Andrew Cooper
MP for Mid Cheshire · Labour · United Kingdom
“By making accessibility one of GBR’s core priorities, this Labour Government are finally putting the improvement of accessibility at the heart of the rail network. How will stations such as Northwich railway station be able to access accessibility improvement funding to deliver the accessible station that my constituents deserve?”
“Without significant intervention, 100,000 social homes could be lost over the coming decade, further reducing the supply of affordable housing. It is against that backdrop that the interim findings of the Renew inquiry are so important—I declare my interest as chair of the Westminster group for the inquiry.”
“I rise to present a petition on behalf of residents of Mid Cheshire pertaining to unadopted estates in my constituency. Around 4,700 households—equivalent to more than 12% of all properties across Northwich, Middlewich and Winsford—are on new build estates where basic infrastructure such as roads, drains and sewers remain unadopted by pub…”
“Beyond increasing housing supply, it offers an opportunity to create healthier, more sustainable communities, to reduce energy costs for residents, and to improve the overall quality of life in neighbourhoods that have experienced years of under-investment. Importantly, regeneration delivers benefits that extend far beyond housing alone.”
“Residents should be at the heart of regeneration plans, helping to shape the future of the places they call home. A good example can be found in the Gleadless Valley regeneration project in Sheffield.”
“It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Dr Murrison. I congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for Basingstoke (Luke Murphy) on securing this debate. I want to speak about the importance of housing-led regeneration.”
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“This International Women’s Day I commend the work in my constituency of the Her-Place charitable trust, which supports women’s wellbeing and creates spaces to facilitate conversations about health and other challenges. Her-Place says that many women, especially in deprived areas, visit their GP with poor mental health, but are given medication without any meaningful discussion about what is happening in their lives. With Healthwatch England reporting that many women feel unheard and that those in deprived areas facing 20 fewer healthy years, how will the Government back community-based wraparound services to close those gaps?”
“In Europe today, it is possible to have a prescription issued in Tallinn, Estonia, and have it fulfilled in Lisbon, Portugal, but in my constituency, my local hospital cannot even send a prescription to a local pharmacy. May I urge my right hon. Friend to look carefully at what works in Europe, avoid reinventing the wheel and seriously consider interoperability with the EU’s identification framework?”
“I intend to support the Bill’s Second Reading, because it contains important reforms to our criminal justice system, and it is essential that we deal with the crisis that has failed victims for too long, but I also intend to continue engaging with Ministers, and I look forward to my concerns being addressed as the Bill progresses.”
“The Bill’s proposal to try by judge alone eliminates all community involvement for that class of defendant, treating them differently from those facing charges of both lesser and greater severity. The 2022 University of Manchester study “Racial Bias and the Bench” found that over half of respondents had witnessed one or more judges acting in a racially biased way towards a defendant in their judicial rulings, summing up, sentencing, bail, comments or directions. I have listened carefully to Ministers’ arguments, but I am nevertheless concerned that significant risks remain.”
“Although Sir Brian Leveson intended for the three-year threshold in the presumption on whether a case should be allocated to the bench division, judicial discretion would be maintained for exceptional circumstances. It is not difficult to imagine cases in which the broader public interest is best served by a jury trial. One wonders how the Colston four would have fared in a judge-only trial. The last word on where such cases should be tried should sit with a judge who has considered all the arguments and nuances. Leveson recommended that the bench division consist not only of a judge but of two magistrates, in order to retain community involvement in the judgment, as well as to address the diversity gap in the judiciary.”
“A raft of measures in the Bill will do that, alongside important reforms such as the removal of the presumption of contact. I intend to focus specifically on the proposals for the Crown court bench division. Parliament has taken a view on where the line should be drawn between offences disposed of by magistrates and offences that require a full Crown court trial with a jury, owing to a different level of severity and jeopardy for the defendant. Elsewhere in our system, it is not unprecedented for serious matters to be decided by a judge alone, such as in the family court. The question is whether the Government have struck the correct balance in their proposals, and whether there are sufficient safeguards for defendants. I have two points to make in that respect.”
“A foundational principle of our constitution is that everyone is bound by and entitled to the benefit of the law, but the long-running crisis in our justice system has stretched that principle to breaking point. Other right hon. and hon. Members have covered in depth the disastrous decisions by the previous Government that have got us to this point. I would only add that on my visit to Chester Crown court last month, they told me about a recent trial that had to finish at 3 pm each day because they could not get the light bulbs in the court replaced. The Government have invested significantly in court infrastructure, legal aid and uncapping sitting days, but it is clear that investment alone will not be enough to deal with this crisis. We also need to reform the system and make it fit for how criminal justice operates today.”
“This will be a worrying time not only for households, but for the energy- intensive businesses in my constituency. Last year, we lost soda ash production from Northwich after 150 years, in part due to the high energy costs. What support does my right hon. Friend intend to provide businesses both to get through this crisis and into the future, so that we can ensure they stay viable and competitive?”
“Many of us, on both sides of the House, are sympathetic to both new clauses. We heard very clearly in evidence sessions that the Computer Misuse Act, as it is today, has a chilling effect on the operation of the cyber-security industry in this country and on whether such companies want to locate here as opposed to other countries. I absolutely hear what the Minister says about the Home Office developing proposals. I wonder whether he can set out a timescale for when those proposals are likely to be brought forward—whether he expects that to be in this parliamentary Session or the next one. The issue is clearly holding back the cyber-security industry in this country, and we would all like to see it resolved.”
“The hon. Lady makes a passionate case and spoke movingly about the debate in her own family and how to protect her children. I recognise that. I have two young children and I think carefully about what they look at online. I worry about when they get older and how we will deal with that. The hon. Lady talks about age-gating as the principle on which she wants to work, but I am concerned. We know that the algorithms are addictive and that they reinforce people’s worst prejudices. What evidence is there that that stops at 16? Is she not concerned that simply focusing on age-gating will diminish the pressure on social media companies to open up the algorithms so that we can have a look at how they affect society more generally?”
“T8. The Housing, Communities and Local Government Committee has just published a report on social housing conditions, warning that just under 430,000 social homes are non-decent. Additional research shows that in the north, more than 100,000 social homes will reach end of life over the next 10 years. I am chairing the Westminster group of the Renew inquiry, which is looking at how housing-led regeneration in the north can improve housing conditions and support the delivery of new homes and growth. Will the Minister meet me and representatives of the Northern Housing Consortium to discuss this important issue?”
“In the Bill itself, there probably need to be some greater safeguards or references to frameworks about how those types of decisions will be made.”
“Q I have a question for Jill Broom. You were talking about the incident reporting requirements. Do you think the legislation strikes the right balance to encourage organisations to come forward when they have been attacked, so that the sector can learn from that and vulnerabilities can be patched out in other areas, or is it so stringent that organisations will be concerned about facing penalties if they are fully transparent? Jill Broom: I think, again, there is something to be said about the devil being in the detail. A lot is coming with the secondary legislation, so we will learn more about the specifics on incident reporting and penalties that will come into play. There needs to be a balance between those in terms of the risk and the impact.”
“Q Stuart, you were nodding, which suggests you have something to contribute. Stuart McKean: It is an interesting cultural challenge. You want people to be open and to report incidents that are having an impact, but at the same time, if they report those incidents they might get fined, which could be economically challenging, particularly for a small business. Yes, we want to open and to report incidents, but—and this is where the detail comes in—what is the level of detail that needs to be reported and what is the impact of reporting it? When you report it to the regulators, what are they going to do with it? How will they share it and how will it benefit everybody else? The devil is definitely in the detail, and it is a cultural change that is required.”
“If they are happy that they are failed over into the US or another country, that is fine; but the reality is that it will be down to the organisation that has a requirement for a resilient service understanding where its data is. As long as it understands where its data is and what it is asking of the MSP, I am not sure the Bill will cover that as such. It is talking about resilience in general. I do not think it goes into the detail of where your data is.”
“Q Stuart, as an MSP, you will be familiar with the fact that the large cloud service providers tend to allow you to live failover to different regions. By default you might be hosting in the UK region, but, depending on an outage, you might live failover to the European Union or to the US, depending on the cloud service provider you are using and how it is set up. How does the legislation deal with that and allow you as an MSP to be compliant with it? Stuart McKean: It is about understanding what your service is delivering. Again, one of the key terms in the Bill is resilience. Needing resilience is a key part of the Bill. Whether you need a service that has international boundaries and you need to fail over to another country will be down to the organisations defining where they want their services to be.”
“We have looked at that; my legal colleagues have looked at things such as spyware, where you have malware in the system that is not doing anything but is living there, for example, or pre-emptive, where they are waiting to launch an attack, and we think this amendment would still cover those scenarios. It is not necessarily cause and impact: the lights have not gone out, but if there is, for example, a nation state actor in your network, we think the amendment would still cover that.”
“However, I would argue that it is quite important that United Utilities share that information with the regulator and that that information is disseminated to Severn Trent, Thames Water and whoever else needs to know, so they can patch their systems, look out for the virus or find out whether they have been infected already. I can imagine that the legislation has been worded as it is to try to capture that situation where activity might occur, but not have an impact. Would you accept that that is important, and how would that fit in with the tiered approach that you described? Carla Baker: I completely get your point.”
“Q Carla, I want to come back on the potential for unnecessary over-reporting of incidents. I cannot speak for the Minister, but I am sure it is not his intention that every phishing email is reported. I was listening carefully to what you said about your proposed tiered approach, and I can imagine, say, a situation where you are United Utilities and you intercept somebody trying to put a pre-emptive virus on to one of your industrial control systems. There has been no impact on customers or your infrastructure, because you have caught it.”
“Secondly, in the light of the implicit expectation of that information sharing, the National Cyber Security Centre already brings together all the relevant regulators for deeper conversation and engagement on areas of overlap, best practice sharing, and particularly the sharing of information related to incidents and wider risk as a result. I hope that will continue to be systematic. On the question of a single reporting avenue, the National Cyber Security Centre, from an incident and operational point of view, is clearly the primary and appropriate location during the implementation of the Bill. From my conversations with the centre and its conversations with the regulators, I know there has been engagement to ensure that it remains a prompt venue for regulators to feed in their information.”
“That sent chills down my spine, though I am sure she did not mean it quite in that way. How will you ensure that there is an adequate flow of information between regulators in a timely manner? They might not realise that there is cross-sectoral relevance, but when that information is provided to another regulator, it might turn out that there is. How do you address the importance of a single point of reporting that we heard about time and again from witnesses today? Kanishka Narayan: Those are really important points. In terms of supporting the quality, frequency and depth of information sharing, first, the Bill provides the legal possibility of doing that in a deeper way. It gives the permission and the ability to do that across regulators.”
“Q We have heard evidence today about the appropriateness of individual sectoral regulators being responsible for this, versus a single regulator. Perhaps unsurprisingly, the sectoral regulators were in favour of a sectoral approach, and we heard differing views from other people. The hon. Member for Bromsgrove already covered the point about whether there are sufficient skills available to staff up all the sectoral regulators to the appropriate level to adequately cover this function. We have heard quite a bit about how important it will be, if taking a sectoral approach, to make sure that sharing information between regulators works smoothly, and that there are no information silos. The witness from Ofcom talked about an annual report to the National Cyber Security Centre.”
“Q With respect, Minister, that sounds like quite a lot of, “This is what I hope will happen and this is what I wish to happen.” How will you mandate that it happens? Does there need to be something in the legislation to ensure that there is a duty of candour between regulators? Kanishka Narayan: The Bill currently says, “We are now giving you the power to be able to do information sharing.” The Bill, as well as other specific bits of wider legislation, has clear expectations on regulators to carry out their regulatory duty. If there appears to be a challenge in the frequency and quality of information sharing, we will of course look at whether we need to go further, but at the moment, giving them substantive permission and the fact that they have clear regulatory responsibilities individually is a very powerful combination.”
“Thirdly, I assisted an individual whose referral to adult services was not made before community paediatrics stopped prescribing as he transitioned from childhood to adulthood. Due to excessive waiting lists, this person has been without ADHD medication since March 2025, which is indicative of a system that is not working properly. Will the Minister address the systemic barriers to the ADHD pathway?”
“First, on barriers and gatekeeping, I have received so many cases of schools refusing or postponing referrals, adults reporting GPs minimising symptoms, and community paediatrics increasingly rejecting referrals even when evidence is clear or a private diagnosis exists. Such gatekeeping practices do not protect services; they merely protect delay and lead to wider mental health problems in the long term. Secondly, on the right to choose, I am sure we all have cases in our mailbags where constituents have been forced to obtain a private diagnosis because of waiting list delays, only to find that the NHS rejects the assessment, will not provide the medication they need or will not play fair on the shared care agreement. That is wholly improper.”
“It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Ms Vaz. I congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for Sefton Central (Bill Esterson) on securing this debate. He knows my links to his constituency, and I am certain that his moving tribute to Matt will be appreciated by Matt’s family, his Labour family and everybody that knew and loved him. ADHD affects people of all ages, backgrounds and communities, yet too many are stuck on waiting lists for years, during which time their needs go unmet and their wellbeing deteriorates. In the limited time I have, I want to make three points.”
“I welcome my right hon. Friend’s statement, particularly the action on mobile phones in schools. Harmful interactions can take place in online games and on instant messaging platforms, and we need to be alive to the risk of driving use to less well-regulated spaces and into virtual private networks. I am also concerned that opaque feed algorithms, which reinforce our worst prejudices and recommend harmful content, can have mental health impacts on adults as well as children. Can she assure me that her review will look at this broader issue, and will she ensure that young people’s voices are at the heart of the consultation?”
“Preparedness must mean more than storing equipment or writing contingency documents; it must mean designing a compassionate, comprehensive safety net that recognises the full spectrum of working lives in the UK and ensures that the mistakes of the past are not repeated.”
“That means ensuring that any future emergency financial support schemes are properly stress-tested in advance against real-world employment patterns so that they reflect the diversity of modern working lives before they are ever deployed. No one contributing to the economy should face a crisis without a lifeline. Mental health impacts must be treated as a central component of emergency planning, not an afterthought. Just as importantly, the voices of those previously excluded should be included in future policy discussions so that lived experience shapes the solutions of tomorrow.”
“Each of those lives lost is a reminder that policy decisions are not abstract; they reach deeply into homes, families and futures. We must not only recognise and acknowledge the impact that exclusion had on those individuals but show renewed determination to ensure that such gaps never re-emerge. The pandemic has taught us something essential: economic resilience is public health resilience. There can be no effective emergency response if large groups of people are left without support. A society is only as strong as its most vulnerable moment. As the UK continues to develop its preparedness planning for future pandemics and national emergencies, it is vital that support systems are designed with the flexibility to meet people where they actually are, not where policy assumes them to be.”
“They were contributing members of society who paid taxes, built businesses and supported local economies, yet at the moment they needed help most, many found none. That includes constituents in Mid Cheshire, many of whom contacted me ahead of the debate. They had done everything asked of them—they had built livelihoods and paid their taxes—but still found themselves excluded from support when the pandemic hit. People saw their livelihoods disappear overnight. Some were forced to drain life savings, sell belongings or take on unsustainable debt just to survive. They felt unheard, unseen and unvalued by the systems meant to protect them. Tragically, for some, the emotional and financial devastation became unbearable.”
“I thank the hon. Member for Stratford-on-Avon (Manuela Perteghella) for securing this really important debate. When the covid-19 pandemic unfolded, it tested every part of our society. It pushed our health system, our communities and our economy to the brink. In that moment of crisis, emergency financial support was rightly created at unprecedented speed. Those measures protected millions, but despite the scale of that effort, far too many people were left behind. The ExcludedUK campaign emerged because an estimated 3.8 million individuals fell through the gaps in pandemic financial support. Those were freelancers, newly self-employed people, small business owners, PAYE short-term contractors and others whose circumstances simply did not fit the rigid eligibility rules.”
“What specific steps will the Government take to ensure that any future emergency financial support schemes are designed with the flexibility, fairness and real-world applicability needed to prevent millions from ever again being excluded in their moment of greatest need?”
“The Chancellor of the Exchequer has done exactly the right thing by setting up the covid corruption commissioner. During the pandemic, there were those who saw it not as a moment of national emergency in which we should all get together, but as an opportunity to line their own pockets. The Chancellor is doing exactly the right thing by trying to root out those people and make sure that they suffer the consequences. We cannot change what happened, but we can choose what happens next. Let us learn the lessons from past schemes that left too many people excluded, and move forward by building systems that protect everyone. Let us ensure that in any future crisis, we never again leave millions to face hardship alone.”
“Like the hon. Gentleman, a constituent contacted me ahead of this debate and told me that, although many motorists act responsibly, there is an increasing problem with drivers behaving more aggressively and passing horses at unsafe distances. Given that horses can react unpredictably when they think their lives are at risk, that puts everybody’s lives at risk. Does the hon. Gentleman agree that teaching equestrian safety as part of driver training would be an important way of tackling this issue?”
“If they intend to withdraw it, will she write to me with details of the status of any undertakings and assurances made by HS2 to my councils and constituents as part of the petitioning process, which would not be delivered for more than a quarter of a century and by an organisation that may, by then, no longer exist?”
“Our region, from our big cities to our small towns, is ambitious for our future. We are hungry to play our part in our country’s economic recovery and have been impatient for the Government to see our potential after so many years of undelivered promises. Today’s announcement to invest in NPR shows that this Government will meet that ambition head-on. The previous Government issued an instruction to the HS2 Phase 2b hybrid Bill Committee to remove the Mid Cheshire sections of the route from the Bill. Can my right hon. Friend confirm whether this Government intend to retain or withdraw this instruction?”
“Sixty-six years ago this week, the last regular passenger train called at Middlewich railway station, drawing to a close 92 years of passenger rail travel from the town. A number of students from Middlewich high school have written to me to ask whether the Government would consider reopening the station, and Enterprise Cheshire and Warrington undertook considerable work under the Restoring Your Railway scheme. Will the Secretary of State meet me to discuss the merits of bringing back railway services to the largest town in Cheshire without a station, and restore that vital connection to Manchester, Crewe and beyond?”
“Will the Minister commit to publishing a timetable for when each consultation and each measure is likely to come in, so that we can give reassurance to families that we are going to do this?”
“I commend the Minister for bringing forward the first road safety strategy in more than a decade, alongside specific and measurable targets for cutting the number of deaths on our roads. Evidently, one of the experiences we share across the House is the first time we meet the family of a child who has been killed on our roads. In my case, it was a child from Middlewich who was just cycling to school when he was hit by a young driver racing another car. What will stay with me—as it will stay with his friends, the school and our community for ever—is not just the sense of utter devastation, but the sense of determination from the parents that it cannot be allowed to happen to another family. The strategy sets out a broad range of measures that the Government want to bring in.”
“I am absolutely staggered to hear the shadow Secretary of State talk about standard software testing practices as though someone is doing wrong by trying to penetrate systems and find flaws in them. Is not the whole point of software testing to find the flaws in a system and get them fixed, rather than parading them in front of the House of Commons as though they are some sort of failure?”
“Whether it is state-sponsored cyber-attacks, hacktivism, identity theft or ransomware attacks, those threats can have a widespread and significant impact on people’s lives, on the wider economy, and on our safety and security. Many Members from across the House have noted the cyber-attack on Jaguar Land Rover —which led to that company posting a loss of £485 million last year and, as I think we heard earlier, to a £2 billion impact on the wider economy—and the Co-op infiltration, which cost that retailer at least £206 million. However, this is not a new issue, and virtually no area of the economy has not experienced attempts to penetrate its systems and cause disruption or steal data.”
“It is a privilege to follow my hon. Friend the Member for Milton Keynes Central (Emily Darlington), who made a fantastic speech. I do not think mine will be of quite the same quality, but I will do my best. Having spent my career prior to entering this place as a software developer, it is perhaps not so much a pleasure as a blast of nostalgia to be speaking on this Bill today. The Bill provides for an important and long-overdue update to the NIS regulations, and provides the means to keep those regulations up to date more quickly as new threats emerge. That was a massive gap in our capability left behind by the rather haphazard and cavalier manner of our departure from the EU, and it is absolutely right that we resolve it as soon as we can. It is a cliché to say that the nature of the threats we face has changed.”
“We just need to think about what the priority of an individual sectoral regulator will be, because it will not necessarily be cyber-security. We have to get the balance right, and we need to listen to the sectoral expertise on that. In conclusion, this Bill is an important and long-overdue update to the UK’s cyber-security framework. I look forward to working with the Government to get the scope and scale of these regulations right and to ensure that all the systems that we rely on every day are secure in the face of current and emerging threats.”
“The other area of the Bill that I want to talk about relates to the regulators. The Minister set out in his opening remarks why he believes a sectoral approach is appropriate, and there is merit to that argument. Sectoral regulators have deep, long-standing institutional knowledge and they understand how the processes work in their sector. However, as I touched on earlier, the consequences of failure are enormous, with real-world impacts on people’s everyday lives. We should not expect an overarching cyber regulator to have the domain-specific knowledge of the water sector or the air traffic control sector, and nor should we expect every sectoral regulator to carry the expertise of how modern scalable data centres that detect faults automatically and automatically failover to different regions or different jurisdictions work.”
“I offer a note of caution about this part of the Bill, and it relates to the threshold at which the regulations apply. For managed service providers, we need to ensure that we are providing appropriate levels of cyber-security without blocking new entrants to the market. That applies to critical suppliers, too. The risk is that we end up boosting the hegemony of the big outsourcers and IT suppliers, rather than being able to support new domestic entrants. There is a risk of vendor lock-in, as we have heard several times today. Equally, the threshold on data centres appears to have been set so high that only larger ones will be in scope. I hope that the Minister will keep both of those points under review as the Bill progresses and think about how we can strengthen this provision to strike the right balance.”
“That situation changed for a whole pile of reasons, such as the need to support more public access, the requirement to facilitate more home working, huge increases in the speed of domestic and business broadband, the need to provide failover, redundancy and scaling, the shift away from big capital investment towards infrastructure as a service, and wanting to benefit from more rapid roll-out of features and applications that require significant server infrastructure behind them, such as we have seen more recently with AI. Systems have been moving virtually wholesale to those that are managed remotely and sandboxed to multiple organisations, and towards virtual servers or services in data centres, rather than on-premise tin. Bringing these two areas into scope is obvious, and it is long overdue.”
“I thank the hon. Member for his intervention. I confess that I am not an expert on the IT of Gloucester city council, but I am sure the Minister has heard his intervention, and may wish to respond in his summing up. I welcome the measures in the Bill to bring managed service providers and data centre infrastructure into scope. When I began my career working on hotel reservation systems, legacy on-premise infrastructure was the standard operating practice. Some organisations would develop their own line of business systems and some would buy in, but virtually all would be hosted on their own servers, often with clever names such as Spartacus, Xena or Buffy the Vampire Slayer—names that I worked with over the years.”
“T2. I recently met a group of care workers from Northwich who are here through the health and social care visa, and who are undertaking vital work with great commitment and some personal sacrifice. They spoke passionately about the unfairness of applying the proposed changes to requirements for settled status retrospectively. What assessment has the Home Secretary made of the policy's compliance with the judgment in the case of R (HSMP Forum Ltd) v . Secretary of State for the Home Department in 2008, in respect of ensuring that changes made to immigration rules should not disadvantage those who had already made life-changing decisions based on the existing framework?”
“Can she possibility provide us with an indication of when councils will get some certainty over what the future holds for the statutory override, so that we can see those dedicated schools grant deficits cleared?”