Sarah Russell
MP for Congleton · Labour · United Kingdom
“In my area, the improvement on potholes is noticeable, and I thank the Government for the additional funding, which is being used for large patching work; no longer is there just shovelling into endless holes. I am concerned, however, about road safety in my constituency.”
“It is believed that they are retained within the site and do not enter the wider water system—I do not want to create alarm—but I want to ensure that this is being properly investigated for my local residents, so that either their minds can be put at rest or appropriate steps can be taken to remediate if necessary.”
“I absolutely call on the Minister to encourage the Environment Agency to take steps rapidly, because this is a significant, ongoing problem. The other area of concern in my constituency is a former landfill site, which is now a golf course. It was set up as a golf course by Cheshire East council.”
“Although the long-standing feeling among local people is that it may very well be an issue with the recycling plant, they would also like the Environment Agency to investigate nearby standing water and other possible sources.”
“Again, there has been extensive testing, and the set of facts is clearly disputed. What I am really concerned about, however, is that Cheshire East, when asked, apparently stated—I have not seen the documents myself—that remediating the whole site fully would cost more than £1 billion.”
“It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Dr Murrison. I thank my hon. Friend the Member for Blackpool North and Fleetwood (Lorraine Beavers) for securing this timely debate. Two separate areas in my constituency are suffering difficulties. The first is West Heath in Congleton, where there is an awful fly problem.”
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“I thank the hon. Gentleman for giving way. Does he agree that we need more enforcement, more accurate assessment of non-resident parent income, and better joined-up working between His Majesty’s Revenue and Customs and the Department for Work and Pensions? Furthermore, if we saw that, it would help not just his constituents, to whom he has referred so passionately, but parents such as my constituent whose ex-partner is avoiding paying any ongoing child maintenance despite owning multiple properties.”
“I did so with my children over breakfast this morning, and one of them berated me for not having been in her online safety assembly. We have to be realistic about the capacity of both parents and schools to manage these issues without making it a blame game between different organisations—parents versus schools versus major corporations. These corporations have a huge vested interest in exploiting our children, and we have to figure out how better to protect them.”
“It is important that we keep talking about these issues, and that we move forward on a cross-party basis. These are sophisticated problems and I am not sure whether we have a sufficiently sophisticated response to them. The Online Safety Act provides us with a lot of tools, and I can see that its potential fines of 10% of global revenue are quite high. That has the potential to drive some behaviour change, provided the companies involved really see that the tools have teeth. I hope that we will monitor very heavily how Ofcom gets on with the new legislation; I am sure that Members of all parties will be interested in that. My hon. and learned Friend the Member for Folkestone and Hythe (Tony Vaughan) said that he spoke to his children before the debate to tell them that he was going to raise these issues.”
“[Martin Vickers in the Chair ] If I am honest, I am not quite sure what the right solution is to those problems. If we do not get societal consensus on the right solution, we will, for instance, carry on seeing parents helping children to circumnavigate age restrictions, and children using VPNs to circumnavigate them themselves. Plenty of teenagers are sophisticated enough to do that. I am not sure what the right answer is. I am not sure that preventing under-16s from accessing such content will solve it. There is a risk that it will create a false sense of security and enable providers of the facilities and apps to say, “Well, under-16s can’t use it. We don’t have to put any safety features in because children are not allowed it anyway.” They will completely abdicate responsibility.”
“The parents do not appreciate the ageing risk that they are creating, potentially several years down the line. The NSPCC says that we have a fundamental problem. We now have the Online Safety Act, introduced by the Conservatives, and we are working hard as a Government to bring it into force. Ofcom has been given a significant role in looking at child risk assessment by online providers. We all know that if those people had children’s best interests at heart, they would already have done a lot of the things that Ofcom requires. The fact that Ofcom is having to do an investigation into OnlyFans, and its ability or willingness to prevent under-age children from seeing sexualised content, does not sit comfortably—that is the minimum I will say about it.”
“The complex picture that those companies have of our children is incredibly sophisticated, and their ability to target content at them is like nothing we have ever even imagined. There is also a problem with parents inadvertently facilitating some of this stuff. I would count myself within that description to some extent, so it is certainly not judgmental. When a parent naively says that when a child is 13, they can access something that they would broadly consider uncontroversial—such as WhatsApp so they can chat to their friends—that creates an ageing risk throughout the lifespan of that app use. As was mentioned previously, children subsequently appear to be 16 or 18 before they actually are, and therefore obtain access to services that are unsafe for them much younger than they otherwise would have done.”
“We all know that if there were 7,000 offences reported to the police, a considerably larger number will have happened. I also discovered the prevalence of dating app use among children. Children experience terrible offences when they go to meet people who were, in fact, adults preying on them. Fundamentally, we need to understand that when we talk about social media, children are a product. If anything that we use on the internet does not cost any money, the gain for the provider is access to our thoughts, feelings and communications—in this case, our children’s thoughts, feelings and communications with their friends. We have a generation now for whose entire lifespan those thoughts, feelings and communications with friends can be monetised and tracked across multiple different websites or social media apps.”
“It is an honour to serve under your chairmanship, Mr Stringer. I did a lot of research in preparation for my speech today and, as a parent of three primary-age children, what I found really alarmed me. The National Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children reports that there were more than 7,000 offences of sexual communication with children last year, which was a significant increase on the year before. It says that typically in those offences, the perpetrators start to talk to children on fairly mainstream web services, and then encourage them to communicate instead on more private messaging services such as Snapchat, WhatsApp and Instagram. I was pretty shocked. I did not appreciate that this was such a widespread problem.”
“My constituent Alison Parr has had the most appalling time trying to obtain free prescriptions on the NHS, to which her profoundly disabled daughter, Ruby, is perfectly entitled. Please may we have a debate in Government time on how the NHS and all public services can be made fully responsive to the needs to disabled people?”
“Q14. Some 54,000 women a year lose their jobs when they are pregnant or on maternity leave, and one in 10 human resources managers say that they would be reluctant to hire a woman who they even thought might start a family. The law has not solved this, so will the Prime Minister please meet me, The Dad Shift and Pregnant Then Screwed to discuss the ringfenced paid paternity leave that is needed to bring about change?”
“Mark and Mandy are now part of Forget-me-not Families Uniting, the campaign group alluded to by previous speakers, which is calling on us to save young lives through the introduction of graduated driving licensing and through the creation of an expert panel to advise the Government on how graduated driving licensing in the UK should look. The Department for Transport’s 2019 road safety statement noted there is evidence that graduated driving licensing schemes, where they have been introduced elsewhere, have proved very effective at improving the safety of young drivers. For example in California, where drivers aged under 18 cannot take passengers under 20 unless supervised, and in New Zealand where young and newly qualified drivers go on to a restricted licence, which means—”
“She speaks of a gaping hole at the loss of her daughter and of the loneliness and emptiness that she has left. It is indescribable. Mandy told me of the knock at the door and the immediate realisation of what had happened, and that the day that Gee was killed will haunt her for the rest of her days. Sadly, there are several tributes on A roads around my constituency to other young people who have been killed in surprisingly similar circumstances. Roads in our area are dark, fast and dangerous. We cannot change the entire rural road network, certainly not in the short term, but we can change the law.”
“I thank my hon. Friend the Member for Shrewsbury (Julia Buckley) for securing this debate. In the words of my constituents Mark and Mandy Ogden, whose daughter Georgia died on 26 June 2020: “The last thing we want is to parade our grief, but we need people to understand the devastation these road deaths cause.” Georgia, known as Gee to her family, was 17. She had been out for the evening and was in a car with another teenage passenger, driven by a third teenage girl. They were all wearing their seatbelts. Mandy talks about the pain of four years now without hearing Gee’s voice, her cute laugh, her silliness and random outbursts of singing, her tantrums over something and nothing, her sassiness, her incredible dancing and performing.”
“Mandy Ogden said to me: “Often, the main argument against this change to driver licensing is that it restricts freedom, but our daughter’s freedom has been taken away forever.” Does the hon. Gentleman agree that that, too, is an important point?”
“Compliant employers are withdrawing from the market because they cannot manage to compete, or provide services, for the amounts of money available. There is an urgent need for a wider reform of the care sector, and pay within the sector. We are, of course, all looking forward to sectoral bargaining, to better protect workers and make it clearer to people what their rights are. However, unless workers have the capacity to enforce those rights, and unless they can move between employers as the rest of us can, they will continue to be exploited. We already have a significant problem in the sector. The problem is getting worse and will continue to get worse but this is, I hope, one of a number of measures that could really improve working conditions for people in this country.”
“At the moment, some councils are putting out tenders for care at payment rates of around £17 an hour. Care representative organisations tell me that the actual cost of providing care with staff paid in a legally compliant way is £22 an hour. That does not include any management costs whatsoever; it is just the cost of the member of staff being provided. We have, at minimum, a £5 an hour gap between legally compliant care workers and what local councils are offering, although the gap is more than that because companies will, of course, want to make some degree of profit—that is not, per se, illegitimate—and will naturally need to charge for some management costs. A gap that big is enriching non-compliant employers in the sector.”
“The other set of people for whom this situation is deeply unjust are my constituents who receive care, who are spending their life savings on care, and who would be absolutely horrified to discover the circumstances in which many of the people who give that care are living. The Gangmasters and Labour Abuse Authority has talked about this as a massive growth area of concern—I have spoken to the Minister about that previously, in this exact room, so I will not go into precisely the same points again. The Gangmasters and Labour Abuse Authority could potentially have a licensing scheme for care workers but, bluntly, its licensing schemes in other sectors do not seem to be eliminating abuse, so a certificate of common sponsorship is the way to get better rights and behaviours within the sector.”
“It is a pleasure to serve under your chairwomanship, Dr Huq. I thank my hon. Friend the Member for Poole (Neil Duncan-Jordan) for securing this debate. Two sets of people are being abused and exploited. The first set are workers in the care sector. I agree with everything that my hon. Friend said about the extent of abuse in the sector, and I have seen it myself in my employment law practice. However, I have also always been aware that there was a need for more advice in the sector than we could ever provide, for exactly the reason that he raised: people are too scared to come forward.”
“My constituents in Alsager, Holmes Chapel, Sandbach and the surrounding villages either drive directly to Crewe or take trains and transfer there. Does my hon. Friend agree that my constituents, like his, want more reliable journeys through an improved station and, moreover, that better transport links could bring economic growth for passengers and others?”
“I want to take a moment to raise the issues around Sandbach station. There is no accessibility at the station, which serves approximately 20,000 people. The only route to Manchester for Sandbach residents is to take a train to Crewe, where they can change accessibly —assuming that everything is working—and then take a train back to Manchester. Does the Minister agree that this needs addressing?”
“May I ask the Minister to review that, and commit himself to a funding floor that is transparent, fair and consistent across the country? The quality of the experience that my constituents and their families have at the end of life should not depend on the generosity of individuals.”
“Let me begin by paying tribute, as others have done, to some local hospices. Both St Luke’s and East Cheshire do a spectacular job, and are very well loved local institutions. I want to say a particular thank you to the staff, of course, but also to the volunteers, and the donors who are literally keeping the lights on. I greatly welcome the £100 million of capital that the Government are providing for hospices, and I ask the Minister to meet me, along with my hon. Friends the Members for Crewe and Nantwich (Connor Naismith), for Mid Cheshire (Andrew Cooper), and for Macclesfield (Tim Roca), to discuss a potential local project. On revenue funding, it would be remiss of me not to mention that St Luke’s and East Cheshire hospices receive 15% and 16% respectively of their funding from the NHS.”
“I understand that there may be some difficulties with the criminal law in relation to people being followed. In the event that they have been actively harassed and threatened, there is a potential crime in the threat, but there may be a gap in the criminal law for those who are simply followed, with that not being part of a continuing course of conduct. Will the Minister commit to looking into that, please?”
“We need to aspire not just to improve telephone and online services, but to ensure that in-person advice is provided. My hon. Friend briefly touched on the quality of advice that people are receiving and the fact that although the Financial Conduct Authority regulates the products that people are being sold around debt reduction—they are products—there is a real problem of mis-selling them, despite the theoretical regulation. Unfortunately, regulation is only as good as the enforcement. It is important that we keep discussing the matter and that we bring real change to the advice landscape because our residents need us to.”
“When people have difficulties, they therefore do not know where to turn. We need to do the best we can to improve civil legal aid. Citizens advice bureaux were partly funded by local government, which was cut, and partly through the legal advice work they did that was charged at legal aid rates. Unfortunately, since those are now so difficult to work under, all those advice services have been decimated. My local citizens advice bureau spoke to me—I say local; it is not in the constituency, though it can occasionally do some in-person transitory work—about how important it is to see people face to face. It said vulnerable people, older people and others might in theory have online access, but actually cannot go through a complex system to resolve their debt without that consistent face-to-face assistance.”
“It is a pleasure to follow my hon. Friend the Member for Walthamstow (Ms Creasy), who spoke incredibly passionately about the difficulties of debt. There is a lot of debt in my community, which appears, on the face of it, to be relatively affluent, but one of the problems is that people feel a huge compulsion to maintain that appearance. I have spoken to a lot of people on the doorstep, and in the course of the submission that we made as a constituency to the Social Mobility and Child Poverty Commission, about the fact that people are really struggling and finding it incredibly difficult. In areas such as mine, where there is not a perception of poverty, there are simply no services to assist people who need help. My constituency has no citizens advice bureau anywhere, no law centre—nothing.”
“The right hon. Lady has referred repeatedly to command, control and consistency, as if the latter were a problem. Presumably, she was part of the Government that sought to use academies as a mechanism by which to control individual schools from Whitehall, rather than having the individual involvement of local authorities.”
“My experience as an employment lawyer is that academy schools generate large amounts of employment rights litigation because they tend not to treat their staff very well. [Interruption.] Some do, of course, but litigation is not in the best interests of children, and ensuring that children have teachers who are adequately paid is a key consideration for Labour Members.”
“That is a hugely important power in the Bill, and I hope we will use it in that way. Lastly, thank everyone for the intelligent and constructive points they have made today, and the Liberal Democrats for their constructive support for the Bill—there are others in the House who really could learn from their example.”
“This is not about penalising parents who make that choice, or about restricting freedom of choice; it is about protecting children who are already identified as extremely vulnerable. I know that everyone here supports that, or I would hope they do. I want to mention the use of the single identifier to track the potential educational outcomes of children in temporary accommodation. I have spoken before in this House of my significant concerns about how, when children lose their accommodation, they often lose their school place and may spend considerable periods outside the education system. Some children lose their accommodation repeatedly during their childhood, and therefore move schools on multiple occasions. I think the capacity to track that, and to track the outcomes for those children, is really important.”
“My favourite thing about the Bill is that it really demonstrates our commitment to all the children in our communities, in all schools, having the best possible opportunities, both because it is morally imperative and because the education of today is the national productivity of the workforce tomorrow. We all have to keep that in the front of our minds, and I know that the Minister absolutely does. I would like to say one or two things about the identifier system we are bringing in with this Bill. Many colleagues have referred to some horrific situations that this seeks to avoid, and to the position of children who are outside school. I want to reassure parents in my constituency that those who have chosen to home-school absolutely have my support.”
“I know she looked at that in the pilot of free breakfast clubs, and I we will continue to emphasise it. The other thing I would like to mention about free breakfast clubs is toothbrushing, which we certainly talked about during the general election. I believe there are pilots for toothbrushing in breakfast clubs, and I would love to see that rolled out widely. Toothbrushing is so crucial, and working parents who drop children off early of course find it difficult to ensure that their children’s teeth are brushed before school. It is best done every day, so I would welcome our extending that as far as possible.”
“There are so many fantastic provisions in this Bill that it is quite hard to know where to start. However, the first thing I want to say is that the move to restrict the number of branded school uniform items will, I know, be so welcomed by parents in my Congleton constituency. So many of them who have spoken to me are struggling and finding it really very difficult to make ends meet, as they have done for many years. I have spoken to parents who are working two jobs and desperately trying to put food on the table. I know that those parents will also strongly welcome the provision of free breakfast clubs. I have spoken to the Secretary of State about the importance of children with special educational needs being able to access those breakfast clubs and holiday provision.”
“The most significant problems in the court system have been caused by 14 years of chronic Tory underfunding of the court system itself, the Crown Prosecution Service and the prison system, which means that: far too few people are held on remand; people are being bailed when they should not be; people are being dealt with very swiftly to try to deal with custody time limits; and there are so many problems baked into the system as it stands that victims are being wholly failed. We need to ensure the system is invested in and reformed in such a way that those problems do not continue to be exacerbated, one of the most enormous ones being—”
“Does my hon. Friend agree that it is important that we keep the blame for the backlogs exactly where it belongs? Defence barristers are doubtless doing the best they possibly can for their clients in some extremely difficult circumstances, and, as my hon. Friend the Member for Wolverhampton West (Warinder Juss) says, they are paid poorly relative to other members of their profession.”
“I understand that there is a specific problem with the criminal injuries compensation scheme as it stands, whereby a claim has to be brought within two years of the original allegation, even though in many cases there has not even been a prosecution by that point. Is that something that the Department is looking at?”
“Does she agree that it is a huge improvement to have a Government who are integrating SEND support and that there is so much more that we are all looking to do?”
“In respect of early diagnosis and onward support, in my constituency of Congleton we have two specific problems. First, although some children receive a diagnosis under the right to choose pathway on the NHS, others, often from more deprived backgrounds, face considerably longer waits than they would under that pathway. The impact of that on those children concerns me very much. Secondly, Cheshire East council sometimes goes for periods of time when it closes the education, health and care plan application pathway to new entrants because it is so overwhelmed by the number of applications it already has. Both those are serious issues for children in my constituency, and I thank the hon. Member for South Cambridgeshire for securing this debate and giving me the opportunity to air them.”
“I thank the hon. Member for allowing me to intervene again; I appreciate it. Cheshire has some of the lowest per-pupil funding in the country. There is a direct link between schools that receive relatively low levels of funding and councils that have relatively high levels of SEND diagnoses, because there is not the same support in mainstream classrooms as when there are higher staffing ratios, which we find in areas that have better funding. We need to look at equalising that funding as best we can in the current environment to improve support at an earlier stage, as the hon. Lady was mentioning.”
“In raising that issue again with the House, I echo my hon. Friend, and I thank all NHS workers and all our care staff—it is appalling and we need to do something about it.”
“Irrespective of the subject of today’s petition—even if there was a two-year wait for rights—we need to look at the relationship between employment rights and visa status in the intervening period, because people in those first two years would still be subject to widespread abuse. The other thing that we could look at is the Gangmasters and Labour Abuse Authority licensing scheme, which does not currently extend to the care sector. That is a significant omission that we could review. I thank Members for listening to me today. Finally, I want to pick up on the point made by my hon. Friend the Member for Southampton Test (Satvir Kaur) about hate crime against NHS workers. When I visited Congleton War Memorial hospital recently, the chief executive made the point to me that his staff are habitually and regularly subjected to racial hatred.”
“It asks that if someone is visiting a loved one or a loved one is receiving care at home and they spot the signs, they contact the authority. The common signs listed are scavenging for food or eating leftovers, working excessively long hours, not being dressed adequately for the role—having insufficiently warm clothing or not having personal protective equipment—being in fear of the authorities, showing signs that their movements are being controlled, or having injuries. That is the reality of working in care in this country. That is what we all accept day to day in order to have our older people or people with disabilities looked after. Any of us would find that idea completely abhorrent. While we continue to do nothing, that is what we perpetuate in our society and all around us. There are two things that we could do.”
“They were too frightened that they would lose their visa status and their employer would create untrue allegations about them in order to have them thrown out of the country, rather than dealing with the underlying problems in the care sector. The Gangmasters and Labour Abuse Authority reports that 61% of all reports made to it in the first quarter of 2024 concerned labour abuse in the care sector. Many, many people work in the care sector in my constituency and many, many more spend their life savings on care. They would all be rightly horrified to experience or receive care from people who work in the circumstances that I saw at first hand in practice. The Gangmasters and Labour Abuse Authority website lists common signs that indicate the exploitation of care workers.”
“It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Sir Edward. I thank my hon. Friend the Member for Folkestone and Hythe (Tony Vaughan) for securing this debate. There is a significant and ageing population in my constituency. There has been a 25% increase in the number over-65s since 2011 and, accordingly, a huge increase in the need for care. Prior to coming here, I was a solicitor specialising in employment rights. I worked in a law centre and saw at first hand how the issue plays out when it goes wrong—and it does go wrong. Typically, we would be approached by a care worker who was very concerned that they were being treated horrifically at work, in ways that were clearly unlawful. Unfortunately, once we gave them advice, they would not go forward with any form of complaint.”
“The Listening Out Loud Foundation in my constituency is run by Jill and Andy Dolman and works with those who have recently left the forces, often with complex problems such as post-traumatic stress disorder. They can provide an excellent insight into how we can better support current and future armed forces personnel. How does the Minister foresee the Armed Forces Commissioner working with small charities such as the Listening Out Loud Foundation, and will he join me in visiting the organisation in the near future?”
“I thank my hon. Friend for raising this horrendous issue. A related issue is the broader regulation of baby foods. Many baby foods contain more sugar per 100g than Haribo sweeties, and there is no compulsory regulation of their content. Large numbers of children eat those baby foods but are still malnourished and do not get a balanced diet. Does he agree that we should consider wider regulation of, and mandatory standards for, the content of baby food, while still being mindful of the need for baby foods to be affordable so that everyone can access proper nutrition for their children? Children in the UK are becoming shorter on average than their international peers, and that is a disgrace.”
“I want to raise a point about washer-dryers, as opposed to washing machines. As a mother of three, I spend a lot of time doing the washing. It sounds like a trivial point, but in north-west England it is incredibly difficult to get washing to dry—it starts raining in October and keeps going all year. It is all well and good if the household support fund provides washing machines, which are great and a good start, but that will not solve the whole problem. I implore the Minister to raise the point about dryers. Of course, there are other problems about affording the electricity to run them, but we will create damp in homes if people cannot dry clothes in them.”
“In my constituency, there has been an 11% decline in the number of adults who have seen an NHS dentist in just the last few years—it has been precipitous. There is a specific problem, however, with adults in care homes. I spoke to a local dentist, and she explained that the standard insurance for dentists no longer covers them visiting and performing services in care homes in the community. Can the Minister look into that, and does he agree that it is a huge problem that when vulnerable people cannot come to a dental practice, dentists cannot go to them?”
“Does the right hon. Member accept that the Conservative Government’s decisions to reduce gas storage and to fail to invest in the NHS over long periods made dealing with those crises considerably worse?”
“I look forward to working with businesspeople and families in my constituency to ensure that we get the delivery of those plans right over time, but right now, this Budget looks like a solution that will begin to fix the NHS and social care; rebuild hospitals and schools; fix the SEND system; and rebuild confidence in our public services, in the economy and in our future as a country.”