Jack Abbott
MP for Ipswich · Labour (Co-op) · United Kingdom
“T6. I recently visited Northgate high school in Ipswich with the Children’s Commissioner. As ever, the pupils were thoughtful and articulate about what they needed for the future, but the subject of digital and AI came up a lot. They said that they need greater access to public services and skilling up for future employment.”
“As the Minister says, conversion therapy is dangerous, widely discredited and frankly barbaric, and it is about time we got rid of it. Suffolk Pride’s fringe festival starts next month with Pride Blooms. I ask the Minister to make a powerful statement today, and to say that this terrible practice will end under the Labour Government.”
“I thank the Minister for her detailed speech. I look forward to working with her over the coming months and years on these important issues. I thank everybody who has contributed and shared not just the experiences of their constituents—as awful and harrowing as they often are—but some deeply personal stories.”
“Women learn from a young age to hide their pain away because they must be overreacting and to feign headaches and stomach pains, migraines and food poisoning. More than 1 million women mask period pain sick days every year, because they feel unable to tell their boss the true reason.”
“Despite years of chest pain and breathing difficulties, she was refused referrals to a thoracic specialist and ended up seeking a private opinion. She lives in daily pelvic and chest pain, constantly deals with breathlessness and spends many days bedbound—thankfully not today, Monica.”
“I thank my hon. Friend and could not agree more. For women with endometriosis who may have already waited years for a GP even to mention the word, and who have already been utterly failed by institutionalised and deeply structural medical misogyny, this is a complete dereliction of duty. The human cost of inaction is devastating.”
The complete record
Every one of 373 lines we hold for Jack Abbott, in date order, each linked to its source. Free to read, in full, without an account. Page 8 of 8.
“It is a privilege to serve under your chairmanship, Mr Dowd. I thank my hon. Friend the Member for Ashford (Sojan Joseph) for securing this important debate on World Mental Health Day. Sitting in the Chamber are Members from every corner of the country and from all sides of the House—evidence that the mental health crisis is undeniably a national one. My constituents in Ipswich, under the Norfolk and Suffolk mental health trust, suffer a particularly desperate service in an already broken system. Since its creation in 2012, the Norfolk and Suffolk foundation trust has been—it arguably still is—the worst-performing mental health trust in the whole country. It was the first mental health trust to be put into special measures, in 2015, and it was then put into the NHS recovery support programme when the body was set up in 2021.”
“In our county this year, children with special educational needs received all but one of the primary school permanent exclusions.”
“I could give many examples to highlight the crisis in SEND provision in Suffolk, but in the short time I have I want to focus on school exclusions. It was absolutely right that the new Secretary of State for Education, Bridget Phillipson, has made driving up school attendance a priority—if a child is not in school, they cannot learn—but too often our education system fails to meet the needs of many children with SEND, and in the worst cases they are removed entirely. Over the summer, the Department for Education released the latest school exclusion figures from English schools for school year 2022-23. Once again, they showed an increasingly familiar, and therefore increasingly alarming, trend across the east of England, in particular Suffolk.”
“There have been multiple versions of the damning Ofsted/CQC report. I say gently to the hon. Member for West Suffolk (Nick Timothy) that it was not the first report, but the third in less than a decade. Warm words and hollow promises of change and improvement follow, yet little change ever comes. The lived experiences of families across our county have not improved, and in many cases have worsened. As I highlighted in my maiden speech, five years ago, after yet another damning report on SEND provision in Suffolk—the one before last—our local newspaper, the East Anglian Daily Times , carried a hauntingly memorable front page with the faces of children and families across Suffolk who have been badly let down by a failed system, accompanied by the headline, “We must be heard”. That simple plea has gone unanswered time and again.”
“I thank my hon. Friend the Member for Lowestoft (Jess Asato) for securing this important debate on a subject close to my heart. Although the SEND crisis is a national issue, the devastating testimony from colleagues from across our region shows that hundreds if not thousands of families in Suffolk have been failed by this deep-rooted, unrelenting issue. The failure is not only structural but cultural, and it is not new. I have campaigned alongside families and campaign groups for many years and have battled to get them the support they need. There is nothing as heartbreaking as a parent breaking down in tears as they beg for help for their young child, exhausted and broken by a system that works against them, rather than for them. In Suffolk, we have seen the same cycle over and again.”
“While I am encouraged by the intentions of the new Government with respect to SEND provision, I join Members present, along with so many others, in reiterating that the challenge is enormous and must not be underestimated. Like families across Ipswich, I know there is no overnight fix for years of failure. What those families expect is a clear, credible plan with measurable defined goals for SEND provision, and not the half-baked, half-hearted SEND review that was finally dished up after much delay by the previous Government.”
“My hon. Friend is absolutely right. The statistics I am reading just scratch the surface. We know there are many more families who have had to make the difficult decision to homeschool their children not out of choice, but out of necessity, because they feel they have no other option. To finish my point, in state-funded primary schools in Suffolk, fixed-term exclusions were 30 times more likely to go to a child with SEND and an EHCP than to a child without. I should add that our county’s fixed-term exclusions are, once again, some of the highest in the country—an unwanted and shameful record of inaction and indifference. Across all age groups in Suffolk, permanent exclusions are more than six times as likely, and fixed-term exclusions more than five times as likely, to go to a child with SEND.”
“I am coming to an end. Those families expect Government to work with local authorities, particularly those such as Suffolk county council, to put that into place. It falls to us as part of this new Labour Government to follow through on our promise to do so, working with local authorities and families to make urgent progress. Children who need—”
“Record rates of retail crime and shoplifting are blighting our high streets, including in Ipswich, where too often such instances act as a flashpoint for completely unacceptable levels of violence, threats and abuse directed towards retail workers. I very much welcome the Government’s commitment to ending the £200 threshold for prosecuting shoplifters, and the introduction of a stand-alone offence that will give shop workers the protection they need. Will the Minister join me in Ipswich to meet local retail staff, so that she can hear about their experiences and the vital difference that these steps will make?”
“I still pop into Coes, a family business founded nearly 100 years ago, and I love nothing better than eating at the Lighthouse restaurant, or drinking an Adnams or an Aspall in the Woolpack or the Greyhound. I am still surrounded by my friends, my family and my neighbours, not to mention a million happy memories, having been shaped and inspired by them for nearly a quarter of a century. I have no doubt that I will make some mistakes along the way, and I know that there will be some times when my constituents disagree with me, but know that everything that I do here will be out of service, friendship and love for my home, Ipswich and Suffolk.”
“I think about Ipswich, and its beautiful, award-winning parks; its waterfront looking absolutely glorious on a sunny day; the music festivals that we have now, which I would have loved to have been to as a teenager—I am only slightly older now than I was then—and the fact that our town once again has a premier league football club. I might have mentioned that already. I think about Suffolk too, the place I moved to 25 years ago. I still hang out with my friends from Debenham high school. I still play for the same cricket club, the mighty Eye and District cricket club—my batting just as terrible, and my bowling just as slow, if not slower. I still want to walk around Fram castle, and along the beaches of Southwold, Aldeburgh and Dunwich.”
“The greatest-ever expansion of community energy projects, delivering a million new owners of energy, will be genuinely transformational, and as a proud Co-operative party MP, I will champion the growth of such projects, so that local people will benefit from our green transition too. Many of us are just a few weeks into our new role, and as this debate is about second jobs, I will be honest in my contribution and say that I have no idea why or how any Member of Parliament would have a second job. We all know what I am talking about. To be the Member of Parliament for Ipswich is the greatest privilege of my life, but to be frank, it is not like any other job.”
“Over the coming years, thousands of jobs will be created in new nuclear at Sizewell, in offshore wind and in solar. I am unapologetically ambitious for our town and our county. I do not want those jobs and that investment to drift away elsewhere. I want kids growing up in Ipswich, or people looking to retrain and upskill, to get those secure, well paid jobs. I want local businesses to benefit from the billions of pounds that will flow out of these projects, and I want our area to be the centre of national excellence. That is our future, if we are brave enough to grasp it. As a Labour and Co-operative Member of Parliament, it is particularly welcome to me that our commitment to community energy sits at the very heart of this mission.”
“If I can make one final plea on this issue, as a former teaching assistant and proud GMB MP, I urge that when we talk about the crisis in retention and recruitment of teachers, we include specialist and support staff in the conversation. They are crucial to breaking down barriers to opportunity, too. I would like to touch on another subject that is incredibly important to me: the energy transition. This is not just an environmental necessity but an economic imperative. It can boost our economy, reduce bills, ensure greater security and deliver the well paid jobs that we need. With GB Energy, we will be able to achieve that. If Britain is to become a world leader in this area, as the Labour party has pledged, I want Ipswich and Suffolk to be right at the heart of this national renewal. Why should we not be?”
“It is also about the exhaustion, desperation and isolation that families suffer, day in, day out; the months—years, even—battling for an education, health and care plan; the time spent waiting by the phone, or checking emails, hoping that they might finally get some positive news; and the energy they have to find just to try to navigate this broken system, fight through tribunals, and submit mountains upon mountains of new documentation and information, all while trying to care for their family. As a Labour Government, we cannot let the suffering of vulnerable children and their families continue. It will be my personal mission in this place to fight this inequality and injustice.”
“I remember five years ago, after another damning report, the front page of our local paper, the East Anglian Daily Times , showed the faces of just some of the children and families who had been so badly failed by a broken system, with the heartbreaking, desperate headline, “We must be heard”. As ITV’s report shows today, so little has changed half a decade later. Those children and their families have still not been heard. This is not just about the educational impacts on children, immense though they may be.”
“On election night, Tom charitably mentioned our shared commitment to improving the lives of children with special educational needs and disabilities, an issue that I have campaigned on for many years in Suffolk. I will now use my role to fight for those families here in Westminster. The SEND crisis is a national issue, and I know many colleagues from across the House will have heard countless stories about the struggles that families have had to endure to access the services that should be theirs. In Suffolk, we have had a decade of the most grotesque and repeated failures.”
“Ipswich can also lay claim to Ralph Fiennes, Constance Andrews, Thomas Gainsborough, Jean Ingelow, Brian Eno, Edith Cook and even Richard Ayoade, to name but a few. My job over the coming years will be ensuring that kids growing up in Ipswich today get their chance to make their dreams a reality, so that when my successor comes to make their maiden speech, they have a few more names to mention too. I would also like to mention my predecessor, Tom Hunt. While an MP, Tom often spoke about being neurodiverse, and was open about challenges that he faced growing up. He looked to tackle some of the stigma that still exists, and that is an incredibly powerful thing for a Member of Parliament to do.”
“No, I have not checked that with the House of Commons Library, as I might have been given an answer that I did not want to hear, but two minutes of searching online tells me that I have a decent chance of being right—and I presume that, as I am now stating it as fact in Parliament, it now becomes true. Thomas Wolsey is arguably Ipswich’s most famous son, and we in Ipswich have been celebrating his legacy throughout the past year through the Wolsey 550. Wolsey does not always get the praise he deserves. Climbing the greasy pole will not win you many friends—something to which Members of this House will attest, I am sure. However, his story, rising from humble beginnings to becoming one of the most powerful statesmen in England, was remarkable, and he left his imprint on our town too.”
“I am sure that that will be a bitter pill for Town fans to swallow as they visit Anfield, the Tottenham Hotspur stadium, the Etihad and Old Trafford next season. Ed’s tweet also represented my most significant celebrity beef on social media since Steve Brookstein—yes, the first winner of “The X Factor” nearly a decade ago. Ipswich has a rich and long history—so rich and long, in fact, that I am going to use this as an opportunity to settle an old score. Now that Colchester has vacated its town status, I am laying claim to Ipswich being the oldest continuous town in England.”
“Yesterday, I asked a question at PMQs, highlighting the huge potential that Ipswich possesses but saying that, after 14 years of neglect, we desperately needed Government support to help revive our town centre. However, corners of social media instead focused on a very gentle joke I had made, when I pointed out that my home county of Suffolk once again had a premier league football team, unlike our friends north of the border in Norfolk. One keyboard warrior in particular took umbrage at that. His name is Ed Balls, and apparently he used to work here. He said that Norwich has had a 15-year unbeaten run in the Old Farm derby—a run that will now, sadly, be extended due to Ipswich being promoted to the premier league and Norwich getting knocked out in the play-offs last season.”
“Thank you, Madam Deputy Speaker, for calling me to speak. Let me say congratulations and welcome to your place. I have been moved and inspired by so many contributions over the past few days, and it is an immense privilege to be making the first maiden speech of today. I also offer my best wishes to the hon. Member for Central Suffolk and North Ipswich (Patrick Spencer), who will also be making his maiden speech today. Not only is he my neighbour, but he is representing a place that is really close to my heart. I am incredibly proud to be making my maiden speech as the new Member of Parliament for Ipswich. However, this is not my first contribution in this House.”
“Q13. We have much to be proud of in Ipswich, from a thriving arts and culture scene to beautiful parks and a stunning waterfront. Unlike our friends over the border in Norfolk, we also now have a premier league football team again; the Prime Minister is very welcome to join us when Arsenal visit next year. Despite all those positives, after the last 14 years, our town centre is really struggling and desperately needs help. Can the Prime Minister set out to this House the steps that he will take to revive town centres like Ipswich’s?”