Jon Trickett
MP for Normanton and Hemsworth · Labour · United Kingdom
“The shadow Minister has said, “Well, we’ve got to be a bit careful. We don’t want to over-regulate these things.” The idea that these activities should be dealt with using a light touch will raise a bitter laugh in the communities I represent, and in communities all across the country who are suffering from the same kinds of problems.”
“They told me that it is probably the worst site in the north of England—other sites are competing for that award, but let us put that to one side for a minute. However, it became clear fairly quickly that the Environment Agency was understaffed and under-resourced and lacked the powers it needed to begin the process of enforcement.”
“At first, the Conservative Government envisaged light-touch regulation. It seemed to me—this has now been confirmed by the Minister, and I welcome her comments—that light-touch regulation simply does not allow the EA to take the necessary enforcement action when activities such as those I have described take place.”
“I welcome the robustness and energy that the Minister has brought to her task—it is very welcome. Inevitably, the shadow Minister, the hon. Member for Chester South and Eddisbury (Aphra Brandreth), wants to revert to some kind of light-touch approach, but we need to make sure the communities we represent are adequately protected—if necess…”
“Many, many years ago, permission was given under licence to do some recycling there, in order to eventually turn it back into arable land. When the people who live there bought their houses or moved in, they had a more than reasonable expectation that that work would be finished within a 10-year period.”
“Secondly, last Monday, we were having a planning appeal on this site, and the planning inspector went way beyond his brief and said to me—I am a Member of the governing party, but he thought I was the Government—“Will you ask the Government what they are going to do about those operators who deliberately take millions of pounds of profit…”
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“My grandmother regularly told me that she lived in fear of the pogroms, from which she, her parents and grandparents had suffered in Russia. She said to me, “Here Jon, I need to tell you something. Whenever anyone unknown knocks on your door, you kid to be daft.” That might not mean much to Members in this place, but what she meant was to pretend to be stupid if somebody in a shirt and tie—a bit like I am dressed today—knocks on the door. In other words, do not comply with the wishes of strangers, especially those who look like they are in authority, because they may well be representatives of a hostile force. That was her experience. She had a lifelong fear of strangers and of authority. Perhaps it was just one of her foibles, I do not know. Equally, though, it might have reflected a part of the wider Jewish experience.”
“It is odd in a way to reflect that those cousins have almost circumnavigated the globe across four generations of my family. Let me focus on the Leeds part of the family. They were hard-working cobblers—boot and shoe makers. They worked in a small place next to the synagogue on North Street, Leeds. There was a great Jewish community there. Although it was a tight-knit working class community, I heard many stories of harassment and racism, including violent attacks. The housing conditions were appalling—three generations living in slum housing, sharing one or, if they were lucky, two bedrooms. My grandparents had three children, one of whom was my mother. They lived in similar conditions. The house that I was brought up in was declared a slum and cleared. They were the generations of people who were building a life here.”
“They stopped off in London—the great port of London—first. In Victorian times, Britain welcomed asylum seekers—Jews escaping the tyranny of the time. It is hard to imagine whether that could happen today. Although that is not the point that I wish to make, it is important to reflect on that. As I said, my family were on their way to America from what is now Poland. They were heading for Liverpool to get the boat across to New York and to freedom, as they saw it. They passed through Leeds. The older generation had by then become aged and infirm, so it was left to my grandmother, the youngest daughter, to stay and care for them—that was the tradition. The rest went on to Liverpool and then to Chicago. I have cousins who finally arrived in the west, in California.”
“I have never spoken about this before, either in public or in private, but it has been on my mind throughout my life and I want to go through some issues, because antisemitism is on the rise. It has long disfigured so many parts of our western European culture, as well as parts of our nation. It is a vile, centuries old, unforgiveable hatred that gave rise to the most appalling crime here in Europe in the last century. As I have said, we all still live in its shadows. Fascism and the holocaust occurred in Germany, but we must never pretend that antisemitism is solely restricted to that nation. I wish to reflect on the lives of previous generations of my family and on what I have seen. My ancestors escaped antisemitic pogroms not in Germany, but in Tsarist Russia. They came to Britain on their way to the United States.”
“I thank the Father of the House, who I always listen to with respect. He is widely respected, but on this matter he may be wrong. I occasionally go to the anti-slavery monument and to look at the Burghers of Calais, which is an amazing sculpture. I then sometimes quietly go and sit on one of the benches, watch the river go by and think about the struggles for emancipation over the centuries, so many of which happened in this very building. I am not sure that putting a monument of the kind we are talking about in Parliament Square, surrounded as it is by traffic, is necessarily conducive to the quiet reflection that I and many others experience in the park. I want to reflect on antisemitism, which was the root of the holocaust, and on my family’s history.”
“I am grateful to the right hon. Gentleman and I agree with him. With my kind of politics, it is very rare that I agree with anybody on the Conservative Benches, but it is good to recognise that these strong pulses of hatred towards racism are shared by all of us in the House. Finally, let the memorial stand as a reminder of the need to fight injustice, just as our country did in the second world war. This is not a battle that can be finally won; it is a battle that we need to fight in each generation, and each one of us must stand in witness to what has happened. Let the monument stand as a reproach to humanity, that our species is capable of the most unspeakable crimes—but equally, as a sign that we are prepared to sacrifice ourselves, as so many people in our military did, to fight for a better world.”
“I return to the issue of nominations into the other place. Is the Minister aware that 27 members of the Lords donated £50 million to his party and that one in 10 Tory peers have given more than £100,000 to his party? Is that all just an unfortunate coincidence, or are we seeing a return to cash for honours? Would it not be simple just to say that nobody who makes donations to political parties can receive an honour in the future? Would that not be the simplest way of dealing with this utter scandal?”
“There are 9,900 families—20,000 people—in my constituency facing an increase in their mortgage of about £1,800 per household. They are facing a crisis already. Is it not the case that the Government are using the old philosophy first expressed by John Major: “If it isn’t hurting, it won’t be working”? The truth is that it is not working for the many, but it is working for the few—it is hurting the many, but only working for the few. Can we have a debate in Government time to discuss this cruel, unequal and devastating economic orthodoxy that is damaging so much of our country? We need a new economic settlement.”
“But the problem is that in my constituency in the Yorkshire coalfield, there are 20 times fewer people employed in science and technology innovation than in Cambridge. We can be proud of what Cambridge has achieved, but why should areas such as mine be so left behind? There is no economic reason why the golden triangle between Greater London, Cambridge and Oxford should be preferred over the rest of the country, so is it pure politics?”
“We have had a Government who, through austerity and the particular form of economic society they have created, have developed a major mental health crisis and then cut the required services. There is no prospect of their doing anything else to improve the situation. This is a serious problem. We must imagine ourselves in the situation of the family in the case I illustrated. This is a crisis that echoes throughout the land and it is not acceptable. I finish on this point. We do need money putting into our mental health services, as everyone would agree. But why do the Government not start by saying that the staff—the carers, cleaners and all the clinical staff—get a proper rise? That would at least be a decent way to try to retain some of those people in house for now.”
“It then said, “This home isn’t working, so you’ve got to move everybody out.” There are people there who are close to the end of life and others who have serious mental health issues. Closing that home is going to kill some people: let us be honest and blunt about it. It appears that its private owners are removing all the people in there with these mental health issues and putting them somewhere else, with no reference whatsoever and no care for people who have basically been commodities for them to use—but they are investing in the home. I have spoken to the CQC and asked: are those fit and proper persons to run such a home to care for people with mental health crises? My argument is that they are not and they have proved the point. They did not even go to appeal and the staff are being left on the scrapheap.”
“We looked it up and found it will be £3,000 per month to get the treatment. This is treatment that should be provided by a civilised Government, but we do not have a civilised Government—it is shocking. This morning, that young woman of 18 was left on her own on a sofa—not even with a commode provided—with two glasses of water and a bloomin’ sandwich while the family went off to work to try to earn the money to pay. It is a disgrace that that happens in our society. Finally, I come to the issue of people with mental health issues in care homes. These care homes are in some ways very good, but in other ways this is a racket. We have a care home in my area that the Care Quality Commission condemned in 2020. Nothing was done by the owners to improve the situation but the CQC did not go back, presumably because of covid, until November.”
“That is shocking, but this is the kind of society that the Government have created and they have then cut the services that would provide the basic support that a civilised society should provide. Let me refer to two profoundly shocking cases, which I am sure are reproduced everywhere in the country. The first involves a family who have an 18-year-old daughter. She has a mental health issue and it has led to her becoming immobilised physically. She was admitted to an acute hospital over the weekend—she is unable to move. The hospital insisted that she left yesterday, but there is no care package and no assistance for her. The doctor said, “My advice to you is to get some treatment, but you won’t get it on the NHS because you’ll wait for years. Your need is urgent. Go to a private practitioner.” That was what he recommended.”
“Let us just think about this: we are talking about people with mental health problems being sent to an area that is unfamiliar to them, miles away from anywhere they know or feel comfortable and loved in, in order to receive basic treatment. It is not acceptable that that is happening in Yorkshire. Suicide has been mentioned by a number of colleagues, from all parts of the House. In West Yorkshire, the figure for men committing suicide is over 20 per 100,000, whereas the figure for the country as a whole is 16 per 100,000. Let us just think about that. It is because of the deprivation and the problems we face in our area. Why should we put up with a postcode lottery that fails to address the mental health needs of young people, with the result that we have a quarter more suicides in West Yorkshire than in the rest of the country?”
“The same applies to the loss of nurses and other qualified staff; these things are in decline. So it is no good the Minister standing there and repeating stuff that has been provided to him by the civil service. It is scandalous that in my area of West Yorkshire 10,000 people in a single year were released from acute hospital with a recommendation that they receive mental health treatment and all of them failed to get a mental health appointment. They were then removed from the list without any opportunity to receive even the basic courtesy of a single half-hour meeting. Beyond that, in the same year, 60,000 patients in Yorkshire had to be referred to a provider outside their area.”
“Even the Minister seemed to concede that in one of his responses, although the idea that the Government will somehow address the problems they have created after 13 years is preposterous. The Minister talks a good talk on the Government’s intentions, but under his Government NHS staff wages have fallen, and nursing bursaries have been cut, as have mental health beds. In my area of Yorkshire we have lost a quarter of our mental health beds since 2010—since the Conservatives came into power and Labour was last in government. The loss of a bed may not sound much, but if we think about it, we see that dozens and perhaps hundreds of people would use that bed in a year. Every bed lost has a huge impact on a series of individuals, families and even communities.”
“My constituency is 529th out of 533 English seats in social mobility—it is one of the most immobile socially. A child who is born today in the local hospital will die younger than those elsewhere in the country if they are in deprivation; there is no chance whatsoever of getting out of the crisis that so many families face, given the absence of social mobility across the country, but especially in areas such as mine. I am talking about deprivation where, in a constituency such as mine, access to a house, green space, healthy living and all the things one should expect to be able to achieve as a human being in one of the richest countries in the world are simply not available. That is the seed bed for the mental health crisis. I speak about my area, but this is a generic problem, as we all know.”
“I think the whole House agrees that there is a mental health crisis, but the Minister’s presentation simply will not do. It was like a series of numbers read from a brief prepared by somebody who is remote from the reality of life in our country. It sounded complacent and like it was coming from on high, rather than from real experience. I hope the House will not mind if I illustrate the general points I want to make by referring to my own area, as the experiences I am going to relate have a general significance for the country as a whole. First, let me agree with my Front-Bench colleague, my hon. Friend the Member for Tooting (Dr Allin-Khan), that the seed beds that are creating the great demand for mental health services lie in the social and economic conditions that have been created following 13 years of failed government.”
“On any index we choose—social mobility, inequality, deprivation, the funding of public services and so on—our constituencies in the so-called red wall have been sinking throughout this Administration. A Minister recently told the House that we will get £20 million from the levelling-up fund, but it never came. In any case, £20 million would not transform our constituencies. What does the Secretary of State say to the old miner I met in the Co-op on Saturday afternoon in our village, who said, “Will you say to Mr Gove, ‘Levelling up, who does he think he’s kidding?’”?”
“The Leader of the House has been generous several times in talking about the problems with leasing. Section 24 allows no-fault evictions. Is it not shameful that since the Government first committed to dealing with this issue 40,000 families have been evicted through no fault of their own, some in my constituency? Some have even been evicted via text, saying, “Get out of this house because we want it for something else.” That is not acceptable. A constituent put it to me this morning that 50 Members on the Government Front Bench are landlords. The best way to reassure people in the country that they are not having an effect on this is for the Leader of the House finally to say when this legislation is coming and whether that loophole will finally be sealed off completely.”
“My constituents in Yorkshire are brassed off with the fact that public transport is so badly damaged that it is not unavailable. There are 20,000-odd people in my area with no access to a private car, but only 3,000 use public transport. That is because the Government have an ideological drive to privatisation, even though every time those private companies get into trouble the state comes in to support them. It is also because the Government have a pathological hatred of the trade unions. Is it not time that the Government stood aside and made way for a different, better system that serves the public rather than the interests of a particular ideological group in the Tory party?”
“Let us try to calm things down. In my hand, I have a senior railcard, which allows me to enter a polling station and vote. A young person’s railcard, which is almost identical and carries a photograph, will not give them permission to vote. The Minister will be aware of allegations of vote rigging by this Government against younger people. What does she have against younger people? When a note is taken of who is turned away because they do not have identification, will the person’s demographic characteristics be identified so that we can see whether or not the vote rigging against young people and other groups that has been alleged has taken place?”
“May I ask the Leader of the House to imagine the position of a family who are unable to acquire a house, then rent one, and suddenly —having put all their love and money and investment into that house—receive, with less than a month’s notice, a section 21 notice to quit from the landlord? That happened to my constituents Chris and Sandra Taylor, as was highlighted in the television programme ITV Calendar. May I just quietly say to the Leader of the House that Ministers, over the years, have made commitments to end this situation? As she looks to the next parliamentary Session and the King’s Speech, will she give an undertaking to the House that that loophole will finally be closed?”
“As always, my hon. Friend is making a powerful contribution. I was in Northfield Primary School in South Kirkby on Monday, where there is a serious antisocial problem. The policing is lacking because of the cuts that he just referred to. I do not think we should be demonising a whole generation of young people. The Tories cut £1 billion or more of funding for youth services, so there is no youth provision in the villages I represent—there are no youth clubs—and all sorts of other facilities simply closed down as a result of those cuts. Does he agree that the backdrop to this problem of antisocial behaviour is, first, inadequate policing because of poor funding and, secondly, cuts to services upon which so many people depend?”
“Of course we all thank police officers who work diligently within the rules, but I came to Parliament this week from Northfield Primary School in South Kirkby, where there is an urgent problem with antisocial behaviour. Two points were made to me. First, where are the police? We do not see them in the villages in our area. Secondly, the 20,000 police officers who were lost each had many years of service and they are being replaced by people who are new to the job. In the vacuum that was left during the years when the Government cut the police service, criminality and antisocial behaviour became rife. Of course, they then cut £1 billion from youth services and mental health services. The Government’s record is a disgrace. They left communities ill defended and we are now seeing the consequences.”
“Women in my constituency have a healthy life expectancy of only 56 years. Could the Minister explain why the difference between West Yorkshire and North Yorkshire—where the Prime Minister has his constituency—is 10 years? Why should women have to put up with that kind of experience? What is his explanation of how that has happened?”
“An hour and a half ago, we were able to identify and source online a machete for under £11 which could be delivered to my house tomorrow. That is totally unacceptable. My constituents do not want to hear any more words; they want action. The Minister talked about diversionary tactics for young people. The 23 villages I represent tell me the Government have abandoned them: no youth services anymore; very little access to mental health services for young people; and very often we do not see any community police officers in our villages. None of that is acceptable. The issue requires a holistic approach by the Government to tackle the sense of abandonment that so many people feel in our area, which is the breeding ground for so much violent crime.”
“Has the Secretary of State seen the recent report on the BBC that billions of pounds—my words, not the BBC’s—are being squandered on agency labour from private providers, with huge profits being generated? Is it right that one doctor alone received £5,200 for a single shift, as was reported by the BBC? What does the Secretary of State think the impact of that would be on his own staff? How can it be right for him to use bellicose language about the staff associations and unions while larding money into the pockets of the private agency providers?”
“In Yorkshire, there are tens of thousands of families desperate for affordable housing. CPRE, The Countryside Charity, says that there are 115,000 potential brownfield sites in our county alone, and tens of thousands of more are land banked, with planning consent already given for housing. Yet there is executive housing popping up like mushrooms in a forcing shed all over my constituency on the green belt. Is the Minister happy that her legacy will be a Government that poured cement and tarmac all over Yorkshire’s green and pleasant land?”
“Given the low levels of social mobility, and the levels of poverty and education in my constituency, it is impossible to imagine, how—without dramatic social and economic change—a child born there today can expect to do anything other than die younger than normal and in poverty. The whole idea of social mobility is a myth, unless it is combined with massive structural and transformative change. With that, I will take the hint that I have had my five minutes.”
“There are 440,000 children living in poverty, despite that fact that their parents are working full-time, and yet Government Members and Ministers continually tell us that work is the way to opportunity in life. I believe in work. I am a member of a party called Labour; the Labour party is about work. We believe in work and want people to be at work. But do not tell me or my constituents that work is a route out of poverty. It is a route into poverty as much as any other system in our country. In my constituency, there has been a 50% increase in the number of children in poverty since 2015. That is in one constituency. My constituency is also in the lowest 20% for young people’s educational attainment.”
“The trust identified, out of the 60-odd million of us in this country, 6,000 people who run it; and two fifths of them went to public school, which is five times as many as average. I accept the right hon. Member did not go to public school; I do not know why I am looking at him—I will draw my attention elsewhere. The people who run this country, including this Parliament, tend to come from very privileged backgrounds. Not so many years ago, there were 100 manual workers in Parliament; now there are only seven of us left. There are 200 people with a business background in the House of Commons. If we look at almost every power structure in our society, the same thing applies—other than in professional sports, where more people from working-class backgrounds have access. I will cut to the chase.”
“Gentleman has an optimistic view of social mobility in our society, perhaps because his constituency is the 51st most socially mobile in the whole country. There are 533 constituencies in England, and mine is the 529th most socially mobile, so he and I inhabit almost two different worlds. He is right to be passionate about this subject, but the truth of the matter is that the Conservative idea that there is real social mobility available for all who are able to make use of it is simply an ideological myth designed to gloss over the fact that our social structures are ossified and it is almost impossible to break though. The right hon. Gentleman mentioned the Sutton Trust.”
“I eventually finished up at university. My first reflection is this: the stepping stones that were available to me are no longer available to the same extent to the current generation. Further education has been cut to the bone and is simply not available at the scale that it was when I was younger, when I basically left school in some disgrace. The university system is now really a commodified form of education. I voted against the original idea to charge student fees—it was a mistake. I did it because I was thinking about people from my background. My grandad said to me, “The system doesn’t work for people like us.” That is a profound thing to have said, and I have spent almost all my life trying to understand what it is about “people like us” and why the system is not working properly for them. The right hon.”
“It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mr Robertson. It was interesting to listen to the speech of the right hon. Member for Bexleyheath and Crayford (Sir David Evennett). He is right to emphasise social mobility, and I was very interested to hear him describe his background. It is probably worth referring to my background. I was more or less told to leave school when I was 15. I left with no meaningful qualifications and I went to work as a manual worker in the building industry. I was encouraged by my grandfather to try to understand why the system had failed me or why I had failed the system. I became very curious about it, and eventually I went to a further education college. The right hon. Gentleman said he had been a college teacher, so no doubt he helped many people in my position.”
“A mature woman constituent who came to see me had been abused as a child by her father. The police simply did not address the matter for years and years until, through that struggle, we eventually managed to get a prosecution and the father ended up in jail. He is still there now. This is not simply a problem of the Met. What is the Home Secretary doing? Is it not reckless to hand over new police powers, such as stop and search, without suspicion of any crime being committed, to a racist, homophobic and misogynist police force? What guarantee can she give that those very police officers who are not acceptable will not use those powers to pursue their evil ways?”
“Member for Stroud is of course right to say that we might look again at how we spend that money, but to imagine that the aggregate sum of money that the Government are providing is satisfactory—those who want to make that argument are living in a fool’s paradise. We need to do something very radical indeed. Why should it be that a child born in a hospital in my constituency today, in one of the poorer communities, will probably die younger than people elsewhere in the country from more prosperous areas, and that during their time they will have less of a chance to achieve their full capacity in life? It is simply immoral, it is wrong, and the Government need to get a grip on it in the Budget next week.”
“It is totally unacceptable that Government Members simply—I don’t want to say this, but I will—whinge on about the need for more early years childcare, but do not will the means, which would be to provide proper finance and to abandon the whole process of austerity that has had such an impact on so many children across our country and in the area that I am proud to represent. We claim to be a society that is based on the ability of every person to fulfil their capacity. We have seen how important development is in the early years—I have described it; scientists are still working on it, but we already know quite a lot. The country has to get a grip on early years, and that means putting money in. The hon.”
“As a consequence, it is on the edge of closing. I opened Little Gruffalos eight years ago, and I was proud to do so. It is a great institution, and the people working there care, and obviously the mothers and fathers do, too. It is on the brink of closure, due to escalating food prices, heating costs, building costs and all the other things, as well as the cost of paying the staff, to the extent that it is now unable to pay some of the staff. Emma Percy told my office that she has not been able to take an income, but she is so committed that she is trying to continue to provide care.”
“She does see it as the provision of education, as well as of care and love, and all the other things we want our young children to have. But here is the problem: almost every single family who use that centre are already in receipt of all the assistance they can get. We heard my hon. Friend the Member for Putney (Fleur Anderson) mention cross-subsidy. What happens is that wealthier parents, who are not in receipt of some of the assistance that the state offers, are charged more, which then cross-subsidises the children who come from deprived homes, because of the failure of the funding formula to provide properly for children coming from needy families. However, there is nobody in this institution in Hemsworth, Little Gruffalos, who is not in receipt of benefits, and there is therefore no possibility of cross-subsidy.”
“Therefore, urgent social action needs to take place to provide social mobility to the children being born today in local hospitals in such areas up and down the country. Doing so absolutely depends on us getting this issue of early years childcare and education—I insist on using that word—correct, and we have not got it correct. Let me turn to the experience of Emma Percy, a constituent of mine who eight years ago asked me to open a centre she called Little Gruffalos. I will spell that for the Hansard writers in a minute or two. This is an amazing initiative taken by local people, and she understood exactly that she was directing her work at the most disadvantaged children from year 2 up in one of the communities that I represent, and trying to give them a better start.”
“It is the same for educational attainment when it comes, for example, to national vocational qualification level 4 in my constituency. The fact is that we are in the lowest 20% for early years and, given what I have just said, Members would expect that to feed through to attainment. For NVQ level 4, which is first-year degree level, we are at 22% in my constituency. The average for the country is twice as high at 40%. Members can therefore see what happens to social mobility, because the ability of a child to take advantage of all that society is meant to offer them depends on poorer people in deprived communities being able to rise up the so-called social ladder. I have some reservations about that expression, but let us use it for the moment. Of the 533 seats in England, my constituency is the 529th least mobile.”
“Members have talked about the role of mothers and fathers, grandparents, and so on and so forth, and they obviously play a key role—the most important role in the development of a child—but childcare is now a social and economic necessity, and from the figures I have just given about the changes in the architecture of a young person’s brain, it is clearly essential that work is done on this. Let me give Members one more figure about my own constituency. I have given the figures on the level of poverty, but when we look at the level of early years attainment in my constituency, we are in the lowest 20% of all constituencies in the country. That feeds right through the whole of life and through the structure, social structures and stratification of constituencies such as mine.”
“It is hard to think about the Government’s fiscal strategy, particularly as it impacts on the early years, and not come to the conclusion that what they have done has been tantamount to a form of institutionalised child neglect. It is impossible to avoid that conclusion, and I say that having thought carefully before using those words. In my constituency, child poverty has risen by 50% since 2015. There are 4,272 children in poverty. It is a very poor area. In the real world that we live in—let us be honest across this House—childcare is now an essential if we are going to meet the needs of the contemporary world, the world of work, and the world of women and parents more generally.”
“On top of that, 4,500 facilities for young children and the early years closed in a single year, which is staggering. It is clear and widely accepted that the funding per child is £2 an hour less than is needed. The IFS—hardly a Labour party think-tank—has said that the Government are simply failing to provide the funds required for proper childcare in the early years. It estimates that the total funding for the free entitlement will be 8% lower in real terms in 2024-25. Those cuts are having an impact on human lives throughout the country today, especially in areas such as mine that suffer from major deprivation, as I will illustrate.”
“Members on both sides of the House about the emphasis that should be put on the early years for the reasons that I have just given. It is self-evident, but science is also telling us a lot about the way in which our brains develop as human beings, although there is more to do. I will break that consensus, however, because it has been fascinating to hear Government Members say, “We need more money,” but not to face the truth, which is that the austerity programme of Conservative Governments has had a dreadful impact on early years provision. Some 1,300 Sure Start centres have closed since 2010. The hon. Member for Stroud (Siobhan Baillie) said that a lot of them are still open, but 85% of them have been closed on the watch of Conservative Governments.”
“By 8 o’clock, when I was back at our house, my daughter had been born, so it was not a good experience for me as a father. With all my children and grandchildren, I was struck by the pace at which I could see the human brain of that infant or young person developing. We now know quite a lot about that from science, as other hon. Members have mentioned. In the early years of a human being’s life, the brain will create 1 million new neural connections every second—let us think about that. That is extraordinary. By the time we are about five years old, there are about 1,000 billion neural connections in the human brain, which is staggering. Those figures show how important the early years are for our intellectual, social and physical development. In this interesting debate, there has been consensus among hon.”
“It has been an interesting debate. We have heard a lot about the experience of mothers in the House. On International Women’s Day, it is right to celebrate the contribution and role of mothers and women generally. We have heard some personal and interesting birthing stories. I have three children and eight grandchildren; the oldest grandchildren are probably ready to have children themselves, but I hope they will not just yet. With our first child, I vividly recall—I guess we all do—the 6 o’clock news was on and my wife said, “I need to get to the hospital. The child’s on its way faster than we thought.” When I got to the hospital, they said, “Well, thank you very much. You can go home now and we’ll see you tomorrow,” which is how fathers were treated at the time.”
“That led to a major breakdown in confidence in the Met, although that was already in process because it was a serving police officer who had committed the crime. The police used the covid rules that were then in place, the appropriateness of which had been debated in the House.”
“Several of those who spoke in the debate in the other place said that the only comparison they could think of was in the laws that were passed against terrorism. Protesting about injustice is not terrorism, and to conflate the two is a mistake. I have not heard the Government make the case for that, and I will be interested to hear what they have to say. The police have said that they do not want these powers, and previous members of the judiciary in the Lords said that they were concerned about how the Bill could be interpreted. The Bill as it stands will lead to a further breakdown in confidence between the police and other parts of the state on the one hand, and communities on the other. One example is the Sarah Everard case, where police moved in to prevent what was effectively peaceful and justified protest.”