Rebecca Long Bailey

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1,995 held · 600 searchable for Rebecca Long Bailey. The searchable lines are below in date order, each linked to its source. Free to read, in full, without an account. Page 10 of 10.

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1. “I know that he is truly supportive of the veterans, so will he undertake to ensure that the Prime Minister meets me, my constituent and other nuclear testing veterans to discuss war pension reform, financial support, the release of blood and urine records, and research and an inquiry into all that happened to those men and their families?”

   House of Commons22 November 2022Contains Parliamentary information licensed under the Open Parliament Licence v3.0Source ↗

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2. “I was with my constituent Laura and her granddad John yesterday as the Prime Minister made his announcement, and they cried with joy. I thank the Minister for his unwavering support and for everything he has done to make yesterday a reality. I also thank for their unwavering support the right hon. Members for South Holland and The Deepings and for Uxbridge and South Ruislip (Boris Johnson), the Prime Minister, the Leader of the Opposition, and the hon. Member for Basildon and Billericay (Mr Baron), and of course LABRATS, the BNTVA, Susie Boniface of the Daily Mirror , and nuclear testing veterans themselves. Days such as yesterday, when politicians transcended party lines for the common good, do not happen very often, and we should celebrate them when they do, but the Minister knows that much more needs to be done.”

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3. “The statement proposes council tax increases to top up social care funding, but the Chancellor must be aware that in Salford, the 18th most deprived local authority, with a current list of 27,000 people accessing council tax reduction support, any increases would raise only nominal funds, and the pain would be felt by residents on a huge scale. How will Salford pay for its social care, and what support will the Chancellor provide to mitigate the impact on those who cannot afford council tax increases?”

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4. “Q9. A 1958 instruction from Whitehall ordered medics to take blood samples regularly from exposed veterans during nuclear weapons tests. I have been made aware that many veterans and their families have been reported being unable to obtain the test results, so are denied the ability to make any sense of what they, and in some cases their families, suffered. Will the Deputy Prime Minister investigate and inform me of the legal rights of these men to obtain their medical records? Will he undertake to ask the Prime Minister to order that the medical files be opened to veterans and the UK Health Security Agency immediately?”

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5. “A Cabinet Office source reportedly told the Daily Mirror that the Advisory Military Sub-Committee has recommended to the main Committee on the Grant of Honours, Decorations and Medals that there be no medal for nuclear testing veterans, despite a Government scientist reporting in February that atomic troops were more likely to die, and to die from cancer, than other servicemen. Given that the Sir John Holmes military medal review in 2012 states clearly that the Prime Minister can personally make a direct recommendation to the sovereign on a medal issue, will he now recommend that those servicemen finally receive the medal they deserve?”

   House of Commons7 November 2022Contains Parliamentary information licensed under the Open Parliament Licence v3.0Source ↗

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6. “It goes some way towards regulating the sector, but it does not tackle the root causes of the problems that my local residents face, it will not provide the homes and repairs that they need now, and it will not ensure that a decent, warm, safe and secure home should be a right for all. Only a change in Government will do that.”

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7. “Those who do get properties are supposedly the lucky ones who should be grateful for what they have received, while the housing team creaks under the volume of people who have not been so lucky and are desperate to find a decent home to live in. As the cost of living crisis bites, a crisis is coming down the tracks this winter in the shape of social housing rent affordability. The Salford City Mayor and deputy mayor, along with Salford MPs, recently wrote to the Government to request a social rents freeze across the board and that they make available the funding to deliver this locally. We have yet to receive any semblance of a response from the Government. Yes, I support the Bill.”

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8. “I also have reports of people battling mice and rats. They should be moved out of their properties but there are no other houses available to put them in. I have elderly people with mobility issues who have been placed in upstairs flats when they need a ground-floor property to have any semblance of quality of life. Again, no suitable properties are available. The list is endless. Social housing has been fundamentally crushed by this Government over the past 10 years. In the city of Salford alone we have almost 6,000 households on our housing register and there are 108 bids per property advertised. What does that mean? It means that families are crammed into unsuitable accommodation because there is simply nothing else available.”

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9. “I have residents who have been told that they cannot open the windows at their properties properly because the window is too heavy and might fall out. I have residents living in freezing buildings this winter where all the cladding has been removed but not yet replaced because the Government at first refused to fund its replacement. The local housing association had to secure a loan to carry out the works, and now structural issues have been identified that need urgent repair. Not only were the residents refused Government help during the fire safety crisis in the first instance, but there is now no additional Government support for them as they face a winter of sky-high energy costs because their buildings have no cladding. Many report to me that they are now just not putting the heating on, which is quite frightening.”

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10. “Although we of course all have positive success stories of issues being addressed quickly by housing associations—I have worked with some brilliant housing association personnel in Salford—we also have myriad cases in which they have not been dealt with, there is not enough funding to deal with the issues, or the resident needs to be rehoused and there is simply nothing suitable available for them. It would take me many hours to go through my list of cases, but let me give a few examples. I have cases of young families living in high-storey tower blocks without baths for their children because there are no suitable properties for their needs and they have been put in properties that are suitable for those with medical needs and given wet rooms instead.”

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11. “The National Housing Federation and Crisis have shown recently in their research that 90,000 new social rented homes need to be built every year, but a lack of funding has meant that only about 5,000 are being built. In the meantime, how can any of us in this House be sure that our local residents are not living in the same conditions as little Awaab’s family, stuck in old, unsuitable properties that are riddled with issues? The fact is that at the moment we cannot be sure, because unless our residents come to us directly we do not know. When that occurs, it is usually because they feel they have not been listened to. They have tried everybody else first and felt that every single door has been shut firmly in their face.”

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12. “But the fact is that years of effective cuts and freezes on rents without Government funding to match have meant that housing associations often do not have the resources to inspect properties routinely, let alone upgrade them regularly to the standard required. Let us also remember that in 2010 funding for new social rented housing stopped completely and that an affordable rent tenure was introduced, in which homes are rented at up to 80% of their market rent. As Inside Housing has reported, although many housing associations tried to use their own funds to keep building some social rented homes, in 2010 nearly 36,000 social rented homes were started; the next year, after funding cuts, that number reduced to just over 3,000.”

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13. “It should have been a moment of reckoning: the instigation of a national mission for decent homes that would have seen the rapid deployment of Government funding to build new homes and bring existing ones to a decent standard. But sadly, I do not think we have yet seen such promises from the Government—indeed, we face threats of further austerity over the coming weeks. Although the Bill suggests a regime of routine inspections of social housing, we have yet to see any detail about how that will actually be delivered and funded. Along with other Salford MPs and our city Mayor, I wrote to all our housing providers because we were extremely worried. We asked for urgent reports detailing the quality and condition of each of the properties that our housing associations manage, evaluated against the decent homes standard.”

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14. “When the news broke of the shocking and tragic death of two-year-old Awaab Ishak in Rochdale, I am sure that, like me, many Members were shocked to their core. Little Awaab’s lungs had been exposed to damp and mould in the flat where he lived with his family, and it was found that his death was directly linked to those poor living conditions. The court recently heard that Awaab’s family battled the problems at their home for a number of years, even before Awaab was born. Indeed, they had filed a disrepair claim against the housing association. What is clear is that Awaab’s death should have brought great anger to this country—one of the richest economies in the world.”

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15. “Indeed, in 2021 Greater Manchester Law Centre ran an investigation into covid evictions in which it sent freedom of information requests to 23 social housing providers across Greater Manchester. It found that six social housing providers claimed not to be classified as public authorities and that they were therefore not subject to freedom of information requests—they refused to answer. Some 13 failed to reply at all. It is clear that the Bill must be amended to make social housing providers subject to the 2000 Act. I hope that the Secretary of State and Minister will make that simple yet necessary amendment as the Bill proceeds to Committee. More widely, I have serious concerns that the Bill fails to address the crisis.”

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16. “I broadly support the Bill, but as it stands its scope is clearly too narrow to address the crisis in social housing, as I think the Secretary of State accepts. I would like to focus briefly on one issue. The Bill proposes a new access to information scheme, which would make social housing providers more accountable to their tenants and regulator. However, it appears that the scheme falls short of making social housing providers truly accountable as council providers have to be, as it does not bring social housing providers under the remit of the Freedom of Information Act 2000. Without being subject to that Act, social housing providers can refuse and have refused to be transparent about important elements of their business practices, even though they are receiving public money through rent and support.”

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17. “According to recent figures from the Resolution Foundation think-tank, the number of all people living in absolute poverty in the UK is projected to rise by 2.9 million between 2021-22 and 2023-24. A real-terms benefit cut would add another 600,000 people to that rise, including 300,000 children. These are our most economically vulnerable households, and if the magical, mythical unicorn of compassionate conservatism that the Chancellor referred to recently is to be given any meaning at all, the Government can start today by extending the pension credit cost of living grant deadline and uprating benefits and pensions in line with recent inflation figures.”

    House of Commons26 October 2022Contains Parliamentary information licensed under the Open Parliament Licence v3.0Source ↗

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18. “Member for Glasgow North East, Independent Age estimates that low uptake of pension credit costs the Government £4 billion a year in increased NHS and social care spending. These deadlines are an arbitrary, cruel barrier that the Government are choosing to impose, but they can easily amend them in this time of crisis. Alongside that, the Government should confirm as a matter of urgency that they will increase income top-ups such as pension credit, not just the state pension, in line with inflation according to the consumer prices index or the higher rate of the pensions triple lock. They should also look urgently at increasing all benefits in line with inflation.”

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19. “As of June 2022, it estimated there is over £6.3 million of pension credit unclaimed this year in Salford alone. Independent Age estimated that if everybody who is eligible received pension credit, roughly one in three pensioners in poverty would be lifted out of it. That is the impact these payments have on people’s lives. The Government must step up to ensure that our pensioners—our grandmothers, grandfathers and elderly friends—receive the support they are entitled to in the first place, as well as the additional crisis support. They certainly should not be excluded due to short, strict deadlines when we know that these exclusion factors are already at play. This is not just about compassion; as we heard from the hon.”

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20. “Members have heard, Independent Age suggests that more than 850,000 pensioners in the UK do not even receive the pension credit to which they are entitled. That is likely due to a combination of digital exclusion, apprehension about applying and social stigma—and that is before they are even eligible for the extra cost of living payment. We must remember that pension credit is a financial top-up for some of the pensioners who are most in need in this country. In many cases, it means that people do not have to choose between heating their homes and eating. Nobody in the world’s fifth biggest economy should ever face that choice. A great campaign run by Greater Manchester Housing Providers, Independent Age, Age UK Salford and Citizens Advice Salford has been supporting people to take up their pension age benefits.”

    House of Commons26 October 2022Contains Parliamentary information licensed under the Open Parliament Licence v3.0Source ↗

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21. “It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship today, Mr Dowd. I thank the hon. Member for Glasgow North East (Anne McLaughlin) for securing this important debate. I fully support her call for the Government to extend the eligibility period for the £650 pension credit cost of living grant to the end of the financial year. Independent Age’s analysis of Government figures shows that around one in six older people in the UK live in poverty. Many are already struggling to afford essentials, and with spiralling energy prices and the general cost of living, that is set only to get much worse. I welcomed the support grant itself, and the plan for an additional £300 pensioner cost of living payment. However, sadly, as hon.”

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22. “The clock may well be ticking on the Prime Minister’s days in office but, as Naomi Klein sadly states, “When powerful ideologies are challenged by hard evidence from the real world, they rarely die off completely…A few true believers always remain to tell one another that the problem wasn’t with the ideology; it was the weakness of leaders who did not apply the rules with sufficient rigor.” That is why today is so important. That is why across this House we have a moral duty to vote in favour of this motion, to introduce a Bill to ban hydraulic fracking for shale gas once and for all.”

    House of Commons19 October 2022Contains Parliamentary information licensed under the Open Parliament Licence v3.0Source ↗

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23. “A new generation is now calling for change, a green new deal and a green jobs revolution that distributes costs and rewards progressively, deepens economic democracy and kick-starts an industrial strategy to rebuild and light up Britain. We get it on this side of the House, but I am worried that we will miss this chance. Worse, I am frightened that, although numerous Conservative Members may speak out against fracking, the fact remains that they are still in a Government led by an environmental and economic vandal.”

    House of Commons19 October 2022Contains Parliamentary information licensed under the Open Parliament Licence v3.0Source ↗

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24. “Well, the author and climate commentator Naomi Klein calls it “the Shock Doctrine: the exploitation of wrenching crises to smuggle through policies that devour the public sphere and further enrich a small elite.” This bandit capitalism extends beyond just fracking into the way the Government approach our whole energy system. The pursuit of markets at all costs, with little state intervention, keeps leading to the same problems: complex, poorly designed mechanisms, open to gaming and profiteering, that deliver poor value for money and poor environmental outcomes, if they deliver at all. When that system fails, as it is failing now, well, it is everybody else’s problem.”

    House of Commons19 October 2022Contains Parliamentary information licensed under the Open Parliament Licence v3.0Source ↗

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25. “Fracking will not solve the energy crisis. Indeed, the shale gas extracted by fracking would make no difference to gas prices and is a more expensive alternative to renewables. Further, fracking would demonstrably increase the risk of local earth tremors, as recently confirmed by the British Geological Survey. On the wider environmental impact, Greenpeace says: “Not only is fracking bad for our climate, it risks causing air, water and noise pollution. It uses toxic chemicals that may not be regulated well enough. An accident could mean that these chemicals leak into water supplies or cause pollution above ground. In fact, this has happened many times in the US.” With all this in mind, why on earth would the Government pursue a strategy that poses such risks and flies in the face of efforts to tackle climate change?”

    House of Commons19 October 2022Contains Parliamentary information licensed under the Open Parliament Licence v3.0Source ↗

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26. “Pendleton leisure centre, a flagship council development to tackle health inequalities in an area of high deprivation that seldom enjoys such investment, was suspended last week, largely, I am told, as a result of the Government’s economic car crash and the prospect of more public spending cuts to come. Will the Leader of the House apologise on behalf of the Prime Minister to the people of Salford?”

    House of Commons17 October 2022Contains Parliamentary information licensed under the Open Parliament Licence v3.0Source ↗

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27. “The Chancellor spoke of cuts, albeit shrouded in compassionate conservativism—a paradox if ever there was one—but surely he must realise how serious things are in public services at the moment. In Salford alone, the council is sitting on a £16 million shortfall due to soaring energy costs. That is on top of slashing its previous budget in half and slashing its staff rotas by over half. How can he possibly put forward compassionate cuts to services that are barely able to function at the moment?”

    House of Commons17 October 2022Contains Parliamentary information licensed under the Open Parliament Licence v3.0Source ↗

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28. “In my own constituency, the Court of Appeal sided with a major water company in the north-west, United Utilities, in a case brought by the Good Law Project over the legal routes available to people to challenge its discharging of sewage into the Manchester ship canal. That case means that any water company can dump sewage into waterways in England and Wales without fear of being sued in a civil court by any group—whether that is an angling club, a swimming club, a wildlife group or local residents. There is plenty that the Government can do to address the issue: properly fund environmental agencies, give environmental agencies real legal teeth for enforcement, and set more ambitious legal targets to clean up water quality. Finally, they should bring water companies into public ownership.”

    House of Commons12 October 2022Contains Parliamentary information licensed under the Open Parliament Licence v3.0Source ↗

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29. “I thank the hon. Member for Bexhill and Battle (Huw Merriman) for securing this important debate. In Salford, we have had numerous incidents of sewage discharge. For example, in 2021 a sewer storm overflow at Pomona docks spilled 289 times for a total of 1,733 hours, discharging into the Manchester ship canal. It will take more than regulation and fluffy reduction targets to fix the problem. Sadly, years of chronic underfunding of the Environment Agency and inaction by water regulator Ofwat means that there are few legal teeth to stop water companies flagrantly discharging sewage into our waterways.”

    House of Commons12 October 2022Contains Parliamentary information licensed under the Open Parliament Licence v3.0Source ↗

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30. “The Joseph Rowntree Foundation has commented on reports that the Government plan to increase benefits only in line with earnings instead of CPI September inflation, stating that this would amount to the biggest “permanent deliberate real-terms cut to the basic rate of benefits” ever made in a single year. Can the Chief Secretary assure my frightened constituents today that, first, these reports are not true and, secondly, that he will uprate benefits in line with CPI inflation in September?”

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31. “May she now rest in peace. We extend our love and support to His Majesty the King as he assumes his new office, in what can only be a period of profound pain. God save the King.”

    House of Commons9 September 2022Contains Parliamentary information licensed under the Open Parliament Licence v3.0Source ↗

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32. “On behalf of my constituents in Salford and Eccles, it is an honour to pay tribute to Her late Majesty Queen Elizabeth II, and to send our heartfelt condolences, love and prayers to her family, the royal household, all who loved her, and the nation, at this sad time. It is undeniable that she served us with unrelenting duty, dignity and kindness. Her dedication to uniting us all was a beacon of goodness throughout her long reign. She never failed to lift us up in the hard time and through the good time. As we have heard tonight, on her 21st birthday, as a princess, she said: “I declare before you all that my whole life whether it be long or short shall be devoted to your service”. She never broke that promise, keeping her pledge with love and warmth for more than 75 years. She really was a shining example of the best of us.”

    House of Commons9 September 2022Contains Parliamentary information licensed under the Open Parliament Licence v3.0Source ↗

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33. “British nuclear testing veterans and their families met the Prime Minister, Defence Ministers, the right hon. Member for South Holland and The Deepings (Sir John Hayes) and me on 8 June. The veterans told me that they felt that the Prime Minister had listened to them, and they were hopeful that they would be formally recognised. Will the Secretary of State provide a progress report on the actions that he and the Prime Minister have taken since the meeting to secure the recognition that these veterans so deserve?”

    House of Commons18 July 2022Contains Parliamentary information licensed under the Open Parliament Licence v3.0Source ↗

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34. “NHS dentistry hangs by a thread. The Government have a moral duty to stop the rot today because rotting teeth come from a rotting Government. I hope that the Minister will change my mind.”

    House of Commons21 June 2022Contains Parliamentary information licensed under the Open Parliament Licence v3.0Source ↗

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35. “As we have heard—from Conservative Members, actually—this is a crisis in NHS dentistry, but many of the factors that contribute to this crisis are directly related to poverty, people’s diets and the amount of money they have to spend as a family on oral health and hygiene. We are in the midst of a cost of living crisis as well as a dental crisis, and the Government need to be doing far more to support families to make sure that they have enough to live on and a decent range of food that provides them with the nutrition they need in order to have healthy teeth. We naively thought that poverty-related ill health, rotting teeth and gum disease had been consigned to the history books when NHS dentistry was established in 1948, but this Government wind the clock back day after day and those afflictions are now back with a vengeance.”

    House of Commons21 June 2022Contains Parliamentary information licensed under the Open Parliament Licence v3.0Source ↗

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36. “Secondly, the Government must provide adequate levels of protected NHS dental funding to ensure investment in new and existing NHS dental services, and they must guarantee the long-term sustainability of NHS dentistry for all who need it. Thirdly, NHS dentistry must be given the status it deserves. That means sitting right at the heart of local NHS commissioning, rather than being treated as an afterthought—a luxury service, as it were, which is how many seem to perceive it. Finally, the Government must build and properly fund historic public health commitments to prevention.”

    House of Commons21 June 2022Contains Parliamentary information licensed under the Open Parliament Licence v3.0Source ↗

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37. “Around 3,000 dentists in England have stopped providing NHS services since the start of the pandemic. Staggeringly, for every dentist quitting the NHS entirely, 10 are reducing their NHS commitment by 25% on average, and 75%—75%—of dentists plan to reduce the amount of NHS work they do next year. It is clear that we face a dental crisis and that the Government must urgently address it. There are a number of actions that I hope the Minister will take. First, they must reform the NHS dental contract with a decisive break from units of dental activity, a greater focus on prevention and the removal of perverse incentives.”

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38. “On the contract, the system in effect sets quotas for the number of patients a dentist can see on the NHS and caps the number of dental procedures they can perform in any given year. If a dentist delivers more than they have been commissioned to—say, to try to help a desperate patient in need of urgent care—that dentist is in effect punished. Not only are they not remunerated for the extra work done, but they have to bear the cost themselves of any materials used, laboratory work and other overheads. It is no wonder that morale among NHS dentists is now at an all-time low, and we are facing an exodus of dentists from the NHS. We are seeing NHS dentistry deserts popping up all over the country, where constituents such as mine in Salford can only dream of trying to get on an NHS dentist’s patient list.”

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39. “The Government confirmed that they held no data for my constituency or even across Greater Manchester. Frankly, that is staggering. So what is at the heart of the decline of NHS dentistry? The British Dental Association details that chronic underfunding and the current NHS dental contract are to blame for long-standing problems with burnout, recruitment and retention in NHS dental services. On funding, in real terms, net Government spend on general dental practice in England was cut by over a quarter between 2010 and 2020. The £50 million that the Government have announced—as we have already heard today, it is difficult to access that at the best of times—will not even touch the sides given the amount of funding cut from NHS dentistry.”

    House of Commons21 June 2022Contains Parliamentary information licensed under the Open Parliament Licence v3.0Source ↗

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40. “He said to me that, had it not been for the fact that he was on anticoagulants, he would have pulled his own teeth out with a pair of pliers. There was the Salford woman with countless abscesses all over her jaw, and no money to go private. She was in acute pain and putting her life at risk from a spreading infection. She had been trying to get on an NHS waiting list for a dentist for over five years. There was also the Salford mother living on the breadline, yet forced to borrow and scrape together the money to go private. She told me that she had to pay £100 just to get on a dentist’s list. There are thousands of stories like this. Recently, I asked the Government what data they held on the number of people trying to access an NHS dentist in Salford, such as the stories I had heard from my constituents.”

    House of Commons21 June 2022Contains Parliamentary information licensed under the Open Parliament Licence v3.0Source ↗

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41. “According to the Association of Dental Groups, only a third of adults and half of children in England have access to an NHS dentist. As we have heard, the top reason for children being admitted to hospital is tooth extraction. It is 2022, not 1922. Back in 1947, when the NHS and NHS dental services were brought about by the then Labour Government, many of us naively thought that they would be around for ever, that we would always be able to access those services when we needed them. Unfortunately, we now see the return to the poverty-linked ill health that we saw in the 1940s. As MPs, we hear heartbreaking stories. There was the Salford man with a badly infected tooth who could barely afford to live, let alone pay for private dental treatment. He could not find an NHS dentist who would take him on.”

    House of Commons21 June 2022Contains Parliamentary information licensed under the Open Parliament Licence v3.0Source ↗

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42. “Of course, there are many permutations as to how a wealth tax could be constructed: it could be an annual tax in tandem with wider, much-needed reform of our taxation system to address existing loopholes and structural flaws; alternatively, it could be a one-off tax in response to the covid pandemic and the cost of living crisis. Such detail requires deeper discussion than time will allow today, but I hope that it will be the next step after today’s debate. Even millionaires are warning us against the injustices that they plainly see in our economic system. Further, they are warning us to take seriously the threat that rising inequality poses to democracy. It is up to all of us, whatever our political stripes, to embrace tax changes that would limit inequality and give our constituents the quality of life they deserve.”

    House of Commons14 June 2022Contains Parliamentary information licensed under the Open Parliament Licence v3.0Source ↗

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43. “On top of all that, the tax system in the UK is littered with loopholes that allow tax avoidance, and there is little resource for Her Majesty’s Revenue and Customs to clamp down on tax avoidance or evasion. There are a number of inherent structural flaws, such as the absurdity that income from wealth is taxed at a lower rate than income from salary. As we have heard today, the sad fact is that it does not need to be like this. We can take steps to reform our broken taxation system, and a wealth tax is one option to try to create such economic balance.”

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44. “The report also found that there were 56 billionaires in the UK, with wealth totalling $204.9 billion, and that throughout the pandemic, while many people struggled, the wealth of British billionaires actually increased by $41.06 billion. Indeed, the five richest billionaires have the same amount of wealth as the bottom 40% of British society. That phenomenon has not happened overnight. The global free market race for the most competitive national tax rate has seen the top rates of personal income tax and capital income tax rates decline since the 1980s in leading industrial nations, and the income share of the top 1% has significantly increased.”

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45. “They include groups such as Patriotic Millionaires, the “Tax me now” initiative, Millionaires for Humanity and 99%-Initiative, who recognise that hard work and entrepreneurship should be celebrated, rewarded and encouraged, but that we cannot do that effectively in a broken economic system that fails to address the gross divide between those with extreme wealth and the majority of everyday people. Those millionaires and, I suspect, many more decent people like them recognise that something skewed has been happening in our economy over recent years, and they are right. “Taxing Extreme Wealth”, a recent report by Oxfam, Patriotic Millionaires, the Institute for Policy Studies and Fight Inequality, found that in the UK alone, “Between 2016 and 2021, the number of individuals with wealth over $50 million increased from 4,375 to 5,330”.”

    House of Commons14 June 2022Contains Parliamentary information licensed under the Open Parliament Licence v3.0Source ↗

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46. “No matter how many people vote, if governments continue to listen to wealth over sense, the votes and voices of everyday people are not heard. If you want to defend democracy you have to face facts. The divide between the very rich and the rest must close. The rich must be taxed.” People might think that those are the words of a social justice movement or a left-wing political activist, but nothing could be further from the truth. The letter was actually written by millionaires themselves—specifically, a non-party political network of millionaires advocating action on economic inequality and higher taxes on themselves.”

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47. “It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Sir Edward. I thank my hon. Friend Member for Leeds East (Richard Burgon) for securing this important debate. I shall start by reading an excerpt from a letter to Klaus Schwab, the Executive Chairman of the World Economic Forum. It reads: “The scandalous rise in the cost of living across the globe is not an unfortunate accident. It is the result of dogged commitment, from governments all over the world, to preserving the power and wealth of a tiny minority over the needs of their voting publics. It is a stunning commitment to failure and a constant suppressant on our economic and social prosperity…We must face it. People do not trust democracy because the prevailing global oligarchy is rendering it pointless.”

    House of Commons14 June 2022Contains Parliamentary information licensed under the Open Parliament Licence v3.0Source ↗

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48. “Is the Minister aware that the report did discount an annual wealth tax, and looked at exploring the possibility of an annual wealth tax if it was done in tandem with overall reform of our taxation system? Does she agree that our taxation system is long overdue an overhaul?”

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49. “Those are just three staggeringly pernicious examples from a frightening selection box of draconian and anti-democratic measures in this Bill.”

    House of Commons23 May 2022Contains Parliamentary information licensed under the Open Parliament Licence v3.0Source ↗

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50. “As JUSTICE says, it is so vague that it would appear to capture a couple walking arm in arm down a busy street where they may be being reckless as to cause “serious disruption” to another couple walking in the opposite direction. Again, “serious disruption” is undefined and could mean literally anything. The widening of already extensive stop and search powers also appears wholly disproportionate and hugely damaging to racialised communities. Indeed, clause 7(2) is one troubling example. That allows for the police to search an individual when they have reasonable grounds for finding an object that is “made or adapted for use in the course of or in connection” with one of the relevant offences. “Object” is not defined; it could be anything from a mobile phone used to agree meeting points with friends to a leaflet about the event.”

    House of Commons23 May 2022Contains Parliamentary information licensed under the Open Parliament Licence v3.0Source ↗

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