hear some of these testimonies.”
“Today is once again a day of heavy responsibility for all of us to decide on what we in this House call “conscience issues”. Many of the people who we represent hold strong and immutable views, and we hear from them. However, we represent many others who hold much more nuanced views and we are less likely to hear from them.”
“Members who support the Bill should not have their motives questioned, Members who oppose the Bill should not have their motives questioned, and Members who have reached a different conclusion from one they reached at an earlier stage should not have their judgment questioned either.”
“We have heard from royal colleges and other professional bodies, many of whom have a neutral stance on the principle but raise significant questions about particular aspects. We know from Ministers that there would need to be some reprioritisation of NHS resources, but we do not know the extent.”
“If there is the prospect of the Parliament Acts being used, that would increase the importance and the salience of the text as it is now. Today, it is reasonable and entirely in order for hon. Members to consider information that is available now that was not available in those previous parliamentary deliberation.”
“The Government have said, rightly, that the time taken to implement other schemes is not directly comparable, because none are as in this Bill. This is a free vote on a matter of conscience—there is no party line on either side of the Chamber. No one, I suggest, finds this issue easy.”
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“One of the biggest users of zero-hours contracts in our country is none other than the national health service, through its use of bank staff. I notice that the Liberal Democrats announced a new policy today, which would require extra pay for people on zero-hours contracts; I do not know whether they have yet costed that policy. By the way, for many of the people working as bank staff in the NHS, that is not their primary job but a second job. This allows a hospital or other setting to respond to spikes in demand. For many people with a zero-hours contract job, it is their second job, not their primary source of income. Zero-hours contract jobs are also very important to people coming back into work, as the hon. Member for Mid Dunbartonshire (Susan Murray) said powerfully in an intervention.”
“I am very grateful to the Secretary of State for suggesting that he will try. I turn to the provisions dealing with guaranteed hours and zero-hours contracts. I understand why it is attractive to the Government and the Labour party to seek to restrict the availability of contracts that do not have a guaranteed number of hours. From listening to Labour colleagues, it seems almost as if “exploitative zero-hours contracts” is one word. It is as if those words must always go together. We all want to end exploitation—that is why, in 2015, the then Government passed legislation to stop employers imposing exclusivity. We said, “If you are not going to guarantee your employee a minimum number of hours, it is not all right to say that they must not work for somebody else.” But not all zero-hours contracts are necessarily exploitative.”
“Do they want to take home fewer opportunities for people returning to the workplace after many years away? Do they want to take home fewer opportunities for ex-offenders—those furthest from the labour market? Do they want to take home—because this will come as well, as night follows day—a further trend away from permanent employment and towards fixed-term temporary employment? Do they want to take home a shift from waged or salaried work to more self-employment? Is that really what Labour wants to deliver?”
“The Government could also do things differentially by sector; there could be one period for employers in general, and another for sectors or sub-sectors that have particularly strong patterns of seasonality. I also ask the Government to reconsider the requirement to not just offer guaranteed hours once, but keep on doing it. That is introducing unnecessary bureaucracy. If the Government want to make changes in this area, I encourage them to at least ensure that once an employer has made the offer once, the right can become an opt-in right. The Government think that these provisions are something for Back-Bench Labour MPs to take home, but I ask Labour colleagues whether they really want to take them home. Do they want to take home higher unemployment, and particularly youth unemployment?”
“We did not have the phrase at that time, but it certainly would have been a zero-hours contract, apart from the fact that there was no contract at all. If the Government wish to reform this area, as they may, I ask them to consider the situation in sectors with great seasonality, including hospitality, tourism and retail, and to please look again at the concept of a 12-week reference period, which does not reflect the reality of seasonality. I know that this will be introduced through regulations, not the primary legislation, and I welcome what the Secretary of State said; I think he indicated that the Government were open to looking at a more sensible length of time.”
“I think we understand why the Labour Government wish to legislate in this way. It is something for Labour MPs to bring home. When so much else in their manifesto is falling apart before our eyes, they can say, “At least we’ve killed off this modern scourge, this huge growth in zero-hours contracts.” As I say, the number of those contracts is not nearly as big as most people think. If you think about it, we have always had zero-hours contracts in all sorts of forms, whether it be piecework, commission-only sales, agency catalogue work or casual labour. In fact, it is possible that today, there are fewer people on a zero-hours contract than ever before in the history of the labour market. Many colleagues might reflect on their first job. Mine was washing dishes in a restaurant.”
“And some people do not, as the hon. Gentleman quite rightly says. When I was working at the Department for Work and Pensions, the issue of zero-hours contracts became a totemic issue under the leadership of the right hon. Member for Islington North (Jeremy Corbyn), the immediate predecessor of the current leader of the Labour party. There was this idea that there had been a huge increase in the number of people in the country on a zero-hours contract. We discovered that less than 3% of people had a zero-hours contract as their primary source of income, and the average number of hours those people worked was not zero or close to zero, but 25. Even more unexpectedly—this was the bit that really got people—the average job satisfaction of people on a zero-hours contract was higher than it was for the rest of the workforce.”
“22. If she will meet with representatives of the farming industry to discuss the potential impact of changes to agricultural property relief and business property relief on that sector.”
“Given the Prime Minister’s clear commitment to growth that benefits every community in every corner of the UK, his Ministers will no doubt be disturbed at polling showing that four fifths of farmers have postponed or delayed investment since the Budget. Is it not time for a rethink of this policy—if not on grounds of fairness, then on grounds of investment, productivity and economic growth?”
“There were five major expansions of early years education and childcare entitlement under the last Government; what the Minister has announced today would have been our sixth. But since we formed this policy, the new Government have made a massive increase in the tax on jobs. When will Ministers next publish their assessment of the economics of running a nursery and of how they ensure that there will continue to be adequate supply of high-quality places, in places like Alton, Petersfield and Horndean?”
“The two things the Government could do to mitigate the situation are to lengthen the reference period to reflect seasonality and to make sure that it is an opt-in right, rather than something that has to be offered repeatedly.”
“We hope for some relief in the delayed Budget when it eventually comes, but there is something Ministers could do now ahead of the Budget to mitigate the situation. I am talking about the Employment Rights Bill. I know that zero-hours contracts have had a sort of totemic importance for Labour Members ever since their last leader made it so, but we have to get past the idea that a zero-hours contract is necessarily trying to exploit workers; it is not. The NHS has many bank workers in hospitals on zero-hours contracts. Students will often work on zero-hours contracts so they can stay in their jobs, even when they move between home and university.”
“Tourism does have issues, of course, but fundamentally, tourism—especially inbound tourism—is an exceptional opportunity to be grabbed. It is not just about the number of jobs; it is about who those jobs are for. This sector is a key source of first jobs and jobs for people coming back to the labour market, including those who are the very furthest from work. I think of some of the great work done by hospitality businesses—including by one of my old employers, Greene King—with people leaving the criminal justice system, for example. Of course, we are talking disproportionately about part-time workers. The sector has suffered terrible blows from the big increase in business rates, and the two effects through national insurance contributions, both in the rates and in the threshold, have disproportionately affected part-time workers.”
“Actually, it was where I spent most of my career before I became a Member of Parliament. More importantly, hospitality is important to my constituency, as it is to just about every constituency in the country. In my case, it employs around 2,000 people across some 200 establishments, including a number of historic heritage pubs. Hospitality is important to our nation partly because of all those jobs, but also because an important part of the hospitality sector is overnight hospitality, which is fundamental to tourism, which in turn brings in such important export earnings. I do worry that with all this talk of tourism taxes, it is starting to sound like people think that tourism is, in some way, a problem to be mitigated.”
“I am sad to say that the number of payroll employees in this country has fallen by 149,000 in the past year. We now have unemployment inching up towards 5%, with youth unemployment much higher than that. Why do I mention that in the context of a debate about hospitality? It is because a disproportionate number of jobs—tens of thousands—have been lost in this sector. It is absolutely fundamental to employment, along with the retail and care sectors. It is a shame that hospitality was not deemed worthy of a chapter in the Government’s industrial strategy, because if it had been—or, indeed, if the Government had an employment strategy—they would not have done what they did in the Budget. The hospitality sector is incredibly important. It is important to me personally, as it happens; like many others, I had my first job in hospitality.”
“Does the Secretary of State agree with me about the importance of step-down provision, provided by community hospitals such as Petersfield and Alton, both for patient care and for relieving pressure on acute hospitals, such as Queen Alexandra and Basingstoke?”
“The Government have tried to have it every which way on these elusive 6,500 extra teachers. If the Labour manifesto had meant that only secondary teachers counted, but they could be in any subject, presumably that is what it would have said. What it actually said was 6,500 new specialist teachers in key subjects, so will the Secretary of State enlighten us: what are those subjects?”
“I welcome what the Paymaster General has said about removing administrative burdens to payment and accepting the recommendations, and his commitment to working with the community and doing so in a timely way. I know that he will continue to devote his considerable energies to those things. Could he also say a word more about memorials? I am thinking particularly of the young victims from Treloar. I welcome what he said about the appointment of a chair to that committee, but is there a timeline for that; obviously there are sensitive matters to deal with, but given the passage of time does he have a timeframe in mind for its completion?”
“I encourage Ministers in both the Home Office and the Department for Education to work together to see what more can be done to support and facilitate that. This debate is particularly appropriate in this terrible anniversary week, as we commemorate those killed in the 7/7 attack. I thank the Backbench Business Committee for facilitating it and the hon. Member for Rossendale and Darwen for securing it.”
“He and his wife were both seriously injured in the bombing of the Grand hotel in Brighton. Lady Tebbit was terribly disabled for life. I will never forget hearing Jo Berry CBE, the twin daughter of Sir Anthony Berry, who was killed in that bombing. Jo has dedicated her life to conflict resolution, founding Building Bridges for Peace, which promotes peace and conflict resolution across the globe. Her willingness to reach out, in a way that 99% of us simply could not, is truly incredible—in the correct sense of the word—and her story remains a most striking and challenging example to us all. We should be doing all we can to facilitate the telling of stories like those of Jo, Figen and others.”
“He has worked tirelessly both as an advocate for victims of terrorism and in the fight against violent extremism, from acting as national chair of the counter-terrorism youth advisory group to founding the Resilience in Unity project, not to mention co-founding Survivors Against Terror, campaigning for the victims of terrorist attacks and working on many other charitable endeavours, including the National Emergencies Trust. There are many others like Travis who have devoted so much of their lives to working with other survivors. I especially commend all those who, in the wake of such unspeakable tragedy, devote their energies to promoting understanding, togetherness, security and peace. Their important work contributes to our shared sense of humanity. This week we mourned the loss of Lord Tebbit.”
“On the 20th anniversary of the 7/7 bombings in London, the group’s publication of a collection of survivor testimonials is a timely reminder to us all. The Home Office victims of terrorism unit recently published recommendations to improve support for victims and survivors of terrorism. I hope and trust that Ministers will be able to deliver against those recommendations, particularly more timely and specialist trauma treatment, improved communication on mental health support and financial compensation, and strengthened support for children and young people in accessing mental health support, including as they transition into adulthood. I particularly commend the work of Travis Frain, who survived the Westminster Bridge attack.”
“Terrorist attacks no longer require sophisticated weaponry when such destruction, devastation and loss of life can be caused with simple materials, even just a car or a van. While the national threat level remains substantial, our security services remain on constant alert. Of course, today’s debate is about giving a voice to the survivors of these terrible attacks. I know the Minister will continue to strive to ensure that survivor groups are always heard. We know from past experience the power of survivors in providing support to other survivors. I highlight the work of Survivors Against Terror and its survivors’ charter. We also know the importance of both short-term and long-term mental health support for survivors.”
“For everyone else, because it is largely indiscriminate in who it targets—members of the public in everyday, “it could happen to anyone” settings—it is intended to erode our sense of safety and security. In 2025, we live in an age of ongoing threats from a diverse range of actors, including extremist Islamism, extreme right-wing terrorism and the growth of a broad ideology category termed “mixed, unclear or unstable.” Today there are more than 80 terrorist groups proscribed under the Terrorism Act 2000, but those groups are only part of it. Terrorism is now possible without a big organisation and, in recent years, it has been as much about individuals acting alone having been radicalised online.”
“We are reminded daily of the bravery of all those who protect our society when we walk by the memorial stone to PC Keith Palmer. For so long in our country, the Northern Ireland troubles were ever present. We must never underestimate the achievement of the Good Friday agreement, and the peace it has so far afforded should never be taken for granted. It can feel like there are times of frequent terrorist outrage and times of lull, but in reality, if we look at the timeline of terrorist outrages here and around the world, there has been little let-up at any time, even if the nature, the driving ideologies and the methods may change. Terrorism permeates public consciousness, and it ravages the lives of those injured or bereaved.”
“Thank you for calling me, Mrs Harris. I first met Travis Frain, the constituent of the hon. Member for Rossendale and Darwen (Andy MacNae), when I was Security Minister at the Home Office. Travis has been instrumental in the survivors movement. He was one of a number of brave victims, survivors and family members I had the privilege to meet. Another was Figen Murray, the mother of Martyn Hett, who was killed at Manchester arena. She has campaigned so hard and showed immense courage and conviction in pursuing the creation of Martyn’s law in the most terrible circumstances imaginable. That law will ensure better organisational preparedness in planning for and, in the worst case, responding to a terrorist attack. We have lost two dear colleagues and friends from this House in Jo Cox and Sir David Amess.”
“I suggest that schools require an extension of the principle established with the LendED product, which is made with the British Educational Suppliers Association: a sort of forum where teachers can see these products, distil the good and bad, and crucially get recommendations from other schools and teachers, because teachers tend to trust teachers.”
“For some subjects, AI will also be useful for dynamic assessment. But schools will have the same issue with AI as with all educational technology, which is that they generally do not have much idea which bits of it are any good. There are both great products and pretty low-grade products, and discerning one from the other is notoriously difficult. As with edtech in general, but even more so with AI, product development cycles do not lend themselves to randomised controlled trials to try to establish what is good.”
“AI has plenty of other potential uses, such as for timetabling, for letters and emails home—although my special request would be that we do not add to the volume of communications that have to be consumed—and for report writing. But we need a clear code of practice, because for the trust of parents, and indeed of pupils, there needs to be clarity about when and in what ways generative AI has been used. Care will still be needed. How does a teacher tell children that they must write their own work, if that teacher is generating text through a machine? The second area of opportunity is in supporting learning. There is clearly a lot of potential for learning personalisation, especially for certain types of special educational need, alongside the role of assistive and adaptive technology.”
“Too many teachers spend their Sunday evenings at home, trawling the internet for resources to use during the working week, when much of that work could be done for them. I commend Oak National Academy for its work on the AI learning assistant. As the Education Committee, chaired by the hon. Member for Dulwich and West Norwood (Helen Hayes), discussed just this morning, the national curriculum is, of course, a framework. It is not a precise set of things that children will learn, because we need diversity in provision. We therefore need to think about how AI can support that diversity. I hope the Minister will give us an update on the content store announcement of August 2024.”
“The areas of risk are the need for discerning and careful use of generative AI by pupils and, finally, the impact on homework, assessment and exams. Workload is a big issue for teachers. Historically, along with pupil behaviour, it has often been the No. 1 issue in teacher retention. In a 2019 survey, it was encouraging to see that the reported workload had reduced by about five hours a week, or an hour a day. However, workload remains a stubborn issue, and the biggest contributors have been planning and preparation, marking, and data entry and analysis. There is also communicating with parents, dealing with behaviour issues and so on, but those first three all lend themselves to artificial intelligence. In particular, the creation of teaching materials seems to be an enormous area of opportunity.”
“Those materials are easily accessible, but that does not mean that masses of people have seen them. This remains an area in which a lot of communicating remains to be done. The DFE guidance talks about balancing the safety considerations of AI with the opportunities. Those are definitely two considerations, but they are not the only considerations, nor are they the most obvious. We always have to remember that at whatever pace we work at in this place, or that Whitehall works at, kids will work at about six times that pace. The four areas I will briefly cover today are two areas of opportunity and two areas of risk, where we need some caution. The areas of opportunity are workload and enhancing learning, particularly for children with special educational needs.”
“The most common uses of generative AI are creating resources, planning lessons and communicating with parents. In the same survey, 6% of teachers said that pupils were permitted to use AI in the work they are set. It is hard to pinpoint an exact number, but it is fairly safe to say that the proportion of pupils actually using AI to some degree in their work is rather more than 6%. The survey data that we have, incomplete as it is, suggests that somewhere between one in three and three in four children are using AI to some degree, with some frequency, in their homework. In this rapidly changing world, I commend the Department for Education for its guidance update in January and the materials that came out on 10 June, made by the Chiltern Learning Trust and the Chartered College of Teaching.”
“I beg to move, That this House has considered the use of generative artificial intelligence in schools. It is a great pleasure to serve with you in the Chair, Sir Jeremy. You will not be presiding over a heated political debate this afternoon, and I hope this is a good opportunity to openly discuss the enormous change that is upon us. Throughout the education world, a lot of thinking is being done about artificial intelligence and its implications. Most of that thinking is being done by teachers, and I hope we will contribute to some of the wider system and policy questions today. In a November 2024 omnibus survey, half of teachers said they had already used generative AI in their role; about a quarter said they had no plans to; and the rest either planned to or did not yet know.”
“The online safety guidance also included the importance of learning why people might try to bend the truth on the internet and pretend to be someone they are not. That was a start, but at this technological inflection point, it needs a huge scaling up.”
“However, it is really important in this context that children know how AI can make mistakes, and that they come to trust and know to look out for the correct primary sources, and trusted brands—trusted sources—rather than just stuff on the internet. In the 2019 guidance on teaching online safety in schools, since updated, a fusion of the computing, relationships and citizenship curricula was envisaged. Children would be guided through how to evaluate what they see online, how to recognise techniques used for persuasion, and how to understand confirmation bias, as well as misinformation and disinformation. The new edition of “Keeping Children Safe in Education”, which came out yesterday, lists disinformation and misinformation as safeguarding concerns in their own right for the first time.”
“We need to be very aware of those risks, some of which relate to existing practices and policy questions, such as how to deal with intimate image abuse and sexting. The problem further supports the case for a comprehensive school-day phone ban, to take cameras out of schools. More generally, there is a need for media literacy and general discernment. I am reluctant and nervous to talk about media literacy, and more so about the phrase “critical thinking,” because it is too often conflated with the false dichotomy that occasionally comes up in the educational world: knowledge versus skills. Clearly, we need both. We need both in life, and we need to have developed both in school, but knowledge precedes skills because we can only think with what we know.”
“Funnily enough, I agree with the hon. Member, though not necessarily about statutory requirements. It is certainly true—in fact, he inadvertently leads me on to my next point—that we need to be careful and discerning in using these products. There are many risks, including the safeguarding risks inherent in technology, hallucinations, dud information and, as the hon. Member rightly says, biases. There are some very direct and sharp risks to children. I am afraid that many misleading, unpleasant and cruel things can be done with AI. They can be done already but, as with so many other things, AI magnifies and turbocharges the problem. Some of those things can be done by adults to children; some of them are done by children to other children.”
“If children are allowed to use a keyboard, spellcheck and AutoText are disabled, to ensure safeguards are in place—but it is still true that most people can type faster than they can write, so there is a disparity in the two formats. The regulations require a school’s special educational needs co-ordinator to decide whether a child is able to use that facility, but they are still quite loose in that they refer to the keyboard being the child’s “normal way of working at school”. I would love the Minister to say a word about that. The Department for Education should be clear that, where such arrangements are made, it should be because of a special educational need or disability.”
“The safest way to protect the integrity of exams is for them to be handwritten in exam conditions, with a teacher walking up and down between the desks—not quite for everybody, but for the vast majority of children, except where a special educational need or disability requires another arrangement. There are also subjects, such as art, design and technology and computer science, where it would not be appropriate. There is already a big increase in access arrangements for exams. A particular type of adjustment, called a centre-delegated arrangement, does not need approval from the exam board, so no data on it is available. One such centre-delegated arrangement is to allow the child to use a keyboard—in the rubric it is called a word processor, which is a delightfully archaic term.”
“Finally, I come to the most immediate risks, around homework, assessments and exams. Colleagues may already have had a conversation in which a teacher has said, “Isn’t it brilliant how much so-and-so has improved? Oh, hang on—have they?” They now cannot be absolutely certain. There are AI detectors, but they are not perfect. They can produce false positives. In other words, they can accuse people of plagiarising using AI when they are not. In any event, there is an arms race between the AI machine and the AI detector machine, which is deeply unsatisfactory. Of course, that is where the teacher’s skill comes in, because there is always classwork to compare. Most importantly, there is always the exam itself, and we need to keep it that way.”
“Indeed, adults using AI may start to give human form, which is called anthropomorphism, to the machine they are interacting with—I occasionally try to be polite when I interact with one of these interfaces. Apps such as character.ai take that to another level. We have to think about the impact on children in their most formative years—on their sense of self, their understanding of the world and their mental wellbeing. That includes the very youngest children, who will be growing up in a world of the internet of things and connected toys. It will be that much more important to draw a line between what is real, what is human, and what is not. In time, when the system has had enough time to think about it—we are not nearly there yet—that may be yet another area for regulation.”
“The hon. Member for Mansfield (Steve Yemm) should not misunderstand me, as I am not against regulation. His points about data protection and privacy are really important, although they are probably too big to fold entirely into this debate. His first group of points and what the NSPCC talks about are the same risks that I am talking about. There is an even broader point, as there is already a lot of blurring between fact, fiction and opinion online. There are all manner of news sources and influencers, network gaming, virtual reality and augmented reality, the metaverse—the whole concept of reality is a little hazier than it once was. With these machines, which in some cases almost seem to have a personality of their own, there is a danger of yet more blurring. We all shout at our PCs sometimes.”
“I contend that there should be no rush to move to online exams. There might be opportunities, lower costs or easier administration involved, but there are certainly also risks, some of which are immediate and some of which would manifest only over time and might take us a long time to spot. If we do move en masse to online exams and away from pen on paper, I promise hon. Members that we would never go back. A cautious approach is what is required.”
“A recent Ofsted report, on 27 June, said that there was not yet enough evidence to conclude what constitutes a good use of AI in schools, but that one common approach among schools that seemed to be using AI successfully was to have a champion who spreads good practice throughout the school. That seems to me a good approach. Sarah Hannafin of the National Association of Head Teachers stated: “The technology should be introduced gradually…to maximise its potential and mitigate the risks.” That is an important point. Most immediately, I implore the Minister not to allow all exams to go digital en masse, except for certain subjects where that makes sense, and except, of course, for an individual child for whom that is the right thing because of their special educational need or disability.”
“There is even evidence to suggest that people do better in tests and have better recall as a result. Maintaining handwriting is therefore important in its own right, quite apart from maintaining the security and integrity of examinations. DFE guidance states that teachers should keep up to date with this rapidly changing world. That is a tough ask. Over the months and years ahead, the Department will have to do a lot to provide teachers and school leaders with bite-sized, easily digestible chunks of information to keep them up to date with this rapidly changing area.”
“It cascades further and further down the age range, until eventually people question why they are learning to write with a pen at all. Some are already asking that question. By the time my child is an adult, people will not even be using a keyboard, but other types of communication and interface, and this will seem very archaic. There are important advantages to learning to write by hand, however. Handwriting and writing are not the same thing. The way someone develops their handwriting, learning the strokes and patterns and how letters join together is an important part of learning the skill of wider writing. There is also plenty of evidence that making marks on a page by hand aids visual memory. Handwriting helps us to understand things because, as we write, we synthesize what we are reading or hearing into our own words.”
“The hon. Gentleman makes his point lucidly and well, and I think it stands on its own feet. The bigger issue with more children taking exams on a keyboard rather than on paper is that exam boards would like to move entire exams online for all children. In a sense, that would be better because it would be equal; there would not be any difference in the speed of writing and typing. Some might ask what is wrong with that, as long as it is the same for everybody, and as long as the internet, spellcheck and autocorrect are disabled. I suggest there would still be multiple types of security risk in having exams done en masse online. There is also a wider problem: if a GCSE is done online, how will students do a mock GCSE? They will do it online. How will someone do a year 9 exam? Hon. Members can see where I am going with this.”
“There are two simple safeguards against misuse of AI in exams here in front of me. Will the Minister recognise that the best way to ensure the security and integrity of exams, and how assessment is done lower down the school, is—for the great majority of children, in the majority of subjects—for exams to be handwritten in exam conditions?”
“I was happy not to wind up, but you have now made me stand up, Sir Jeremy. We have had a good and constructive debate. I am grateful to the Minister for his engagement, and to all colleagues for taking part.”