Josh Newbury
MP for Cannock Chase · Labour · United Kingdom
“A helipad that cannot be used around the clock can leave a gap in that journey, and when an emergency happens at 2 am, a patient cannot wait until the hospital’s facilities are fully up and running. I appreciate that not every hospital has the same needs.”
House of Commons29 October 2026Contains Parliamentary information licensed under the Open Parliament Licence v3.0Source ↗
“They deserve the same confidence as anyone that, if the worst happens, everything possible is being done to get them the right treatment quickly. I know how strongly people in Cannock Chase feel about access to healthcare.”
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“Every extra minute matters, so the longer a crew spend getting from one hospital to another, the longer they may be unavailable to help the next person who needs them.”
House of Commons29 October 2026Contains Parliamentary information licensed under the Open Parliament Licence v3.0Source ↗
“In some cases, crews from Staffordshire might need to consider flying a child to Alder Hey children’s hospital in Liverpool, because that often offers a quicker route to getting the care they need. I am very concerned about that.”
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“I met its CEO, Hanna Sebright, and one of my constituency predecessors who is working with them. I heard about the challenges that the sector faces. Air Ambulances UK’s review has identified significant gaps in hospital helipad provision across the country.”
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“My husband’s family have personal experience of this because, 20 years ago, when my niece was just a year old, she came down with a nasty pneumonia infection. It got to the point where she was in a critical condition and doctors said she needed to get to A&E as quickly as possible.”
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“For my constituents in Cannock Chase, particularly those living in rural communities—or those in trouble in the forest itself—this is about knowing that that distance will not count against them when they need urgent care. We are right to focus on bringing more healthcare closer to home, but we must also make sure that, when people need specialist and emergency treatment, there is a clear and reliable route to get them there. Thanks to air ambulances, that is often the case—they often step in and do incredible things for our constituents. If they can save someone’s life, we should be doing everything we reasonably can to make sure that a hospital is ready for them when they arrive.”
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“Will the Government look at a clearer national approach to hospital helipads, so that hospitals and the NHS trusts that look after them know what is expected of them when it comes to access around the clock? Will the Minister work with relevant trusts to look at the concerns raised around Royal Stoke and New Cross, and make sure that any necessary improvements are properly considered? Will the Government look at how essential helipad improvements might be funded where charities cannot meet the full cost? Nobody wants to think about the moment in which a family member is seriously injured and an air ambulance has to be called, but those moments do happen. When they do, people need to know the system is ready for them.”
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“A helipad that cannot be used around the clock can leave a gap in that journey, and when an emergency happens at 2 am, a patient cannot wait until the hospital’s facilities are fully up and running. I appreciate that not every hospital has the same needs. We have heard very different cases from across the country, but we should have a clear understanding of which hospitals need helipads, which need improvements to their helipads, and which have facilities that cannot be used at all hours. We also need to make sure that recommendations are followed through. If an assessment identifies a problem, there should be a plan to address it, rather than the same concerns appearing in report after report, which we have seen for many years. I too have a few questions for the Minister, which echo some of what she has already heard this debate.”
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“They deserve the same confidence as anyone that, if the worst happens, everything possible is being done to get them the right treatment quickly. I know how strongly people in Cannock Chase feel about access to healthcare. We have lost our minor injuries unit, so local people know what it means when a service they once relied on is no longer there. That is one reason why I am really pleased to see this Government’s focus on improving access to healthcare, including through neighbourhood health centres, because bringing services closer to people’s homes really matters. I welcome that ambition. However, we also need to think about what happens when someone needs emergency treatment that cannot be provided locally. Our neighbourhood services must be backed up by hospitals that can receive patients quickly day or night.”
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“In some cases, crews from Staffordshire might need to consider flying a child to Alder Hey children’s hospital in Liverpool, because that often offers a quicker route to getting the care they need. I am very concerned about that. These are hospitals that people across my region and in the wider west midlands rely on at the worst moments of their lives. Where a helicopter cannot land directly, patients might need to be transferred. As we have heard, that can have disastrous consequences. For someone with, for example, a serious head injury, major trauma or another life-threatening condition, this is the time we should be doing everything we can to save their life. I think about my constituents in our rural villages who are already likely to be further away from emergency services.”
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“Every extra minute matters, so the longer a crew spend getting from one hospital to another, the longer they may be unavailable to help the next person who needs them. We have seen a similar problem at Birmingham children’s hospital, which provides specialist major trauma care for children right across the west midlands, including Staffordshire. There is no helipad at the hospital, meaning that children brought in by air ambulance need a further road transfer, just like that described by the hon. Member for North Cornwall (Ben Maguire), typically adding 10 to 15 minutes to the journey. That is despite the fact that the hospital sits right next to Queen Elizabeth hospital Birmingham, which has a helipad. For families facing what might be the most frightening day of their lives, those are precious minutes.”
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“I met its CEO, Hanna Sebright, and one of my constituency predecessors who is working with them. I heard about the challenges that the sector faces. Air Ambulances UK’s review has identified significant gaps in hospital helipad provision across the country. Royal Stoke, which serves many of my constituents, has been given an amber rating, meaning that further action is needed. New Cross hospital in Wolverhampton has been given a red rating, meaning that priority action is required. That is genuinely concerning for patients. New Cross does not currently have a hospital helipad, which means a patient who needs urgent specialist care might face a long journey by road, or air ambulance crews might need to fly them further to another hospital, as was the case for my niece.”
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“My husband’s family have personal experience of this because, 20 years ago, when my niece was just a year old, she came down with a nasty pneumonia infection. It got to the point where she was in a critical condition and doctors said she needed to get to A&E as quickly as possible. I think there was some trouble on the roads that night, so she was taken by air ambulance from Evesham in Worcestershire all the way to the Royal Stoke university hospital. She had to be in hospital for a few weeks after that, such was the severity of that infection, but the air ambulance undoubtedly saved her life that day, and she lives to tell the tale as a brilliant 21-year-old. In January, I went to the Cosford airbase, headquarters of the Midlands Air Ambulance Charity.”
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“It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Sir Alec. I congratulate the hon. Member for Strangford (Jim Shannon), who represents a beautiful part of Ulster, on securing the debate. I thank him for doing so and for his keen interest in debates that I have secured in the past. I have one in Westminster Hall next Tuesday on train services; I hope to see him there. When somebody is seriously injured, every minute matters. For people living in or visiting the most rural parts of my Cannock Chase constituency, getting to the right hospital can already mean a long journey. Air ambulances do an incredible job: they bring expert care to the people who need it most, often in the most frightening circumstances imaginable.”
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“I will start by thanking the Minister for the part he played in getting the announcement of a strategic mayoral authority for Staffordshire over the line in time for yesterday’s Budget. However, despite the potential efficiency and simplicity gains of local government reorganisation, the shifting goalposts and the stop-start process have caused deep frustration in our county. Can the Minister confirm what the coming months will bring in terms of consultation with MPs, councillors and, most importantly, our constituents, so that they are clear on how they can again have their say over the future of our councils?”
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“Q10. Twenty-one years ago my constituent Paul Dadge helped survivors of the 7/7 bombings to safety. His phone was hacked, and so were the phones of family members of people who lost their lives that day. Press intrusion also affected victims of the Manchester Arena bombings and the Hillsborough families, who have described press regulation as the final piece of the jigsaw in their fight for justice. Fourteen years on from the Leveson inquiry, we still have major publications in control of the system that polices them. I know that this is an issue that the Prime Minister cares deeply about, so will his Government bring forward plans for the fair, independent press regulation that our constituents want to see?”
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“Cannock Chase Labour has shown that councils can deliver, and I hope the Government’s measures will give more councils the means and confidence to do so in future.”
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“I am also interested to hear from the Minister about whether there is scope to take the number of long-term empty homes into greater account when housing targets are calculated. Finally, I welcome the Government’s plans to tighten right to buy because we need to ensure that the council houses that we build remain available to people who need them well into the future. As we make it easier for councils to build again, I hope that we can gradually work towards ending right to buy altogether and protect that housing stock for the long term. That is ultimately what the debate is all about: making sure that people have access to a decent, secure and genuinely affordable home, whether that means building on a neglected garage site, regenerating a former school or bringing empty property back into use.”
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“I will also touch on empty homes, something that two constituents raised with me just last week. One is concerned about the number of green belt sites having to be released. The other, who is trying to get on to the housing ladder, very much welcomed the upcoming Your First Home scheme announced by the Prime Minister but felt that bringing empty homes back into use should also be part of the answer. I therefore welcome the Government’s boost to the powers that councils can use to tackle the issue of long-term empty properties. Again, I encourage Cannock Chase district council to make full use of them, including for two semi-detached houses on Poplar Street in Norton Canes that have stood empty for many years.”
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“The ribbon may have been cut under Reform, but the groundwork was done under Labour. That brings me to the Government’s plans to help councils do more, because in Cannock Chase a lack of ambition was never the problem, finding affordable finance was. That is why I welcome the extension of preferential public works loan board rates, which will help make the numbers stack up for councils looking to invest in new homes. I also welcome the council house building support fund because councils need the right people and expertise to develop schemes, build pipelines of projects and put together strong bids for funding. That is something that my council found that we often missed out on when councils of other similar sizes were getting funding awarded. I hope that my district council will make full use of that opportunity.”
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“I will start by singing the praises of what we have done in my constituency, because Labour’s record at Cannock Chase district council shows what can be achieved when a council is ambitious about providing the homes its residents need. After more than 30 years without building new council homes, the last Labour administration, which I was proud to be part of as deputy leader, got building again. It started with the most unglamorous of sites: old garage blocks that were becoming increasingly difficult to rent out, many of which had turned into magnets for antisocial behaviour and drug dealing. We turned them into new homes, filling some of the biggest gaps in our housing stock. We also partnered with Lovell Homes to redevelop the former Aelfgar school site in Rugeley, where 58 new homes have been delivered, including 29 council houses.”
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“Yet the authority responsible for receiving them may not even know they are there. The clinicians who want to do their best to replicate that support are sometimes left on the back foot. They may only discover the child when something has gone wrong and they come to them in a very bad way. That is not a sensible way to organise care for any child, let alone one who is already vulnerable, which is why, of course, the legal duty to inform exists. In my constituency, we have seen rapid growth in independent children’s homes in recent years, partly because of the relatively low property prices but also, as we know, because of a chronic lack of foster carers. As a former foster carer myself, I very much welcome the recruitment campaign that the Department launched last week.”
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“Then they are moved miles from home—sometimes hundreds of miles—and the support that they had, we hope, been receiving does not always follow them. The statutory requirement is for the responsible local authority to notify the host local authority when a child or young person in care is placed within its area. but I am hearing that this does not always happen and does not always include the relevant information regarding identified risks and support needs. Consideration should also be given to the suitability of the placement, such as the availability of local services. When a local authority decides to place a child in another part of the country, that child arrives with their own history, their own vulnerabilities and, often, an established package of support.”
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“It was about vulnerable children being placed in Staffordshire by local authorities elsewhere in the country and the problems that arise when the right people are not told that those children are coming. I heard from clinicians that increasingly they are coming across young people who have been placed in our area without Staffordshire county council being notified. Sadly, CAMHS staff sometimes encounter those children for the first time when they are in a serious mental health crisis. The doctors I spoke to described young people who might be self-harming or experiencing suicidal thoughts. These are children who will almost certainly have already experienced deep trauma, family breakdown and considerable instability.”
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“I had gone there to talk to the team about the fantastic Pride in Place funding coming to our area and to meet some of the brilliant clinicians based there who specialise in areas such as child and adolescent mental health services, paediatric podiatry, occupational health and various forms of family support. As I am sure Members across the House will have experienced, I often leave a visit in my constituency with much more work than I walked in with, but that is of course what I was elected to do, and it is a pleasure to do that work. One of the conversations I had at West Chadsmoor raised an issue I felt needed to be brought to this House.”
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“I would like to take this opportunity, as I have not yet had one, to warmly welcome the Minister to his place. I know that he is covering tonight for the Under-Secretary of State for Education, my hon. Friend the Member for Whitehaven and Workington (Josh MacAlister), but I am sure that he will do a fantastic job. I know that in his role on early education, which is also an area of interest for me, he will be a steadfast champion and a fantastic member of this Government, so I welcome him. I first applied for this debate after a conversation I had at the West Chadsmoor NHS clinic back in June.”
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“I thank the hon. Gentleman for his kind words. He always has a kind word to say and a valuable contribution to make to any debate on any topic, which is quite impressive. He is absolutely right to highlight the fact that there are so many people in our country who would love to foster and have the attributes and the motivation to do so, but who simply cannot afford to because the costs they would have to meet exceed the payment they would get. We need to raise awareness of the fact that fostering is paid for—many people do not realise that—and we need to bring those stories to the House, as he has rightly done, to highlight the need to do far more to support our foster carers, who do an incredible amount.”
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“My ask is that, as this work progresses, we keep the experience of the child at its centre. That means pushing local authorities to share information, health services being able to plan ahead, and clear accountability for ensuring that the support a child needs is actually there. Every child in care deserves stability, safety and the chance to thrive, wherever they are placed. I look forward to working with the Minister to ensure that the Government’s reforms deliver those outcomes for children in Staffordshire and across the country.”
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“I recognise that the Government are taking steps to address the shortage of placements. The £560 million investment in children’s homes and foster care, alongside the roll-out of regional care co-operatives, is intended to help to create more suitable places closer to where children live. That matters, because the best way to manage the challenges of out-of-area placements is, wherever possible, to avoid placing children so far away in the first place. When children do need to move, we must ensure that their care and support move with them. I welcome the steps that this Government are taking to increase placement capacity, strengthen the system and improve how services work together. The investment in children’s homes and foster care provides an opportunity for us to ensure that more children can be cared for closer to home.”
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“I began by talking about the clinicians at West Chadsmoor NHS clinic, and I will end by returning to them. They see children who have already faced more disruption to their young lives than most of us can even imagine. They want to give those children the stability, understanding and care that they deserve, and the least we should expect of the system that supports them is that it gives those professionals the information and co-operation they need to do that. A child should not have to experience a crisis before the services around them realise that support has fallen away; a family should not have to become an expert in local government responsibilities before it can access help; and a local authority boundary should never become a barrier to a child’s wellbeing.”
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“Secondly, how are the Government working with health partners to improve the sharing of information when a child moves, so that their clinical history, existing treatment and crisis support arrangements can follow them and the services can plan ahead? Thirdly, how will the Government ensure that their regulatory and inspection framework provides effective oversight of children’s homes, so that the care and supervision children are promised is the care they actually receive? Finally, as the Government expand placement capacity and roll out regional care co-operatives—a very welcome development to my mind—how will they ensure that these reforms improve not just the availability of placements, but the co-ordination among local authorities, children’s homes and health services?”
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“Whether a child is living in a children’s home or being cared for by a grandparent, aunt, uncle or another family member, we must not allow administrative boundaries to become barriers to accessing the right support. That leaves me with four questions for the Minister, who as I said is standing in for the Under-Secretary of State for Education, my hon. Friend the Member for Whitehaven and Workington, who I know is doing a lot of work in this area. First, what steps are the Government taking to ensure local authorities meet their existing statutory duty to notify receiving authorities when placing children out of area, and to identify where that duty is not being met?”
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“It speaks to a wider challenge in how we co-ordinate support across local authority boundaries. Figures that I have seen show that in 2024, 45% of looked-after children were placed outside their home local authority, up from 40% in 2015. While 69% were placed within 20 miles of home, that proportion has fallen from 76% in 2015. The same challenges can affect kinship families. The 2024 annual survey by Kinship found that nearly a third of kinship families lived in a different local authority area from the one the child had lived in before coming into their care. Of those families, 57% reported difficulties accessing support as a result. These are different circumstances, but they point to the same question in my mind: when a child’s life crosses a local authority boundary, does the support they need follow them?”
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“The promised two-on-one or three-on-one support was not followed through either, to the point where the young person was at one point left alone and was found by neighbours banging on doors, clearly in extreme distress and mental health crisis. I cannot independently verify every detail of that story and I do not want to prejudge any investigation that might take place. I have also visited excellent homes in my constituency, run by people who care deeply about providing the highest quality trauma-informed care, and I believe they are the majority. However, these concerns underline why we need effective oversight and clear accountability for the care being provided. This is not a narrow issue affecting only children in residential care or those in Staffordshire alone.”
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“That young person had clearly had an incredibly traumatic experience at a young age and had complex needs. The placement was intensive, to the point where the home accepted just one child at a time, supported by several staff, 24/7. However, the company responsible for that home clearly had no intention of following through on the promised support package, which was not put in place. I heard that CAMHS were not even contacted, despite the company having put in its bid that local CAMHS services in my area were good and dealt with looked-after children very well, and that it had already made preliminary inquiries with CAMHS.”
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“The issue is particularly relevant to my constituency and the wider Staffordshire area, where, as I mentioned earlier, we have seen an increase in the number of children’s homes in recent years. As that number grows, we need to be confident that the right safeguards, oversight and support are keeping pace. A children’s home is not simply a property with staff in it—it is a place where some of our most vulnerable children should receive the care, stability and specialist support that they really need. To give a tragic example of how badly things can go wrong, I will share one story from Cannock Chase. Last summer, a constituent in Hednesford raised concerns with me about the care being provided to a vulnerable young person in an independent children’s home very close to where he lived.”
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“In some cases, local services can end up duplicating already commissioned input, leading to double-funded provision. That complexity is compounded when multiple providers operate within one geographical area. In Staffordshire and Stoke-on-Trent, there are multiple CAMHS providers, alongside specialist children in care health teams hosted by different organisations. Acute hospitals attended by young people may be managed by separate provider trusts, many of which do not have access to community health records that are held elsewhere. These organisational boundaries can create barriers to timely information sharing and co-ordinated care. Similarly, when children move between multiple out-of-area placements, information can become fragmented across different systems and accessing records held by external providers may not be possible.”
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“It also means that GPs may not know that a young person has entered their area; diagnoses, risks and existing care plans may not accompany the placement; responsibility for GP registration, crisis support and ongoing care may remain unclear; services might respond without essential clinical and contextual information; and young people may experience avoidable crisis escalation—emergency department attendance and in-patient stays are all too common. Fragmented arrangements can undermine safeguarding and continuity of care. Commissioning of provision is carried out by local authorities, but if they are not aware of what has been commissioned from the home area, which can often include a comprehensive health package to sustain the placement, it is not hard to see where things can go wrong.”
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“These children deserve more than a placement address; they deserve a joined-up package of care that follows them wherever they move to. The doctors I spoke to explained that, when Staffordshire county council receives the appropriate notification, CAMHS has a chance to contact the young person’s previous NHS trust, establish what support they have been receiving and work out how that support can be continued locally. That is the difference between planning for a child’s needs and reacting when those needs escalate. Without notification, that opportunity is taken away. The receiving services may not know about the child, may not have their clinical history and may not understand what treatment or support has been interrupted.”
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“Because of the high level of EBD homes, the county council is even taking the step of asking potential providers not to set up new EBD homes in my constituency for the time being, despite the shortages we are all aware of. As more homes open, our local services clearly have a growing role in supporting children whose previous care arrangements may have been organised hundreds of miles away. I am proud that Staffordshire can provide care for those children, but I want to ensure that the local authorities placing them here are giving our services the information that they need early enough to plan properly. My point is not that Staffordshire should do less to support these children; it is that, if we are going to provide that care, we must have the communication and co-ordination needed to do it as well as possible.”
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“When my husband and I were fostering, we were very fortunate to have that support from our county council, and we need to ensure that that support is available to everybody. Staffordshire is increasingly welcoming children who are placed in our county by local authorities elsewhere in the country, and I am very glad that our county is able to play that role in caring for vulnerable young people. The figures for Cannock Chase give us a sense of how the picture is changing. In 2025-26, five children’s homes opened and two closed, with a net increase of seven places. The county council told one of the councillors in my constituency that there are 19 homes for children with emotional and behavioural difficulties and seven for children with learning difficulties.”
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“I absolutely agree with my hon. Friend, who speaks from deep personal knowledge of this topic. She is right to highlight the experience of foster carers in her constituency, who all too often feel that the buck always stops with them and that there is never any let-up. It can be an incredibly challenging role—we are talking about some of the most vulnerable children in our society, who often have incredibly complex needs that present themselves in many different ways. It is the responsibility of our society as a whole to ensure that those children are well cared for, but we also need to ensure that our foster carers have the support and the wraparound care that is needed to succeed, because they play such an incredible role.”
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“It is good to hear that Ofsted is adapting and growing its inspection regime to reflect the fact that many children’s homes are opening, and the variation in practice seems quite large. Will my hon. Friend ask the Minister for children and families to look into whether Ofsted’s capacity to carry out inspections matches the growth in children’s homes in certain parts of the country, such as mine? We are seeing rapid growth in a short space of time. We need to make sure that the situation does not run away from us in those areas, and to avoid poorer practice in areas where there are not as many inspectors as we need.”
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“I hear time and again from my constituents, particularly in Rugeley and Brereton—WS15 in Royal Mail-speak—that they are getting a month’s-worth of letters shoved through their door in one go. So to get emails from Royal Mail’s public affairs team like the one we had this morning that my hon. Friend the Member for Lichfield referred to, telling us that things are going swimmingly in most of the country is, frankly, galling. I invite them to come to Cannock Chase and speak to the people I represent if they want to really find out how the service is doing.”
House of Commons26 October 2026Contains Parliamentary information licensed under the Open Parliament Licence v3.0Source ↗
“There has also been a direct financial consequence for Zoe’s parents, who received a parking fine that would have been £60 if paid within 14 days. However, because the correspondence was not received, they were unaware of the deadline so ended up having to pay the full £100. Zoe’s sister Emily has, very sadly, passed away since her family first got in touch with me, and I want to place on record my condolences to Zoe and her whole family. Sadly, stories like theirs are not unusual in Cannock Chase. I have heard from constituents who have missed court information and jury duty and have had Christmas cards arriving in January. My constituent, Julian, told me that he had to collect his post from the sorting office in Rugeley after receiving nothing whatever in July, and found 16 letters waiting for him.”
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“I thank my hon. Friends the Members for Redditch (Chris Bloore) and for Lichfield (Dave Robertson) for their steadfast work on this issue. Ahead of today’s debate, my team and I spoke to Zoe from Hednesford—not by letter, of course, because it would probably still be on its way. Zoe told me that her parents rely on post for important correspondence such as, as we have heard from many hon. Members, hospital appointments, particularly for their daughter Emily, yet they often go weeks on end with nothing at all. Emily was diagnosed with a very long list of long-term health conditions. Because of the lack of post, Emily missed extremely important medical appointments on many occasions. As we know, missed appointments are a big drain on NHS resources, from GPs right through to hospitals.”
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“Royal Mail execs should meet with us here in Parliament, explain what is going wrong and set out what they will do to put it right. Our constituents deserve more than apologies and hollow promises. They deserve a reliable service and we need to see meaningful action, right now, to make that happen.”
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“What particularly struck me was my constituent’s description of postal workers as a tight-knit group who continue to look out for one another and pull together. That sense of solidarity is clearly still there, but it is being strained to breaking point by the pressure from management that workers describe and by the uncertainty around hours and rounds. I am also told that trade union reps are struggling to keep up with the number of staff seeking their help, such are the difficulties in many sorting offices. Fixing the issues Royal Mail faces is far from straight forward. A lot needs to change, but that change has to work for the people delivering the post and those waiting for it at home. Given what all of us in this House are hearing, it falls to us to ask whether we are even on the right track. The consensus tonight is a resounding no.”
House of Commons26 October 2026Contains Parliamentary information licensed under the Open Parliament Licence v3.0Source ↗
“Many new starters leave within a short time, and I am told that the way some staff are spoken to by managers is completely unacceptable, with conversations that should be about helping people to improve instead leaving them feeling belittled or intimidated. I have heard stories of multiple managers waiting for posties to finish their rounds, only to tell them that they are too slow, even after they have faced wind and rain, or got held up by uncontrollable things like roadworks or livestock on country lanes. Knowing a round takes time. Knowing that community, spotting when members of the public might need help and taking pride in getting the job done are all part of what made our postal service the envy of the world, and worthy of its royal moniker.”
House of Commons26 October 2026Contains Parliamentary information licensed under the Open Parliament Licence v3.0Source ↗
“Some workers are now doing what two postal workers would previously have done, with tracked parcels and first-class post taking priority. That inevitably raises questions about what is realistically expected of staff, and what happens to the letters that have to be left behind. I am told that new recruits are being sent out alone very quickly, moved between unfamiliar rounds and put under pressure to meet targets, sometimes facing managerial meetings when they fall short. That is a considerable ask for someone who is still learning the job. In the past, new posties would spend months learning alongside experienced colleagues before being expected to manage a round independently.”
House of Commons26 October 2026Contains Parliamentary information licensed under the Open Parliament Licence v3.0Source ↗
“I know that the Rugeley sorting office does not cover your constituency, Madam Deputy Speaker, or my hon. Friend’s constituency, but the story she tells about the particular difficulties of the service experienced by her rural constituents is echoed in my constituency. On Saturday, I held a coffee morning in Prospect Village, quite an isolated rural village, and I heard exactly the same concerns, so I am completely with her on that. A constituent of mine—I will keep them anonymous because I do not want to put them in a difficult position—has shared with me some of the things that are happening to postal workers locally. I am told that overtime is rarely permitted, meaning that when a postie cannot finish their round, some of the post inevitably has to go back to the sorting office, where it builds up.”
House of Commons26 October 2026Contains Parliamentary information licensed under the Open Parliament Licence v3.0Source ↗
“My hon. Friend is, as always, making a fantastic speech and banging the drum for our great county. Does he agree that if we are serious about creating and filling the jobs he is talking about in Staffordshire, we have to give our colleges the capacity to train the workforce that we need? I welcome the recent investment in South Staffordshire college, including Cannock college, but will he join me in calling for further investment in our training facilities in Staffordshire, so that local young people can access skilled jobs in construction, engineering and all those growing industries?”
House of Commons26 October 2026Contains Parliamentary information licensed under the Open Parliament Licence v3.0Source ↗
“Homeless mothers and children in my constituency have been housed in mould and rat-infested rooms at the Fairway motel in Rugeley. I have raised this matter with Cannock Chase district council many times. In March, I told it that a full environmental health investigation was needed, yet six months on, the exact same issues have been raised again. Will the Leader of the House join me in telling the council to get its act together, and could we have a debate on how we can ensure that all temporary accommodation is fit for human habitation?”
House of Commons22 October 2026Contains Parliamentary information licensed under the Open Parliament Licence v3.0Source ↗
“I hope that Ministers will consider assessing applications on clear criteria, including environmental benefits, value for money and fair access. As the chair of the all-party parliamentary group for public sector efficiency, I would be keen to be involved in those discussions—alongside, of course, the sector itself, which needs to be heard first and foremost.”
House of Commons21 October 2026Contains Parliamentary information licensed under the Open Parliament Licence v3.0Source ↗
“We should remember that that first window did succeed in allowing farms like Sarah’s and Jay’s to get in for the first time. There are, however, many lessons to learn. After closing within six hours, the second £233 million SFI26 window demonstrates the sheer level of demand from farmers wanting to participate, but also—let us be frank—desperately needing Government support to tide them over after a series of torrid growing seasons. The window opened at 10 am. For many farmers, that is well into the working day. Many will have been tending livestock or out in the fields, so the timing and the IT system were, in fact, unnecessary barriers. I welcome the Government’s commitment to reopen the SFI as early as possible in 2027, and to scrap the first come, first served approach.”
House of Commons21 October 2026Contains Parliamentary information licensed under the Open Parliament Licence v3.0Source ↗