Dr Peter Prinsley
MP for Bury St Edmunds and Stowmarket · Labour · United Kingdom
“I am confused by the Opposition referring in their new clause to a requirement to “make regulations” in this respect, as the private sector is already widely used to reduce waiting lists where appropriate. However, we must also be aware of the problem we have with overuse of private facilities.”
“I wonder whether the hon. Member’s experience mirrors mine. Many years ago, it seemed to be easy for general practitioners to ring me up. I often received telephone calls from general practitioners asking for advice about patients.”
“I am listening carefully to what the hon. Member, who is a medical colleague of mine, has to say. Although I think that a fracture liaison service is an excellent idea, there are many, many aspects of medical care that require careful attention, such as the management of people with hearing loss—my own field—or the assessment of people wi…”
“I agree with everything that the Minister has to say—what a surprise—but particularly the fact that when the new Government came in, they did something about these 40 “new” hospitals that were not full hospitals.”
“I am interested in what the hon. Member has to say about strike action. I was involved in trying to get the resident doctors’ strike stopped, but was unsuccessful for many months. I think she is talking about the principle of whether people involved in medical care should ever go on strike.”
“Does the Minister agree that the single most effective thing that we have done for public health since we were elected is to get the Tobacco and Vapes Act 2026 passed? The gradual abolition of cigarette smoking will save more lives than anything else we could conceivably do in politics.”
The complete record
Every one of 496 lines we hold for Dr Peter Prinsley, in date order, each linked to its source. Free to read, in full, without an account. Page 8 of 10.
“All too often, it is the same story: it is those with long-term conditions, not deadly diseases, who feel most let down now. The reality for many is that by the time they reach my age, they are fortunate if they have never had to visit a clinic or see a nurse about something that is no longer working quite as well as it should. The wheels begin to fall off all of us eventually. Living with a long-term condition has a profound impact on people. It can mean lost work days, missed opportunities and, for many, being pushed out of the workforce altogether. When people are unable to work because of poor health, they are cut off from society and their quality of life obviously declines. That also has a terrible effect on the economy.”
“It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mr Efford. Long-term conditions need a long-term plan. We were promised one of those, and it cannot come soon enough. The Chancellor’s statement yesterday, which committed to a 3% real-terms rise in NHS funding each year, gives me enormous hope for the future of our health service. Some 70% of that funding will likely go to the treatment of long-term conditions, so it is incredibly important that we consider how we should treat them. Most of us at some point will collect a few long-term conditions. Some of us are born with them; sometimes, they are serious disabilities. I am sure that we will hear some stories of those challenges. I reached out to the people of Bury St Edmunds and Stowmarket and heard many stories about their experiences of using our NHS.”
“I thank all who have contributed to this interesting discussion. I particularly thank my hon. Friend the Member for Wellingborough and Rushden (Gen Kitchen), who has acquitted herself extraordinarily well and should be congratulated. It is quite obvious that many of our fellow citizens are depending on us. It is also obvious to me that the politics of healthcare really do matter. We have an opportunity to do something about this, and we must seize that opportunity, because I believe that is one of our great missions. I thank everyone very much for coming to the debate this afternoon.”
“I very much welcome yesterday’s statement, the funding, and the fact that the funding will go on for several years. Does the Minister agree that we depend on the people in our NHS? Will she join me in congratulating Dr Cameron and all the teams at the West Suffolk hospital, who, by adopting a whole-hospital approach, have abolished corridor care and improved the hospital’s throughput, using a model that could be widely adopted?”
“That is welcome, and I am optimistic about the potential for rural exception sites to be brought forward in much greater numbers, delivering small-scale affordable housing that is crucial to ensuring that the English countryside has vibrant and inclusive communities for generations to come. Let us put the life back into the heart of rural England.”
“Increasing awareness and engagement will double the output of affordable housing on such sites, so let us encourage officers and local authorities across the country to take a much closer look at the guidance. That will give us a new engagement strategy for delivery partners, who will work with the local community and landowners, which will be crucial. By giving rural exception sites the prominence they deserve in planning, we increase the supply of affordable homes but maintain the unique character and spirit of our rural communities. I was heartened to read in the Government’s response to the consultation on the revised national planning policy framework that further consideration is indeed being given to exceptions as a means of supporting rural affordable houses.”
“—[ Official Report , 16 March 1949; Vol. 462, c. 2126.] That sort of community is now an exception, but let us reform rural exception sites and offer a route back to that ideal. Despite the potential, the rural exception site regime is alarmingly underused. Out of 145 local authorities in the country, only 25 used rural exception sites to deliver affordable homes in 2021-22. I thank the hon. Member for St Ives (Andrew George), who is not in his place, although he was here for most of the afternoon, for his support for my new clause. Cornwall leads the country by example: 50% of what is delivered on rural exception sites across the whole of England is in Cornwall, and 20% to 30% of housing delivered in Cornwall is through rural exceptions. Why do we not equip other areas across the country, including my county of Suffolk, to do the same?”
“Rural exception sites, which are usually found on the outskirts of small settlements, offer a modest but vital solution. Developed for the provision of affordable housing to those with a connection to the area, they help sustain local economies, retain local people and skills, and keep families together. Because they adjoin villages, development takes place on a gently human scale; houses radiate out from a historical core, respecting the historical and rural situation. These are not soulless, disconnected housing estates. This is development on a scale that ensures that affordable housing is woven into the fabric of our communities, not added on. It preserves and recreates the social mix once typical of our towns, where, as Nye Bevan remembered, “the doctor, the grocer, the butcher and farm labourer all lived in the same street”.”
“I rise to speak in support of new clause 64 in my name. It seeks to encourage a greater focus on the delivery of affordable housing through rural exception sites. I tabled it to prompt further consideration of the role that this policy can play in addressing the urgent need for affordable homes in rural communities. As many who represent areas with significant rural populations will know, we have a serious housing problem. Waiting lists grow faster in rural areas than anywhere else, and young people are forced out of villages and towns by the lack of affordable housing. Parents face old age without the comfort of their children nearby. Pubs, post offices and shops start to struggle for lack of customers. Those businesses close, and a small village and the whole community feels the damage.”
“I am grateful for the Minister’s answer. Bury St Edmunds and Stowmarket is privileged to host thousands of servicemen and servicewomen from RAF Honington, RAF Lakenheath and RAF Mildenhall. They play a crucial part in the lives of our towns and villages. Can the Minister assure me that the Ministry of Defence is working with other Departments to ensure that places such as Bury St Edmunds and Stowmarket will benefit from the announcements in the strategic defence review in the form of jobs, housing, investment and apprenticeships?”
“Does my hon. Friend agree that such service charges are an outrage? There should be some form of guarantee associated with what services are in fact provided. I, too, have had many constituents complain to me about the complete lack of services that they pay for. As she says, if those services were something that was being paid for on the open market, trading standards officers would be involved.”
“The simple testing of hearing and the provision of hearing aids will do much to help. I urge Members of a certain age to consider having a hearing test. I am interested to know what we can do with patient data. If researchers across the country ran studies on 67 million people, we would accelerate progress towards a cure. Artificial intelligence could be set to work analysing datasets and providing rich sources of longitudinal data to inform future research and cures. Artificial intelligence already models the folding of proteins that cause the disease, so to secure those benefits, let us do something about the collection of medical information, and let us prioritise openness by giving patients access to their medical records, allowing them to see how the information is being used to support the NHS. That is something we could do to help.”
“We must be bold, optimistic and forward-thinking, and prepared to deploy radical advances in science to tackle the condition. Let us support our scientists and researchers as they strive to develop more effective treatments and make progress towards curing the disease. Let us support research by enabling the NHS to empower its clinicians to conduct research and to use patient data. That would help to facilitate medical research and increase the number of clinical academics, whose number has been declining for much too long. I was delighted to hear my hon. Friend the Member for Oldham East and Saddleworth (Debbie Abrahams) talk about hearing loss. Many members will know that I am an ear, nose and throat surgeon. Hearing loss is absolutely central to the problem of people withdrawing from the society in which they live.”
“Let us improve specialist dementia support in hospitals and in the community. It is simply our duty to do so. The estimated economic impact of dementia in the UK last year was £42.5 billion. By contrast, we learned yesterday that the defence budget is £58 billion. It is suggested that, by 2040, the dementia budget will be £90 billion, so something must be done. Improving the treatment of dementia in our communities and in primary care settings will certainly help to free up hospitals and care systems, because, as we have heard, people with dementia occupy a quarter of all the hospital beds in the country. Let us move dementia treatment into the communities, with specialist nurses in communities to ease the pressure. Dementia is not inevitable.”
“I thank the hon. Member for South Devon (Caroline Voaden) for securing this important debate. We have heard many moving speeches this afternoon, and it has been a great honour to sit and listen to them. We must remember that dementia is not a fact of life, or something that everyone must face as they get older. It is not inevitable as a part of ageing. Dementia is a disease— a dreadful disease at that. Some 1.5 million people will be living with dementia in this country by 2040, so let us treat dementia with the same seriousness that we treat all other deadly conditions. Let us not neglect dementia simply because it disproportionately affects older people. At present, we have a fragmented and complex health system that does not provide a clear enough route for people with dementia.”
“We do not have enough dentists and we do not have enough dental service providers, so let us sort out the dental contract, which we have heard about. The right hon. Member for South West Wiltshire (Dr Murrison), who is no longer in his place, is quite right that NHS dentists are in fact heroes.”
“Is there a better metaphor for the state of this country than the state of dentistry? Fourteen years of neglect left us with a decayed system of NHS provision, with those able to pay the only ones protected. I see it myself with wards full of children with dental abscesses at the weekend. Residents have told me stories of searching for NHS dental provision that simply does not exist. In my constituency, the number of urgent appointments has increased by 35%, with practices providing urgent dental care services seven days a week and into the evenings, and there are more coming soon, so the Government are making a serious attempt to deal with the decades of decay and drift, but we must go further.”
“We have begun to address this political emergency, but we must go further with a clear and fair offer focusing on what the Minister described as the triangle of patients, practitioners and the public purse, providing a service that ensures that we give excellent, affordable care for all, including prevention, especially for the most vulnerable, and in a way that means we can pay for it. NHS dentistry can be saved. Let us have a sign on the door saying, “Urgent NHS dental appointments available here.” Would that not that be great?”
“That is certainly a suggestion that should be investigated. We must increase the number of dentists, as we have only 24 dentists for every 100,000 people in the east of England. We also need to increase the number of training providers and training places, but even with the opening of a dental school it will take ages for there to be new dentists. One suggestion is that we sort out the dental accreditation system. Hon. Members may not know that there are only 600 opportunities to take the accreditation exam each year, but there are 6,000 people planning to take the exam—that will take 10 years. We must get the General Dental Council to increase the number of exam opportunities.”
“Some 9,000 UK medical graduates compete with 15,000 overseas graduates for postgraduate training, meaning that many of our own graduates simply cannot progress into higher professional training, and either go abroad themselves or leave medicine. Does the Minister agree that the Treasury has a crucial role to co-ordinate spending on medical university education by the Department for Education and on postgraduate training by the Department of Health and Social Care, so as to ensure that public money spent on medical student education is not wasted?”
“Does my right hon. Friend agree that while we are seeing record levels of mental health problems in our young people, investment in community services for people with mental health problems must be a priority?”
“What matters most, they explained to me, was being a SQEP—a suitably qualified and experienced person. Whatever your academic background, it is important simply that you can do the job, so let us SQEP up our society and invest in technical education and apprenticeships across the country, especially in rural areas where it is so sorely needed. We will train the generation that will rebuild Britain.”
“We will soon see a wave of major infrastructure projects in the east of England, and we will need thousands of workers. We must ensure that we are educating people quickly enough to fill those jobs. Anglian Water reservoirs, offshore wind farms, East West Rail, Sizewell C—the success of these vital projects depends on a constant supply of technically trained people. The Eastern Education Group has suggested a formal network of “further excellence” technical colleges, a suggestion that I strongly commend to the Government. I recently visited Hinkley Point C, the model for Sizewell C, and met outstanding nuclear technicians who started their careers with apprenticeships. They went straight into well-paid jobs and will eventually operate nuclear power plants.”
“Thank you, Sir Edward. That is very kind. Far too often, people who leave the academic track at 16 are not provided with an alternative. Apprenticeships and skills education were neglected by our predecessors, so I am glad that in Bury St Edmunds and Stowmarket we have some fantastic businesses, such as British Sugar and Greene King, providing high quality apprenticeships. We also have excellent technical education providers such as Nikos Savvas, principal of the outstanding Abbeygate sixth-form college in Bury St Edmunds and CEO of the Eastern Education Group, who has been visionary in championing the value of effective technical skills, extending all the way from early years to adulthood. It has never been more important to have a proper system of technical education.”
“The president of the Royal College of Ophthalmologists has stated that the widespread outsourcing of NHS cataract surgery to private, for-profit providers risks the integrity of hospital eye surgery departments meaning that there will be few services to treat patients with preventable blindness. How can we reassure the public that such services will be maintained?”
“On the same day, he reminded us that Britons were the first “to draw the sword against tyranny.” We cannot forget that. It has now fallen to us to safeguard the peace that his generation won, and we must put aside our political differences.”
“They were determined and indomitable, and alongside the home guard and the ARP wardens they made a huge contribution to our victory. Many in the House will find it quite unbelievable that war has returned to Europe. As we speak, rockets and drones are being flung at cities, and civilians hide in air raid shelters. Those who start wars do not respect the lessons of history, which, as the great songwriter said, are simply blowing in the wind. They must not be allowed to win. I therefore welcome the Government’s choice to increase defence spending and applaud the commitment to go further—2.5% is really not enough. Eighty years ago, Mr Churchill addressed the Commons from the other place, this Chamber having been hollowed out by a direct bomb strike.”
“The brave men of the United States air force flew bombing raids from Rougham deep into Europe, and the incredible fighter ace and double amputee Wing Commander Douglas Bader flew from RAF Honington. Vanishingly few of that generation are among us now, but I was delighted to send my congratulations to one of them—Jim Grant, from Stowmarket—on his 100th birthday last year. Jim signed up to the Royal Marines in 1943 and served until 1946. He was present at D-day, firing for the troops at Sword, Juno and Gold beaches. I salute his service. We must also never forget the thousands of extraordinary ordinary citizens who made this contribution to the people’s war for freedom. In Suffolk, we received thousands of volunteers for the women’s land army from all over the country to milk cows, pull potatoes and drive tractors.”
“As I was born in 1958, my childhood was surrounded by people who had fought in world war two, but as a child it all seemed so long ago. My father was an RAF doctor serving in the middle east and in East Anglia. The fatality rate of the air crews was quite appalling, not least because of all those killed as the planes crashed. I remember stories my dad told us of crawling into stricken planes to extract wounded pilots. Like many who fought in the war, he spoke about it only in his greatest old age, but now that I have grandchildren of my own, it no longer seems so long ago. What tricks time and memory play on all of us. Suffolk was on the frontline defending our country. Our airfields were key to the liberation of Europe.”
“After 570 days, 59 hostages remain. Does the Minister agree that their unconditional release is a key to the ceasefire? What did Prime Minister Mustafa have to say about that yesterday?”
“I have heard the same story from businesses all over the place. Since Brexit, getting goods through customs has become a major hurdle, which we need to sort out with UK-EU customs co-operation. The previous Government left businesses and the country in a mess and Bury St Edmunds in the worst possible situation, so I am really glad that this Government are beginning to sort things out.”
“PPG Industries runs a major manufacturing facility in Stowmarket with 350 people, mixing paints and coatings shipped around the world, and AkzoNobel, a Dutch paint company, employs 150 people. Those two companies have nearly 500 people out of the industry’s national workforce of 1,400, and they are deeply entwined with the EU. Under the previous Government, they faced sharp increases in costs due to the barriers, they have had to contend with diverging chemical rules, and they face logistical headaches when importing raw materials. But these are large companies; imagine how much harder it is for small businesses. Beautiful Beers specialises in selling fantastic Belgian beers imported from the continent. Its owner, René, faces a bureaucratic nightmare. He is doing it alone and struggling.”
“Yesterday, I visited Hinkley Point C, the largest building site in Europe, an international project built through close co-operation with European partners, and a powerful example of how trade and co-operation with Europe is essential to our success. “Big Carl” was at work. The largest crane in the world, manufactured by Sarens in Belgium and imported to Britain because it is the only crane capable of doing the job, Big Carl is just one example of why a smooth trading relationship is essential. British businesses thrive by selling into the European market and rely on importing specialised goods that only Europe provides. Back home, in Bury St Edmunds and Stowmarket, we can see how vital the relationship is. We have one of the largest centres for paint and coating production in the country.”
“This Labour Government are taking this issue seriously and delivering for the people of Bury St Edmunds and Stowmarket, and I am glad to see that they are not simply papering over the cracks. They will use the latest tech to ensure that public money is spent as effectively as possible on lasting repairs so that our roads do not split up again. Brilliant new pothole-filling machines and surfacing technologies will save us money, and it was great to hear about the advances in technology from my hon. Friend the Member for Stoke-on-Trent South (Dr Gardner). Ministers have taken the decisive action that the previous Government put off for too long, and I hope the rest of the House can join me in congratulating them on that.”
“Better, smoother roads will support our local economies, improve transport and, most importantly, limit the number of accidents, so it is wonderful to hear that the Government are at last doing something after more than a decade in which our local roads were simply ignored under the Tories. In Suffolk, the effect of the decline in highway spending—last year, it was down by almost 25% compared with 2015—can be easily seen, but that is already changing. Potholes are getting fixed more quickly, because our local authorities are getting a much-needed injection of cash from this Labour Government. In Suffolk, they are getting an extra £11.7 million this year for that purpose.”
“It is no surprise to me, having sat in this debate, that my son, a student at Keele University in Stoke-on-Trent, was involved in a horrendous bicycle crash as he came down a steep hill and went head over heels when his front wheel landed in a pothole. Cyclists know all about potholes. The evidence suggests that between 2017 and 2023, one person per week was killed or seriously injured while cycling, so potholes cause deaths. This is a trend that has not shown any sign of abating. Bus drivers and taxi operators cannot do their job safely when the roads underneath them simply do not work, and our emergency services cannot help us if they are expected to use crumbling roads. I have heard of paramedics whose ambulances have been damaged, to the point of being undriveable, by hitting a pothole on the way to a call-out.”
“People in Bury St Edmunds and Stowmarket must navigate pockmarked and pimpled streets—how depressing and frustrating! People are forced to accept a fear of damage or even injury as a precondition of using our roads, and they are locked in extended battles for compensation with the council and their insurers. We all know about this problem. Only 36% of local roads in the east of England are in good structural condition. People talk about the effects of potholes on motorists, and quite rightly—they are dangerous, damaging to cars and a daily irritant for many of us. However, it is not just car owners who are affected by our roads, and many people know a horror story.”
“More than a third of clinical academics are over the age of 55 and approaching retirement, so universities need to provide incentives to get younger clinical academics to come. We did solve this problem previously. When the consultant contract changed in 2003, the then Department of Health provided £15 million to support the medical schools with the implementation of the consultant clinical academic contract. That funding was later embedded in the baseline grants to the universities. That is a model for solving this problem. Unless we act now, we will lose this vital workforce altogether at the very moment when we need them most, and we simply will not be able to run our medical schools.”
“I understand that 20 out of 26 medical schools may be preparing to offer redundancy to clinical academics because they simply cannot afford them. That would be a disaster. We cannot afford to lose the very people who train the future NHS staff and carry out the medical research that underpins all the innovation in our health service. As the Government rightly expand the number of medical school places, we will depend even more on clinical academics to educate the next generation of doctors. Their numbers are declining. Clinical academics now make up just 5.7% of the consultant workforce—down from 8.6% in 2011. Over the last decade or so we have seen a 6% fall in medically qualified researchers, and a 24% decline at the senior lecturer level. We are marching towards a cliff edge.”
“It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mr Vickers. I should like to speak this afternoon about the vital but vulnerable role of clinical academics. These are the people who combine frontline work in the hospitals with teaching and research at the universities. They are essential to the success of life sciences, and central to the training of the future NHS workforce. Clinical academics are employed by the NHS and higher education institutions jointly. Their pay follows the NHS consultant contract, which was updated last year after national negotiations. Universities, however, were not part of those negotiations, and are now required to implement that contract without having received any additional funding. The result is deeply worrying.”
“Shockingly, these toys falsely displayed UK and European safety marks, misleading parents into believing that they were buying something safe for their children. The tragedy is that in many of these cases the sellers simply disappear, vanishing from the platform, and the families are left with no way to seek redress from the harm caused. That is why we must act. I am glad that the Bill will give the Government the opportunity to address this issue. It will give them the power to regulate new and emerging business models and marketplaces, which previous laws did not allow.”
“I welcome this Bill, which will address the alarming proliferation of unsafe products in online marketplaces. I would like to talk particularly about the hazards of unsafe toys, which are increasingly being sold online. As a very recently retired ear, nose and throat surgeon—yesterday actually—I know the very real harm that these dangerous toys cause. I have operated on young children who inhaled small components from unsafe toys, detachable parts or parts that were unsafely secured and were a choking hazard, and ribbon or string that exceeded the legal limits, creating strangulation hazards. These are frightening life-threatening situations that no family should have to put up with. Those are not isolated incidents. A Which? investigation found that over 90% of toys purchased from some online marketplaces were unfit for sale in the UK.”
“I thank the hon. Member for her intervention. I would point out the particular danger of button batteries—something that is well known to ENT surgeons—which cause perforation of the oesophagus and the trachea by a chemical reaction. In the last two years, 95% of consumers have purchased from online platforms, with approximately 23 million monthly transactions in UK. We certainly need strong accountability for these marketplaces. Without that, dangerous items will continue to resurface, putting children at risk. I urge the House to ensure that the Bill puts more pressure on the sellers of unsafe toys, forcing them to take responsibility for their actions.”
“Currently, they allow affordable housing to be granted for local development on small sites not usually granted planning permission. Although those are intended to promote the construction of affordable homes, most of the plots are undeveloped. Minor changes to the national planning guidance are needed to allow for proper development. That will help us to get a lot more use out of such sites, spurring reasonably sized considerate development and ending the pattern of relocation that causes family ties to fragment. Construction will energise a village’s economy, giving work to local firms that are well placed to deliver housing quickly and efficiently. This Government can regenerate rural England. This is surely our generation’s chance, so let us grasp it.”
“We ought to encourage more house building at small scale on the edge of villages. For hundreds of years, that was the model of expansion across all of England. It has produced our prettiest villages, where progressively newer buildings radiate outwards from a historical core. That is the sort of development that preserves the character of a village. It is the most popular form of development in the countryside, and the Campaign to Protect Rural England has put its name to a call for small-scale affordable housing on the edge of villages. We already have places set aside on the peripheries of towns and villages across the country for delivering such community-scale housing. They are called small rural exception sites.”
“The houses in this sort of village are occupied by commuters with big cars lurking in the driveway, or by retired folk whose children have long since moved away. For the lowest-paid people, housing is more expensive in the countryside than in every urban area except London, with the cheapest housing costing nine times the average income of the lowest-paid quartile. Therefore, as the Government construct 1.5 million houses, let us think long and hard about where we will put them. This Bill, together with the changes that the Government have made to the national planning policy framework, will do much to loosen restrictions on house building. The designation of land as grey belt is good for those in suburban green belts, but more can be done to earmark land for housing deep in the countryside.”
“Imagine an English village, if you still can—old houses around a village green, with a little school, a pub or two, a post office, a row of shops, and an ancient church with a creaking gate and some crooked headstones with fading bouquets shaded by ancient oaks. It may be a place where old maids hike to Holy Communion through the mists of the autumn morning. That sort of village is disappearing. Anyone who visits now will find the pub shut for want of drinkers, the shops empty, and the vicar gone—only the fading bouquets remain. There is no doctor’s surgery and no bus route. It has isolated, elderly residents; not a child in sight, as if the Pied Piper had been to visit, and ageing parents with none of their family nearby to help. Like so many problems in this country, housing lies at the centre.”
“Small modular reactors, as the Minister says, will play an important part in delivering clean, cheap and secure energy across this country. However, current rules require that any reactor must apply for regulatory justification, as if nuclear power was an entirely new practice instead of an existing one. That delays reactors getting online and lowering energy bills for people across the country, including in Bury St Edmunds and Stowmarket, by up to two years. Will the Secretary of State consider working with his Cabinet colleagues to simplify the system and recognise that nuclear energy technology is an existing practice, thereby accelerating the deployment of small modular reactors?”
“Each day, organisations such as Combatants for Peace, the Middle East Children’s Institute and the Holy Land Trust tackle the profound scars left by the cycles of war. The unified fund will deliver resource and support to make these small-scale initiatives society-wide, to eradicate psychological drivers of conflict, and to pave the way to healing. I will close with Magen Inon’s words: “Our shared future is based on the belief that all human beings are equal, and deserving of respect and safety. This is how I was raised and how I am raising my own children. In the long term, and even if it’s very far away, the only real future is that of hope and peace.””
“The effects of trauma on peacebuilding cannot be overstated. Traumatised populations are likely to support violent and armed extremist groups. Trauma leads to a siege mentality and increased anger, and trauma means a continual drain on grassroots pressure for the ending of the conflict. It is vital that peacebuilding initiatives help to end these cycles of trauma and introduce a path towards healing and lasting peace. The newly proposed international fund will help us to do that, and it is critical that we build momentum for it today. Civil organisations in Israel and Palestine are already working with people who are terribly traumatised, while living with their own personal traumas under the harsh daily realities they face.”