Westminster Hall
Westminster Hall is an alternative Chamber for MPs to hold debates, named after the adjoining Westminster Hall.
Each debate is chaired by an MP from the Panel of Chairs, rather than the Speaker or Deputy Speaker. A Government Minister will give the final speech, and no votes may be called on the debate topic.
This information is provided by Parallel Parliament and does not comprise part of the offical record
Town and City Centre Safety
(1 day, 10 hours ago)
Westminster HallRead Hansard Text Read Debate Ministerial Extracts
Westminster Hall is an alternative Chamber for MPs to hold debates, named after the adjoining Westminster Hall.
Each debate is chaired by an MP from the Panel of Chairs, rather than the Speaker or Deputy Speaker. A Government Minister will give the final speech, and no votes may be called on the debate topic.
This information is provided by Parallel Parliament and does not comprise part of the offical record
Baggy Shanker (Derby South) (Lab/Co-op) [R]
I beg to move,
That this House has considered town and city centre safety.
It is a pleasure to serve under your chairship, Mr Dowd. I declare my interest as a city councillor in Derby and former council leader, but most importantly as a proud Derby-born resident since 1972—yes, the year we won the league. In Derby, as in towns and cities up and down the country, there is so much to be proud of. We have a community that rolls up its sleeves and cracks on. From Alvaston to Sinfin, our Derby Parks Volunteers are out come rain or shine, working to keep our parks looking their best. Just before Christmas, volunteers from across the city—from the Salvation Army, the Pakistan Community Centre and the gurdwaras—pulled together to support 200 Pear Tree families evacuated from their homes. It is those examples of community, and many more, that make us proud to call our city home.
The city is brimming with what it has to offer our residents and visitors. People can grab a pint at the Hairy Dog, and head on to a gig at Vaillant Live, which opened its doors last year. They will see that the city is buzzing. And there is an exciting future ahead, with regeneration efforts breathing new life into the cultural heart of our city. Demolishing the Assembly Rooms, which could not come a moment too soon in my view, will completely transform our marketplace, creating a multipurpose community venue, a four-star hotel and grade A office space for the fantastic businesses across our city. That is not all. From the redevelopment of the derelict Friar Gate Goods Yard, to the Guildhall theatre, regeneration is going full steam ahead. In our city, we are committed to creating positive change that our community can feel.
Catherine Atkinson (Derby North) (Lab)
My hon. Friend is setting out brilliantly some of the regeneration that we are seeing in our city. From the new performance venue, Vaillant Live, and the redevelopment of the Friar Gate Goods Yard, to the £20 million that the Government are investing in the Guildhall and Derby theatres, it is regeneration that he has played a central part in, both as council leader and, now, as an MP. He is absolutely right that the long-awaited demolition of the Assembly Rooms and the regeneration of that site will be transformational for our marketplace—the icing on the Birds Bakery cake. But does he agree that people will go into the city centre and enjoy that regeneration only if they feel safe to do so? Does he agree that more bobbies on the beat and further investment in our CCTV—issues that we have both been working on—are essential so that everyone feels safe to live, work and play in our city?
Peter Dowd (in the Chair)
Order. I remind Members that 20-odd people wish to speak. That means that everyone will get a maximum of about two minutes—I might as well give everyone a heads-up on that—so if there are to be interventions, then, as I have said in the past, can they be a sketch, not an oil painting, please?
Baggy Shanker
Thank you, Mr Dowd. I also thank my hon. Friend the Member for Derby North (Catherine Atkinson)—my fantastic MP—for her intervention. She is absolutely right: it is a partnership of investment, but people need to feel safe in our city centre.
As my constituent John told me, we can see how much effort and investment are being put into our city, from building housing to breathing new life into the shops and spaces in our city centre. I want every single resident and visitor to be able to take their family out for the day, meet up with friends and enjoy what the city centre has to offer, but the long-term success of regeneration depends on the community feeling safe to enjoy our city centre. As John also told me, he has real concerns about the safety of his family when they are out and about in Derby. Seeing drug users loitering on St Peter’s Street and on paths by the River Derwent has put him off popping to the shops and has stopped his wife going out running in our city centre altogether.
Ms Julie Minns (Carlisle) (Lab)
My hon. Friend makes the point about people needing to feel safe in their communities. One of the issues that many of us hear from our constituents about is illegal e-bikes speeding through our parks and town centres. Many reputable dealers, such as Bikeseven and Palace Cycles in my constituency, would never sell an illegal e-bike, but they are widely available. Does my hon. Friend agree that the time has come to ban the sale of illegal e-bikes and cut the problem off at source?
Baggy Shanker
It is simple: if they are illegal, they should be banned.
Unfortunately, John and his family are not alone. I hear those concerns reflected at my surgeries and in my inbox time and again. Families such as John’s tell me that they are worried about the drug and alcohol abuse they see on our streets.
Warinder Juss (Wolverhampton West) (Lab)
In my constituency, the Safer Wolverhampton Partnership works with keyholders such as the council, police, healthcare, housing and education providers. The Way Youth Zone also provides support, stability and a safe place for young people. Does my hon. Friend agree that we need to adopt a co-ordinated and holistic approach to addressing city centre safety, with appropriate funding for youth services?
Baggy Shanker
It is critical to have the right funding and a sense of partnership working to tackle the problem together. Young people often tell me they want to take in everything our wonderful city centre has to offer but knife crime, and the perception of knife crime, makes them worry for their safety when they are out and about. Constituents, such as Tirath, tell me the lack of visible policing heightens their concern, so that they feel unsafe in the city centre.
Anna Dixon (Shipley) (Lab)
Neighbourhood policing teams are essential to ensure that feeling of safety on our high streets and in our town centres. I hope my hon. Friend will join me in commending my local team, led by Inspector Tany Ditta in Bingley, Shipley and Baildon. Does my hon. Friend agree that the Government’s investment in 3,000 more neighbourhood police and police community support officers is essential to make people feel safe in our town centres, to help our high streets thrive?
Baggy Shanker
I congratulate Inspector Ditta and my hon. Friend on all the work she does to help her local police, coupled with the additional investment in the police from our Government.
Nobody here will want to talk down their city centre and I am not here to talk down Derby. Like our constituents, we are proud of the places we represent but, up and down the country, years of Tory austerity and mismanagement have eroded that pride. Austerity took bobbies off the beat and out of our city centres, with PCSO numbers halved and an estimated 600 police stations shutting their doors for good. It left our high streets boarded up, with shops closing at a rate of 37 a day in 2024. It also let retail crime run rampant, leaving shoplifting at its highest level since records began, with hard-working staff worried about their safety at work. A Co-op campaign to protect retail workers shows that, shockingly, there are more than 1,300 incidents of violence and abuse every day, with shop workers threatened just for doing their job.
The catastrophic austerity experiment left our communities feeling less safe than ever. Research by the University of Southampton demonstrates that austerity led to a 3.7% increase in total crime and 4.8% increase in violent crime, with those increases hitting deprived neighbourhoods the hardest. In Derby, we have seen that play out in the streets and places we love. Pride for one’s city is stretched when the high street is littered with empty or plain dodgy shops. In 2024, Derbyshire Live estimated that more than 80 shops in the city centre were for sale or to let. That is an increase of about 60% on the previous two years. Any sense of safety was shaken when last summer residents watched masked thieves smash their way into a pawnbroker’s shop on St Peter’s Street in broad daylight.
Danny Beales (Uxbridge and South Ruislip) (Lab)
My hon. Friend is making an excellent speech about an issue that is important to many of us. He talks about masked thieves. Councils have the power to ban face coverings, particularly in town centres, by introducing public space protection orders. Does he agree that councils should work with the police to do that where appropriate? Is he as shocked as I am that Hillingdon council is refusing to ban face coverings in the town centre, despite the community and the police asking it to do so for exactly the sorts of reasons that he mentions?
Baggy Shanker
My hon. Friend makes a valid point. The police need to work with local authorities to tackle these issues sensitively.
Melanie Onn (Great Grimsby and Cleethorpes) (Lab)
My hon. Friend mentioned dodgy shops. I have been running a campaign against dodgy vape shops and others on the high street. Safety is so important, and these shops, which sell goods to young people, erode confidence in the high street. Does he agree that commercial landlords must be given more powers so that they can understand exactly who they are renting to and shut such shops down?
Baggy Shanker
My hon. Friend is absolutely right: such shops do not help other businesses and residents, and do not make our city centres a safe environment, so more measures are needed to tackle that.
Last year, there was another really difficult day for our city. Gurvinder Singh Johal, also known as Danny, was tragically murdered as he was going about his business in a Lloyds Bank branch on a Tuesday afternoon. It was utterly devastating for his family. When crimes like that happen in plain sight, in places that we use regularly and consider to be safe, it is not surprising that public confidence is shaken. Communities are left wondering whether the towns and cities they know and love really are the places that they see in front of them. Public safety is not just about law enforcement; as my constituent Tirath puts it, it is also about preserving the character of the places we call home.
Constituents up and down the country, in towns and cities from Stoke-on-Trent to Somerset, share the same feelings. We are here today because we want to take our constituents’ concerns seriously. We are here because when they tell us that more needs to be done for them to feel like crime is being taken seriously and tackled, we want to listen. Most importantly, we are here because although austerity damaged our towns and cities, it did not break them. We want to crack on and make changes so that everyone can enjoy our town and city centres as the brilliant and buzzing places that we know they can be.
That is why I want to talk about what comes next. We know that keeping our communities safe is not about warm words; it is about action. That means working hand in hand with the police and our partners to ensure that people feel welcome and secure spending time in our towns and cities.
Stuart Anderson (South Shropshire) (Con)
I have recently completed a “shop local” survey of almost 4,500 residents, and they said that a cleaner high street would improve community pride and help to reduce crime. Does the hon. Gentleman agree that that is a good initial approach, although it does not replace police on the beat?
Baggy Shanker
The hon. Gentleman is absolutely right. We need clean, vibrant, buzzing city centres, and organisations must work in partnership with the police—it is everyone’s responsibility.
At home in Derby, I have worked to drive practical action on crime and antisocial behaviour. I have teamed up with local partners and my neighbour, my hon. Friend the Member for Derby North, to hold regular city centre summits. I pay tribute to the organisations that have got round the table with us, including Safe and Sound, the Derbyshire constabulary and the Derby City Youth Alliance. The work they do day to day to support our city centre and ensure it is a place that our community can enjoy is absolutely vital. There is still much more to do, but we are taking steps in the right direction.
Constituents regularly tell me that when police are not visible, they feel more worried about their safety in the city centre. On a recent walkabout with local police, I was pleased to see at first hand how work to recruit and deploy more police officers and public protection officers is helping residents to feel safe and supported when they are out and about in Derby. We also know that action at a local level needs backing with investment, resources and the visible, responsive police presence our communities want to see.
Helen Maguire (Epsom and Ewell) (LD)
I am pleased that the night-time economy is on the rise in Epsom, and although I have not sampled the new Labyrinth nightclub I have been to many restaurants and pubs with local residents. The thriving night-time economy contributes to our high streets but, as the hon. Member mentioned, they must be safe. Does he agree that, even at night time, a visible, trusted police presence deters crime?
Baggy Shanker
Absolutely. There is no time when the police presence should not be there. It should be there during the day, in the evening and during night-time hours.
Last year, I was absolutely chuffed to see the Chancellor back Team Derby, which will bring everyone with a stake in our city’s future together to ensure that every pound of investment coming into Derby delivers the real change our community can see. That is why I wholeheartedly welcome the Labour Government’s commitment to keeping our streets safe for everyone to enjoy. Whether it is freeing up local offices to deliver neighbourhood policing in their communities; making sure that, when residents report concerns to 999, they can be confident about the response they will get; or putting bobbies back on the beat, it is vital that we crack on with the job—today, tomorrow and every single day.
Wherever we call home, it is a basic expectation that we can step out of our front door, pop to local shops and feel safe. I urge the Minister to back reform with the investment and resources our local police forces need so that, in Derby and across the country, our communities have the confidence to enjoy everything that their towns and cities have to offer them.
Several hon. Members rose—
Peter Dowd (in the Chair)
Order. I remind Members that, should they wish to bob to be called in the debate, they should do so. Members have two minutes to speak.
Iqbal Mohamed (Dewsbury and Batley) (Ind)
I congratulate the hon. Member for Derby South (Baggy Shanker) on securing this important debate, and on his introductory speech. Across the country, there is a growing disconnect between the official statistics on serious crime and the lived experience of our communities. Although some categories of serious violence have declined, many people feel less safe than ever in our town and city centres. That perception is not irrational; it reflects the rise of highly visible, everyday crimes that fundamentally shape how people experience public spaces. Antisocial behaviour, phone snatching and shoplifting have become rife on our streets. Those offences may not always dominate national headlines, but they corrode public confidence in the police and undermine the social fabric of our communities.
In Dewsbury and Batley, those trends are painfully visible. Just weeks ago, a gang knife attack in Dewsbury town left one man seriously injured in broad daylight. Days later, the police seized £600,000 worth of cannabis from a drugs factory operating in the town centre.
Leigh Ingham (Stafford) (Lab)
I appreciate that this is a slightly different issue but, with empty properties on high streets and absent landlords not contributing to our communities, crime is taking place in those buildings in Stafford, and local authorities do not have the powers they need to take them back from absentee landlords. Does the hon. Member agree that that is something on which the Government need to press heavily, to get our town centres back into active use?
Iqbal Mohamed
I agree that empty shops and buildings in town centres are a draw for nefarious activities, with people squatting or committing crimes from those places. I encourage the Government to look at that. The recent announcement of business rate cuts will help certain businesses, but that should be extended across all town centre businesses.
On Sunday, thieves brazenly stole the 129-year-old mayoral chains from Dewsbury’s town hall, having climbed in through the roof. Constituents tell me that they no longer feel safe shopping, or even leaving home after dark. These are not abstract statistics; they are lived realities that have major ramifications for an individual’s quality of life. The decline of visible neighbourhood policing and the hollowing out of council services and youth centres have played a significant role in this deplorable state of affairs. Those changes were not inexorable certainties, but a conscious political programme of austerity. That is why I welcome the Government’s renewed emphasis on neighbourhood policing, including dedicated antisocial behaviour leads and guaranteed patrols in towns. In Dewsbury, we have seen the emergence of a new town centre team. Those initiatives matter: visibility matters.
Nationally, the challenge is stark: shoplifting is at record levels, phone snatching rose by 153% in a single year and abuse of retail workers is escalating. The Crime and Policing Bill contains some welcome measures, but legislation alone will not rebuild public confidence. Town centre safety requires a holistic approach—policing, youth services, urban design, transport, economic regeneration and more must work together. Ultimately, crime is a threat not just to security, but to democratic trust. Safer town centres are not just a policing objective; they are a democratic necessity. If we want people to believe in our towns, institutions and democracy, we must start by ensuring that they feel safe on our streets.
Gill German (Clwyd North) (Lab)
It is a pleasure to serve under your chairship, Mr Dowd. I thank my hon. Friend the Member for Derby South (Baggy Shanker) for securing the debate.
Improving community safety in Clwyd North is one of my top priorities. It has been great to work alongside North Wales police through meetings and walkabouts, and to talk directly to retail workers and residents out and about in the town centre. I have seen how antisocial behaviour is being tackled through better community cohesion. Local PCSOs and shopkeepers are connected by radio in our town centres, staying in regular contact so that they can quickly share information about what is happening on the street and, crucially, step in when issues arise. That kind of everyday co-operation is making a difference by deterring antisocial behaviour before it escalates, reassuring residents and businesses with a visible presence, and bringing a sense of order and safety, which is so important. That really matters because it shows people that antisocial behaviour will not be tolerated, and that our communities, and crucially our high streets, belong to the law-abiding majority.
We have got more PCSOs in every Clwyd North neighbourhood with a named officer in each one. We have got local initiatives, such as Operation Restore and Operation Vroom, to tackle violent offences, antisocial behaviour and persistent nuisance behaviour like e-bikes and disruption on our streets. In short, I can see first hand from being out and about in Clwyd North that Government-backed initiatives are being backed up by the local police’s confidence to really tackle issues. We have more PCSOs in our neighbourhoods, safer streets and stronger local communities. It makes a real difference and makes people feel secure.
Jim Shannon (Strangford) (DUP)
It is a pleasure to serve under your chairship, Mr Dowd. I thank the hon. Member for Derby South (Baggy Shanker) for securing the debate and giving us all a chance to participate.
I want to give a Northern Ireland perspective on town and city centre safety. Northern Ireland has several specific Government-led and multi-agency initiatives designed to improve safety in town and city centres. They are often co-ordinated through local partnerships, such as the PCSP—police and community safety partnership. However, as with most Departments, lack of funding in Northern Ireland has greatly hampered the progress in safety that they need. For example, CCTV —the sleeping policeman, as I call it—in Newtownards and Bangor is not fit for purpose. It needs upgrading: the screen and film is very grainy, so it is hard to ascertain who is on it. The local Police Service of Northern Ireland chief superintendent is crying out for a system that can be used as evidence for crimes, but more importantly one that can prevent crimes. The local PCSP have acknowledged the need, and yet the council’s hands are ostensibly tied, having struck the local rate.
We then go up the ladder to the Minister for Justice.
Mr Gregory Campbell (East Londonderry) (DUP)
Does my hon. Friend agree that we have the potential for a win-win here? Many people complain about high street shops being derelict and empty, but if we can encourage people to live adjacent to or above retail units, we can increase footfall and protect people, provided the police are present, particularly in the evening time.
Jim Shannon
I thank my hon. Friend for that. It is not just about CCTV in the city centre, but in the shops as well. The Minister and the Department have highlighted that their funding does not stretch. I could argue that the Minister does not prioritise in the way that I would like, but that does not change the facts. The PSNI has indicated that if it had the system, it would monitor it. In other words, if the system is in place, the PSNI will look after it, so there is an advantage to doing that.
I have one quick story— I am conscious of time and want to give others the chance to participate. My son worked in a shop in Newtownards—he does not work there any more. One night, a guy came in to rob the till and steal some drink. He threatened my son with a knife, so my son stepped back, which was the right thing to do—there is no sense in being a hero when it comes to some maniac with a knife. The CCTV in the shop was the reason they were able to catch them, so it is just not about CCTV in the street, but the CCTV in the constituency shops as well.
The rate of crime in Newtownards is 33.6 crimes per 1,000 people compared with 36 elsewhere. The PSNI find themselves going from business to business to ask for camera evidence, and even to ask residents for Ring doorbell footage. That is another way of catching those who are up to no good, and is something we need to focus on.
Sadik Al-Hassan (North Somerset) (Lab)
It is a pleasure to serve under your chairship, Mr Dowd. In my constituency of North Somerset and our amazing town centres, safety is an issue raised consistently by residents, and their concerns reflect a wider truth about communities across our country. Homicide rates in England and Wales have fallen to their lowest levels since records began, which is welcome news, yet that is not how people in my community and across the UK feel. We have less violent crime, but the small crimes that tear the fabric of our community spirit are on the rise.
Having spent nearly two decades working in pharmacy, I know at first hand that I can be in a local shop watching somebody sweep a shelf of products into their bag and walk away almost undeterred, driving a feeling of lawlessness, making us feel that antisocial behaviour and crime rates are increasing, because low-level everyday issues are more prevalent and more visible. Shop floor staff are often told not to put themselves at risk—rightfully so, as I still have a scar on the back of my hand from a shoplifter. The public are afraid to get involved, as they will likely be on the wrong side of the law. It is the antisocial behaviour, the petty shoplifting, the lack of police presence and even the proliferation of e-bikes tearing through our streets that is driving the feeling of unsafe towns and villages. Add in the absence of CCTV coverage and police presence in key areas, and residents feel they have nowhere to turn.
The Portishead post office, which is in one of the largest towns in my constituency and a vital hub that Portishead residents and I campaigned tirelessly for, suffered two break-ins, one only a month after opening its doors in May 2025. Even next door in the village of Pill, where I live, I have seen a rise in antisocial behaviour, including bikes tearing up football pitches and even affecting a match. That is why I welcome the Government’s Bill and the safer streets mission that sets out clear priorities on neighbourhood policing and town centre crime. Part of the conversation should be about the fundamental changes we have seen on our high streets. We should look not with nostalgia, but at what we need our high streets to look like in future.
Peter Fortune (Bromley and Biggin Hill) (Con)
It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mr Dowd. I thank the hon. Member for Derby South (Baggy Shanker) for securing this important debate. The Government promised to strengthen neighbourhood policing. We have heard many well-intentioned but sadly empty words from Labour Members as their actions in London fall far short of the mark. Nowhere did they tell Londoners during the mayoral or general elections that they would cut £260 million from London’s police service, and yet that is exactly what they are doing.
Bromley might be one of the safest boroughs in London, but our town centres and villages still face acute policing challenges, from antisocial behaviour and shoplifting to car theft and burglary. We are simply not receiving the policing resources our community needs to tackle the issues. Together with the £22 million funding cut for Bromley council, my constituents in Bromley and Biggin Hill are being unfairly punished by this callous Government. As part of Mayor Khan’s sweeping cuts to the Metropolitan police, he is closing all but two of the 24-hour police counters across London. In doing so, he is breaking his manifesto promise to retain at least one 24-hour front counter in each borough—just as, incidentally, he is breaking his promise to protect the green belt. Bromley, despite being a major town centre with a busy nightlife, is one of the areas set to lose its round-the-clock police station service. On the evening of 23 March, lights will be turned off at Bromley’s police station. It will be a huge blow for public safety, further undermining confidence in the Met and hindering our brave police officers from doing what they do best, which is keeping our people safe.
Regardless of the outcome of any changes, I will keep fighting this closure all the way. If we do not stand up and say, “Enough is enough,” Sadiq Khan will break more manifesto promises and come back for even bigger cuts to policing in Bromley. It is clear that our town and city centres are not safe under Labour.
Graeme Downie (Dunfermline and Dollar) (Lab)
It is a pleasure to serve under your chairship, Mr Dowd. Last Friday I was at a roundtable with local businesses, creative organisations and city centre groups in Dunfermline to discuss the safety of the town centre and how we can make Dunfermline a prosperous city in the future. What struck me was the unanimity of experience: people love their city and are committed to its future, but they feel that too much of the burden of improvement is falling on them, rather than being supported by different levels of Government.
Those at the roundtable spoke about day-to-day frustrations that shape how safe a city feels: graffiti that is not cleaned; broken cobbles left unrepaired; street furniture that has seen better days, and a lack of accessible parking, which makes the city centre more difficult for disabled residents. I also heard examples of vandalism and shop break-ins not being meaningfully followed up. Here we come to one of the key responsibilities devolved to the SNP Scottish Government: policing.
While frontline officers in Dunfermline and across Fife work incredibly hard, they are operating under sustained pressure from years of cuts, centralisation and under-investment. Dunfermline, with its heritage and potential future, has not received the kind of long-term planning and investment that it deserves from the Government at Holyrood, and that is also true of wider investment in Scotland’s towns and cities.
What was striking at the roundtable, however, was a sense of optimism—from places such as Café Wynd, Veneno Music Store and Caledonian Craft Beer Merchant, there was a clear pride in what Dunfermline has to offer. While many of the policy levers for direct intervention in the future success of Dunfermline lie in Holyrood, there are actions that the UK Government could and should take.
I hope the UK Government will consider Dunfermline as a pilot area for trialling any kind of tax incentives, which small businesses are calling for to support creation and innovation in town centres. We need a shared vision between the UK and Scottish Governments, Fife council and local businesses to deliver that future. Dunfermline has talent, ambition and enormous potential, and with the right support across both Scotland’s Governments, and a clear, shared and deliverable vision, it can become a leading example of how to build a safe, thriving and modern city centre in the 21st century.
Paulette Hamilton (Birmingham Erdington) (Lab)
It is a pleasure to serve under your chairship, Mr Dowd. I thank my hon. Friend the Member for Derby South (Baggy Shanker) for securing this important debate. In my constituency, our local town centres are the beating heart of community life. Whether that is Erdington High Street, Slade Road, or Kingstanding shopping precinct on the Hawthorn Road, these hubs are vital to our local economy, culture and sense of belonging.
When I was first elected, Erdington High Street recorded some of the highest levels of crime in Birmingham. Working closely with West Midlands police and our police and crime commissioner, we secured £880,000 from the proceeds of crime fund to launch Operation Fearless. Through that initiative, officers have made substantial arrests for violence, theft and drug offences, seized dangerous weapons, and helped restore a sense of safety and order to the high street, showing that effective, sustained policing can make a real difference.
I urge the Minister to continue working closely with police forces, local authorities and community partners to support proven initiatives such as Operation Fearless, which demonstrate that sustained, community-focused policing can turn around our high streets, making them safe, welcoming and vibrant places at the heart of our communities.
Laura Kyrke-Smith (Aylesbury) (Lab)
It is a pleasure to serve under your chairship, Mr Dowd. Aylesbury has much to offer and huge potential, but we will fulfil that potential only if people feel safe when they are in town. Our police do a really good job, as do wonderful organisations such as Street Angels, but we have got to be honest about the challenges, of which I will briefly mention three.
First, the threats faced by our retail workers have surged in recent years. I met the assistant manager at one of the retailers at the shopping park in Aylesbury, and she showed me harrowing footage from her bodycam during a recent shoplifting incident. She kept remarkably calm and professional, but she was dealing with not just one individual, but a whole crowd of shoplifters who threatened her, surged the exit to the store and attacked her physically as well as verbally before making a dash for it.
That is far from the only time this has happened recently, and no retail worker should ever have to deal with that. I support the measures in the Government’s Crime and Policing Bill, which will introduce a new standalone offence of assaulting a retail worker, but I would like to hear more from the Minister about that.
Secondly, I want to highlight the persistent antisocial behaviour we see in our town. I met representatives from our local Pubwatch group, who described the antisocial behaviour that deters paying customers from coming into their premises. I hear from women in particular who say they do not feel safe walking down certain streets at night. I know that the Crime and Policing Bill includes measures to address this, such as the introduction of new respect orders, but I would be grateful if the Minister shared more about plans to continue tackling that blight on our town centres.
Thirdly, I want to make a point about root causes. While it is right that we tackle these threats to safety in our towns, we will not get far without also looking at what is behind them. We know that antisocial behaviour is often linked to drug and alcohol use, but it is also driven by lack of opportunity and hope. In my view, measures such as the Government’s youth strategy, which sets out a long-term plan to invest in safe spaces and opportunities for young people, will ultimately reduce the incentives for people to get into the kinds of activities that make our town centres unsafe, and instead give people a sense of hope and opportunity. I would like to hear more from the Minister on that.
Harpreet Uppal (Huddersfield) (Lab)
It is a pleasure to serve under your chairship, Mr Dowd. I congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for Derby South (Baggy Shanker) on securing this important debate. Huddersfield is my home town, and I am so proud of it. Regeneration is on its way, including investments in Our Cultural Heart, the George hotel, the TransPennine route upgrade and the national health innovation campus at Huddersfield University.
Those investments are important because, like many towns across the north of England, Huddersfield has faced decades-long challenges from under-investment in our communities and town centres. That can be seen in the visible decline of our high streets, the increase in vape shops and stores dealing in counterfeit items—many of which are propped up by organised criminal networks—and in the drop in visible policing and growing concerns about public safety.
It is also apparent in the feeling that institutions, agencies and Governments have let our areas down, and in the lack of trust in us to deliver. On a recent visit to Kirklees college, one of the key concerns raised by students was safety and the perception of safety in the town centre. Those concerns have been echoed in my meetings with town centre business owners and in contacts with residents at coffee mornings.
I am proud to have stood on a manifesto that committed to supporting town centres, and we have seen that in the commitment to neighbourhood policing, which includes 12 additional officers in Huddersfield town centre. The Home Secretary announced plans to reform policing last week, which included the creation of a new police force to tackle serious crime and further restore neighbourhood policing. Those measures are all important, but will the Minister set out how we will tackle organised crime and county lines networks, and give us an update on the role of violence reduction units in providing youth-focused prevention networks in Huddersfield? More importantly, we must ensure that we continue to invest in young people. Investing in young people, alongside increasing policing and levels of infrastructure, is really important for our town centres.
Jack Abbott (Ipswich) (Lab/Co-op)
It is a pleasure to serve under your chairship, Mr Dowd. I thank my hon. Friend the Member for Derby South (Baggy Shanker) for securing this important debate.
This issue comes up repeatedly with my local residents, who want to feel safe in our town—whether that is walking, shopping, eating or enjoying public spaces. Women and girls should feel safe at night. Families should be able to enjoy our town centre free from the fear of antisocial behaviour. As has already been mentioned, shop workers should not have the threat of retail crime hanging over them. I am really pleased that, after years of campaigning by the Co-operative party, that was included as a standalone offence in the Crime and Policing Bill.
We have made real progress in Ipswich over the past couple of years through a combination of Government initiatives in partnership with our hard-working police force. For example, the Clear, Hold, Build initiative has removed weapons and drugs from our streets, led to over 100 arrests, and resulted in charges and convictions totalling nearly 43 years. Other initiatives, such as Operation Spotlight over the summer, meant that police spent more than 1,700 extra hours patrolling the town centre in July and August, so there is real progress. We have seen crime fall in the last few years by 13%. I look forward to further legislation, which will make it much easier for councils to bring empty shops back into use and protect our high streets from unwanted businesses. There has been real progress in tackling some of those problems.
Although tackling crime is absolutely a priority, we cannot arrest our way out of the problems that we see on our high streets. That is why we are working hard in Ipswich to bring good, well-paid and secure jobs to the town. Whether it is at Sizewell C or Halo, hundreds of jobs will be created, and we are increasing footfall in our town centre—it has increased by 15%—by attracting people in. We are making progress, but there is much more to do. I thank the Government, and look forward to the Minister’s comments.
Lizzi Collinge (Morecambe and Lunesdale) (Lab)
It is a pleasure to serve under your chairship, Mr Dowd. I want my constituency, where beauty surrounds and health abounds, to be a place where everyone feels safe on the high street. There is still work to be done, but I am committed to doing that work alongside our local partners.
Central to that is the Government’s plan to put 13,000 additional police officers, PCSOs and special constables into neighbourhood roles by 2029. Those officers will be embedded in our communities, building relationships, preventing crime and responding quickly when crime occurs. Locally, there are some fantastic initiatives such as Safe Morecambe, which brings together the police, the business improvement district, the local authority, the community safety partnership and my office. Through funding from the police and crime commissioner, we are putting in place a street warden to help reassure residents further.
A key part of making our streets and town centres safe will be tackling the antisocial behaviour that people suffer, from vandalism to noise, and drug use to harassment. Those are the everyday issues that really upset people, quite rightly. To combat that, the Labour Government are bringing in respect orders, and local authorities are getting powers to issue higher fines and to seize those damned bikes and get them off the road. We are also cracking down on shoplifting and violence against retail staff. It is horrendous that people are going to work in fear of being assaulted.
However, it is not all doom and gloom. There have been some real successes in London under Mayor Sadiq Khan, where crime is at its lowest level since comparative records began. This shows that it can work.
Luke Taylor (Sutton and Cheam) (LD)
Does the hon. Member acknowledge that total crime figures are actually up over the last 15 years in London—from 87.1 crimes per thousand people in 2023-24 to 106.4 in 2024-25? Is she happy to correct the record and say that overall crime levels in London are up under Sadiq Khan?
Lizzi Collinge
I would welcome the hon. Gentleman sending me those statistics, but they go against all the other pieces of evidence I have seen, particularly for serious crime. Obviously there are spikes in particular crimes. Phone theft, for example, has been a real problem in London, as it has been elsewhere because they are now very high-value items. Online crime, as I discussed with one of my hon. Friends earlier, is becoming more prolific—people are being scammed and defrauded. The nature of crime has changed. I am very happy to look at all the evidence. All the evidence I have seen shows that serious crime in London is going down, and that is the result of co-ordinated policing efforts and public health measures because, in some respects, crime is a public health problem.
Visible policing, backed by good community relations and street-level intelligence, can work. It reassures communities and deters crime. That is the approach we need in Morecambe and Lunesdale and across the country—neighbourhood policing, targeted funding and practical local initiatives, such as Safe Morecambe, together with national action, such as the creation of a specific offence for an assault on a retail worker. We owe it to all our constituents and communities to make sure they feel safe in our town centres.
Margaret Mullane (Dagenham and Rainham) (Lab)
It is an honour to be here under your chairmanship, Mr Dowd. I thank my hon. Friend the Member for Derby South (Baggy Shanker) for securing this debate. Many of my constituents are in regular contact with me about safety in their town centres and local high streets. If criminals are allowed to prevail, law abiding residents feel unsafe and are deterred from popping to their high street and town centre. That adds to the deterioration of our high streets and town centres, which have already had 14 years of Tory austerity to help that process along.
Closed shops, rubbish piling up and an over-concentration of vape shops, barbers and betting shops hardly encourage visits to our communities. High streets and town centre shops matter: we build relationships with our shops and community spaces. Unless the police are given greater resources to tackle shoplifting in places such as Dagenham and Rainham, my residents will be put off visiting the shops. I welcome the Pride in Place funding for Barking and Dagenham, but what we need to focus on—this is a big issue in my constituency—is that when criminals feel that they can get away with shoplifting, crime escalates. In Elm Park in my constituency, one shopworker was assaulted. When the criminals could not get what they wanted without paying in one shop, they ran into another, stole its cash and assaulted the shopworker. The human cost is terrible: that worker was traumatised.
Without a doubt, we all enjoy shopping online, but equally, we take joy in popping out and visiting our local shops. Local authorities should think about local start-up businesses with short leases, look at the areas where great things work and share best practice. The Government will give councils the power to say no to businesses that do not enhance their area. I heard my right hon. Friend the Secretary of State for Housing, Communities and Local Government give a sterling defence of our town centres and high streets on Sunday. I welcome that renewed focus from the Government and hope that we start to see the investment that is much needed for our high streets to thrive again.
Michelle Welsh (Sherwood Forest) (Lab)
It is an honour to serve under your chairmanship, Mr Dowd. I thank my hon. Friend the Member for Derby South (Baggy Shanker) for securing this debate.
Town and city centres are the beating hearts of our communities. They are places where people come together to meet friends and family, and to complete daily tasks such as nipping to the Post Office or getting their weekly shop. They are places that help to combat loneliness and, at a time when society can feel so divided, they show that we have lots in common with each other. Places such as Dayus gift shop, Spelt & Rye and Cassidy’s are local businesses that represent the best of our towns, and places such as Hucknall and Ollerton represent the very finest of Nottinghamshire.
In my constituency, local businesses care about their community, but there is a dark side to our town centres that makes them feel unsafe to those for whom they are also a lifeline. Shoplifting has sadly become rampant in parts of my constituency such as Hucknall, where many local businesses have faced violent attacks from offenders who are often known to them and have targeted the same stores over and over again. What links much of this criminal activity is addiction, whether that is to alcohol or drugs—or perhaps even both. Ashfield police do an incredible job and are highly efficient, but sadly the criminals go back to those businesses again and again once they are released. Without intervention from across Government Departments, the system will continue to allow offenders to repeat these attacks, all while harming businesses on high streets and making residents feel unsafe.
Health has an important role to play. Years of local support services were absolutely decimated by the previous Government, which has left a gap in our communities and affected local businesses. Pride goes two ways, and for too long the previous Conservative Government let Sherwood Forest down. Enough is enough. I am proud that this Government are investing in communities long neglected by the Tories. By tackling shoplifting and antisocial behaviour through early intervention, tackling root causes and improving infrastructure to suit the needs of communities, we can make town centres safer.
Rachael Maskell (York Central) (Lab/Co-op)
Thank you for your chairmanship, Mr Dowd. I thank my hon. Friend the Member for Derby South (Baggy Shanker) for securing the debate. York may have a purple flag, but the feeling of security is certainly not spread across my community. There are particular areas of crime where we have great concerns, such as bike and shop theft—I welcome the measures that the Government are taking on that—and personal safety across our city.
We have already heard about the challenges people face with substance misuse. We have to drive that public health model to ensure that there are safe places people can use, and that they get the help and public health support that they need. We also need to go upstream and ensure that we are addressing the waves of county lines, which come into the city of York and cause much disturbance. We must ensure that we have early intervention and a seamless approach to youth services in our city. I called two meetings—
Lola McEvoy (Darlington) (Lab)
My hon. Friend is making a great speech, outlining the need for more youth services. In Darlington, I have called for the council to apply a public spaces protection order, which would allow them to remove balaclava-wearing people who commit anti-social behaviour. We are seeing an escalation in such activity from young people, who are trying to be “the big man” in the town and wearing balaclavas to hide their identity from the police. What is her view on that?
Rachael Maskell
I thank my hon. Friend for all the work she is doing in Darlington. Clearly, PSPOs can be used in a really powerful way to create safer spaces in our town and city centres.
I called two meetings in York, one for the night-time economy in the city and one for the daytime economy, because they operate in very different ways. I called together all the agencies involved to examine, first, where the strategies for the two economies can be co-ordinated and come together, and, secondly, the specific issues for each economy.
The issue that came to the fore was CCTV and ensuring that there is a proper strategy for it, including making sure that cameras are switched on, are in the right places and are of the right resolution, so that we can identify crime. I am working with agencies across our city to ensure that we have proper CCTV protection. I am also looking at how we can ensure there is co-ordination across the different agencies that work in our city, which is really important.
However, the words that come to the fore so often are that we need more bobbies on the beat. We need more police on our streets, and there is also an issue with the funding formula for policing. When I spoke to our deputy mayor for police and crime, they highlighted the real challenges in areas such as North Yorkshire, which is a huge rural area with crime hotspots in our urban spaces. I ask the Minister to look at that funding formula again.
Let me briefly mention Unite’s important campaign, Get Me Home Safely—I declare my interest as regards Unite. We need to ensure that our taxis are safer. I want to ask the Minister what has happened since Casey’s recommendation on changing taxi licensing regimes. We operate a safe taxi licensing process in York. We want to ensure that there is such a process in the city, and that we have the resources to control and monitor it. Will she also consider how we can protect our transport staff? I know that the RMT has campaigned hard for that, because it is so important.
In closing, I thank all the agencies that keep our city safe.
Naushabah Khan (Gillingham and Rainham) (Lab)
It is a pleasure, Mr Dowd, to speak under your chairship.
Our town centres are the heart of our communities. They give our towns identity and define how we interact with where we live. However, it is that very interaction that means people also need to feel safe, secure and welcome in town centres. That is certainly true in my constituency and in my home town of Gillingham, where the high street has become a visible sign of decline. Unfortunately, we are plagued by antisocial behaviour, graffiti, drug activity and knife crime.
Our brilliant local police officers—Marcus, Matt and Issy—do a fantastic job in visibly patrolling our town centre, which shows the difference that community policing can make, but the fact remains that Gillingham town centre is in the top national decile for crime and residents just do not feel safe. That did not just happen overnight. It comes after chronic underinvestment by the former Conservative council and the damaging impacts of austerity under the former Government, which left Gillingham forgotten.
My town centre is a reflection of how reduced civic investment has changed the character and feel of town centres. Despite that, I have hope for the future, because there are opportunities for change. The announcement of the Pride in Place scheme by the Government is a significant step in the right direction.
Additionally, in partnership with Medway Council I have established a taskforce that adopts a multi-agency approach, working with the police, local councillors and other stakeholders to address the challenges that we face. Off the back of that work, we have launched the Love Gillingham initiative, convening a community panel of residents, stakeholders and businesses who have the same passion and vision for their town centre. I would argue such a holistic community-centred approach, which is also tough on crime and tough on the causes of crime, is needed, alongside national Government interventions, to truly ensure that our town centres across the country are safer and more vibrant.
Dr Scott Arthur (Edinburgh South West) (Lab)
In October last year, I ran a community meeting in partnership with Catriona Munro, who is Labour’s candidate for Holyrood in the Edinburgh South Western constituency. One of the key things that was brought up was the activity of food delivery companies. At the heart of this activity is what some would call a precarious business model, based on precarious work, which essentially exploits these workers and encourages them to drive illegal e-bikes in quite a reckless manner. In November last year, outside my constituency office, the police managed to impound 13 of these e-bikes. Just imagine what they could do if they were fully funded.
Lola McEvoy
My hon. Friend is eloquently making a point about the funding given to the police to eradicate e-bike crime. Does he agree that we would be in a better position if we had more bobbies on bikes? Perhaps the Minister will talk about that in her speech.
Peter Dowd (in the Chair)
Order. We do not have very much longer. I want to get other Members in, and the Minister and the Opposition spokespeople need the opportunity to speak. I am not telling the hon. Gentleman not to take interventions, but I will end up cutting somebody out of the debate if he does.
Dr Arthur
Thank you, Mr Dowd. I appreciate that guidance.
We absolutely need more police, but unfortunately their budget was cut in Scotland last year, which has made their job even harder. I recently wrote to Deliveroo, Uber Eats and Just Eat. They track their riders’ every move, and they say that despite knowing where they are all the time, they cannot use their apps to track their speeds and whether they are riding recklessly unless I know the order number for the thing that is being delivered. I find that absolutely incredible. I have, however, been offered a place on the Deliveroo rider training course—it will be interesting to see what that comprises. It is really disappointing that the companies are not taking more ownership of the problem.
I approached the Minister for road safety, my hon. Friend the Member for Nottingham South (Lilian Greenwood), and she confirmed that the Government will launch a national work-related road safety charter. I really hope the food delivery companies engage with it constructively, but I have my doubts that it will change matters on the ground. Recklessness and exploitation of their workers is fundamental to those companies’ business model, and we need to address that. I hope the Government will legislate if the companies do not step up.
It was said earlier that the Government must take seriously their powers to manage the import and sale of these illegal bikes, and I agree. I find it absolutely incredible that people can buy them given that, in most of our constituencies, there is nowhere that they can ride them. I hope the Minister will address that point too.
Jodie Gosling (Nuneaton) (Lab)
It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mr Dowd. I thank my hon. Friend the Member for Derby South (Baggy Shanker) for securing this debate.
Nuneaton town centre, like many of our town centres, used to be a source of pride. Our vibrant markets stretched all the way through town, down Queens Road, through market square and back down Abbey Street. Every shop was full, bustling with shoppers. Over the past decade, like many of our town centres, it has taken a hammering and has suffered significant decline. Shops have been boarded up, and the market has been reduced to an echo of its former self. Crime—shoplifting, serious organised crime, drugs and antisocial behaviour—has become commonplace.
A few years ago, my teenager—like many parents’ teenagers—was in town on a Saturday, and a Facebook post popped up showing police cordons around the town centre, with a flippant comment, “Nunny got a bit stabby”. It culminated in the tragic and fatal stabbing of one of our local lads, a gentle giant, Tom Ellis, in June 2024.
Since my election, I have been driven to change the future of Nuneaton town centre, alongside the ambitious Labour council, and we are progressing rapidly with transformation work. The market is growing back, and in March our transformation project, Grayson Place, will be completed. We await the opening of food halls, college campuses, event spaces and the first championship padel centre.
I have made it my priority to meet senior officers from our local safer neighbourhoods team, walk the town, and talk to businesses, market stall traders and shoppers. I welcome the return of our designated town centre officer. I also welcome the investment of £1.5 million from the Government’s Pride in Place impact fund for our town centre, alongside £1.4 million in neighbourhood funding. We are working together with organisations such as the police, the business improvement district, our town centre wardens and our brilliant councillors, such as Councillor Nicky King, to co-ordinate the approach and rescue our town centre.
Jessica Toale (Bournemouth West) (Lab)
It is a pleasure to speak under your chairmanship, Mr Dowd. Tackling crime and antisocial behaviour has been a priority in my constituency since my election. Countless residents have told me they feel unsafe. Bournemouth faces seasonal pressures, where millions of people visit our beaches and parks during the summer. Last year, we had a slew of negative headlines about chaos, decline and lawlessness, but the crime statistics show a completely different picture. Bournemouth is consistently in the top 20—if not top 10—safest cities, or large towns in our case. Yes, serious incidents occur, but they are trending downwards. Shoplifting is rife. I do not want to minimise that or people’s experience of it, but in my limited time I want to understand why fear feels so real for so many people when crime is relatively low.
I recently met a resident who told me he does not let his 12 and 14-year-old daughters go out after 3 pm or 4 pm in Bournemouth. Yet when they went up to Regent Street he let them wander around and go off shopping on their own. Crime rates in Bournemouth are 16% lower than the national average. They are 130% higher in Westminster—an area that has 8% of London’s crime. I do not say that to minimise or to denigrate Westminster, but safety is not only about where the crime happens; it is also about whether the shops are filled and the streets busy, clean and looked after, and about confidence and pride, and feeling reassured and protected.
Since my election I have been relentlessly focused on funding for our police, with £1 million for hotspot policing over the summer, 40 new officers for Dorset police, and it is why I relentlessly bang on to the Minister about the funding formula. Safety was a key theme of our Bournemouth town centre citizens’ panel. The panel called for four things: a co-ordinated women’s safety initiative, improved co-ordination of positive safety initiatives, awareness of CCTV effectiveness, and a lighting audit to highlight low and high lighting areas in the town. These sit alongside actions designed to improve the public realm, spur regeneration, fill our streets and restore civic pride. I will certainly be playing my part in all of these.
Phil Brickell (Bolton West) (Lab)
It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mr Dowd. Let me start by thanking Westhoughton South councillor John McHugh for his campaigning for measures to tackle antisocial behaviour in Westhoughton, to give residents and firms the confidence they need to go about their business. John has worked extensively with me and with Greater Manchester police, and many of his efforts are not publicly commended but they should be.
Our town centres are the hearts of our communities, which is why I welcome the Government’s new Pride in Place funding for Bolton West. But regeneration, whether in Bolton or Blackrod, Horwich or Westhoughton, will only succeed if we resolutely confront one of the biggest threats to our town centres—high street economic crime. In towns across this country, cash-intensive businesses are being used to launder criminal money, evade tax and undercut legitimate traders. These acts are not victimless. They are predatory. They enable organised crime and drug dealing, drain the public finances, and drive honest businesses out. That is why the Government’s safer streets mission must include tackling economic crime. If there is one thing I know after tackling bribery and corruption for more than a decade, it is that if we want safer streets, we must follow the money.
It is not just an issue of putting more police officers on the streets. Having met officers from Greater Manchester police’s economic crime unit, it is clear to me that any lasting efforts to address and increase safety in our towns must also rely on provision for specialist financial investigators within the police, to go after the same criminal actors who feed off our high streets, carrying out their business in plain sight. I welcome the Government’s decision in the latest Budget to establish a high street criminality taskforce, but for it to work, high street economic crime must be treated as a systemic national threat, with regeneration funding aligned to enforcement. That has to include stronger licensing and registration in high-risk sectors and tougher action against phoenix companies and against serial non-payment of tax and business rates. We can look to what the Dutch have done with their Bibob Act, which has set the way on tackling high street money laundering and been very effective over the years. We also need to see far better data sharing between different trading standards teams, His Majesty’s Revenue and Customs, Companies House, the police, and local authorities.
John Slinger (Rugby) (Lab)
It is a pleasure to serve under your chairship, Mr Dowd. I will make two brief points—one per minute. The first is around Rugby town centre and how the police officers, community wardens and BID rangers all work together to ensure that it is safe. Will the Minister look at whether borough or district council-run community wardens can play a really powerful role in defeating antisocial behaviour and criminality at the sub-policing level?
My second point is about children and young people carrying out antisocial behaviour and criminality in our town centres. There was a recent case in Rugby in which the police made several arrests of young people for antisocial behaviour and criminality. Those officers made every possible effort to work collaboratively across agencies to avoid going down the criminal route with arrests. In some circumstances, however, it is sadly necessary to make arrests, particularly when members of the public, visitors, businesses and others are badly affected.
Will the Minister set out her thoughts on the Government’s approach to antisocial behaviour and criminality among young people, given that the respect orders in the Crime and Policing Bill apply only to people over 16? That potentially leaves a gap for powers available to police and others in that regard. We need to ensure there is no lawlessness on our streets. Irrespective of the age of the perpetrator, we do everything we can to avoid arrests, but we must ensure that police have the powers they need.
Peter Dowd (in the Chair)
That was the final Back-Bench speech. With the forbearance of those on the Front Bench, I wanted to get in all hon. Members, given the importance of and interest shown in the debate. I would be grateful if they would bear that in mind in their responses. I call Luke Taylor, the Liberal Democrat spokesperson.
Luke Taylor (Sutton and Cheam) (LD)
Thank you, Mr Dowd. I also thank the hon. Member for Derby South (Baggy Shanker) for calling this important debate. No one can live freely live under the fear of crime. Across London and in boroughs such as mine in Sutton, that freedom begins and ends with residents feeling safe to use their town centres and high streets. It is where people come together and shop, and in this day and age, it is one of the last truly public spaces left.
When our constituents cannot see police on their high streets, they do not feel protected and are left feeling powerless. Their sense of security slips and changes how they live their daily lives. High street footfall drops, shops close earlier, parents worry, and women are forced to plan their routes home with keys clenched in their fists. Londoners should feel safe in their everyday routines without being threatened by an illegal e-bike tearing across the pavement, the fear of their phone being snatched from their hand, or being forced to put up with antisocial, disrespectful behaviour.
Let me be clear: no matter what certain right-wing politicians say—fortunately, they are absent today—London is largely a safe city. Figures for serious crime in the capital are falling, which should be celebrated. The murder rate is at the lowest level in London since 2014 and violent crime in the city is down by 12% compared with 2024, though up by around 30% in 10 years.
Improving figures for the most serious crimes contrasts with an increase in more visible crimes such as shoplifting, up 19% in London this year. The same is tragically true for sexual assaults, which are up by more than 10,000 in a decade, from 16,100 in 2016 to 26,800 in 2025. All crime reporting in London is up from 87.1 per thousand in 2016 to 106.4 in 2025, all under Mayor Khan’s watch and Government funding deals decided by Conservative Ministers.
Those are sobering reminders that crimes that make life miserable—or, in the case of sexual assault, terrifying—are up despite the positive headlines. The lived experience of my constituents tells a far more uncomfortable story than the picture that the mayor and the Government want to paint. It is particularly heartbreaking for women and girls, who have faced under-reported violence on our streets for decades and had hoped that, as society finally begins to shine a spotlight on gendered violence, visible and proactive policing would finally rise to meet the challenge. Instead, they have to bear witness to the erosions of such policing.
Between 2015 and 2025, the number of Metropolitan police officers stayed almost static at around 32,000 full- time equivalents. As our cities become more complex, new crimes and dangers have developed and the population has grown by more than 500,000 people, the Metropolitan police has not. Just last year, under Sadiq Khan’s leadership and a Labour Government, the Metropolitan police lost more than 1,400 officers and staff—a cut of over 4%.
I expect the Minister will talk about decisions made by some of my predecessors up to 16 years ago as a reason for Labour’s failure properly to fund the Met this year, but the responsibility sits squarely on the shoulders of a Labour Government and a Labour mayor. For Londoners, those cuts are a kick in the teeth. Police officers should not seem a novelty. They should be spotted on the street and not thought unusual.
Luke Taylor
I genuinely thank the hon. Member for his contribution; he must have read my next paragraph.
CCTV cameras and facial recognition tech watching and monitoring us going about our business cannot replace a friendly face with a welcoming smile and advice on getting assistance for a lost phone or mislaid keys. I fear that as funding for the Metropolitan police continues to be stretched thinner and thinner, that reassurance will begin to all but disappear. Having walked the streets of Sutton with my local police unit, I have seen at first hand the strain caused by falling officer numbers. My high street team has been cut from 11 to four. They are doing extraordinary work, but they are being asked to cover more ground and respond to more incidents with fewer colleagues by their side.
Sometimes I fear that there is a dangerous strain of make-believe in this debate: the belief that police capacity can grow without the financial backing to support it. No one has been clearer about that than the Metropolitan police commander, Sir Mark Rowley. Last year he warned of severe consequences as the Met faced a £260 million funding gap. Even after emergency support reduced a much larger deficit, the pressures have not gone away, and policing capability in the capital continues to be eroded as we speak. Within the Met’s specialist teams, the flying squad, firearms teams and the Royal Parks police are all set to be cut, to say nothing of school liaison officers, who do some of the most important work in restoring and embedding trust in the police in the next generation and stopping the dangerous spread of youth violence at its root. Those units form the backbone of serious crime prevention in our capital.
In recent weeks, we have been told that structural reforms will save the day. There have been proposals for mergers to create mega-forces, which apparently will do more for less. Police reform without proper funding is not fixing the problem; at best, it is delaying it and at worst, it is putting greater pressure on the cracks that are already showing. The changes set out in the police reform White Paper must be done right. I want to press the Minister for clarity on what the reforms will mean, particularly for the Metropolitan police.
At a time when visible policing is so hard to achieve, we would expect priority to be given to those last vestiges of accessible law enforcement—police front counters. But no: having already lost police officers and stations and with a £260 million shortfall to plug, Londoners are now being asked to stomach the closure of counters across the city, leaving most of London a police access desert. The 12 complete closures and the loss of 24-hour counters in 25 other locations touch every part of London. A 24/7 counter in every borough gone—another broken promise from Mayor Khan.
When those counters close, people lose the sense that police officers are present and accessible in their community. We can all see and agree on that, so it beggars belief that just last week, both Labour and Green assembly members voted against Lib Dem proposals for a funded moratorium on these closures. How can they expect Londoners to put their trust in them if they will not back us on this most basic of campaigns? The Liberal Democrats across London are calling not just for this to be stopped, but for more properly funded police front desks in every community based in local hubs such as libraries, shopping centres and town halls. That would allow people to report crimes and share information with the police face-to-face in convenient locations.
To conclude, I simply ask the Minister this: when can our police forces expect to see the investment they deserve? What assessment are the Government making on an ongoing basis of the impact of below-inflation funding increases on the viability of community policing? Why, when the Government claim to want to restore community policing, will they not intervene when their own party’s mayor is driving policing in the opposite direction in the capital?
Matt Vickers (Stockton West) (Con)
It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mr Dowd. I thank the hon. Member for Derby South (Baggy Shanker) for securing this important debate.
Town and city centres are the lifeblood of our local communities. They are crucial for people, local businesses and our economy, yet under this Labour Government it increasingly feels as though our town and city centres are being not supported but attacked—attacked by a jobs tax that raises the cost of employing people, by surging business rates that punish employers and enterprise, and by relentless pressure on pubs and small businesses, the very places that make our high streets sociable, welcoming and safe. The result is plain to see: businesses are closing. And when businesses are closing, confidence drains away.
Thriving town centres are not just about economics; they are about safety. Communities with busy, successful high streets are more likely to report crime, look out for one another and defend what they value. That brings me—
Matt Vickers
That brings me to Stockton, which has a great high street and incredible local businesses. I always encourage people to support Stockton, but I would be negligent in my duty if I did not acknowledge the challenges it faces—challenges that did not arrive overnight. Over decades, Stockton’s Labour council has allowed the town centre to decline and become home to unacceptable levels of crime and antisocial behaviour. When disorder grew, enforcement weakened. When problems became visible, excuses multiplied.
The council’s priorities tell their own story. Instead of employing more civic enforcement officers or street wardens—the people who provide visible reassurance—the council has expanded layers of management on six-figure salaries. It has recently emerged that Stockton-on-Tees borough council spent £15.8 million on recruitment consultants in just three years. Money that could have gone into keeping the town centre safe was instead swallowed up by consultants and questionable spending decisions. Councils have a duty to spend public money wisely, and in Stockton that duty has too often been neglected.
At the same time, instead of using all the powers available through public space protection orders to clamp down on antisocial behaviour, the council’s soft approach has allowed far too much of it to go unchallenged. Worse still, Stockton’s Labour council volunteered itself as an asylum dispersal authority, taking on a completely disproportionate number of asylum seekers. For many years, Stockton has had one of the highest ratios of asylum seekers to residents in the entire country. Those asylum seekers are largely housed near the town centre, placing pressure on accommodation, public services and integration, and leaving large numbers of lone men congregating in the town centre, causing understandable concern for residents and businesses alike.
The situation has been compounded by the council’s permissive approach to housing. It has allowed large numbers of houses in multiple occupation, bedsits and bail accommodation to cluster around the town centre. The result is predictable: people stop visiting, businesses close and crime goes unreported. That creates a doom loop, and Labour councils across the country have perfected it.
What we now see nationally is Stockton scaled up. Since the Labour Government came to power, there are 1,318 fewer police officers on our streets and more than 3,000 fewer people working in policing overall. That is not an accident: it is a choice. Police chiefs warn of a funding shortfall of £500 million. In my local force, the Labour police and crime commissioner says there is a £2.4 million gap—the equivalent of 40 police officers.
Even when offenders are caught, punishment is increasingly optional. Labour’s early release policies mean that criminals are back on the streets sooner—sometimes within weeks—so shopkeepers see the same faces returning, residents see the same behaviour repeated, and police officers see their work unravelled by decisions taken far from their communities. The consequences are clear: shoplifting is rising and the robbery of business property has surged. The Government tell us that crime is under-reported; if that is true, it only strengthens the case for more police, not fewer.
The Government point to measures in the Crime and Policing Bill, but targets mean little if officer numbers are falling. Warm words do not patrol streets. Conservatives believe that safety is not a luxury, but a foundation on which everything else depends. That is why we back our police. That is why we are committed to recruiting 10,000 more officers. That is why we support visible, proactive policing in the places that need it most.
Before the Minister tells us once again that a strategy is in place, may I ask a very simple question? Will she commit today that no police force will lose yet more officers as a result of the Government’s next spending review, or should communities prepare for even fewer police on the streets? That leads me to a second, unavoidable question: does she expect communities to feel safer when there are fewer police, criminals are being released early and Labour councils refuse to use the powers they already have to tackle antisocial behaviour, or is managed decline now official Government policy? Fewer police, early release and unenforced laws are not unfortunate side effects; they are policy choices, and our town centres are paying the price.
The Minister for Policing and Crime (Sarah Jones)
It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mr Dowd. I thank my hon. Friend the Member for Derby South (Baggy Shanker) for his brilliant speech. Apart from anything else, I want to visit the Hairy Dog and see all the wonderful things that are happening in my hon. Friend’s patch. I thank him for telling the story of his very strong community and its resilience in the face of the challenges we all want to overcome.
I want to praise the Members of Parliament who have come to this debate to represent their constituents. We are all reading, with increasing fury, about the behaviours of the former ambassador to the United States, and it is the MPs in this debate who represent the very best of what politics is about. We are in this job because we want to make our streets safer and our communities better, and to bring pride to the people we represent, and that is what Members have done in this debate. The snake oil salesmen, like those from the Reform party, who go on television and tell us we are a crime-ridden nation do not come to these debates to have these discussions. I am afraid they do not have the answers. The MPs who are present to speak up for their constituents and to demand answers, to demand better and to demand more bring out the best of what politics is for and what we are all in this business for.
I also want to speak in praise of our police. I recently met the first responders from the Huntingdon attack. Such bravery is quite extraordinary, and we ask that of our police every day. They go out and face danger, and we should always thank them.
The hon. Members for Sutton and Cheam (Luke Taylor) and for Stockton West (Matt Vickers) seem to forget that as Opposition spokespeople they represent their party and the nation. They spoke mostly about Sutton and Stockport rather than actual national policies. I ask them to think about what their parties have done in previous years. I will take no lessons whatever from the Conservative party, which slashed 20,000 police and then, in a rush to bring them back, put them behind desks. For example, around the country we now have 250 warranted police officers who are working in human resources. We will put police back where they belong: on our streets.
I will give Members a couple of good updates before I tackle some of the challenges we must overcome. First, the knife crime statistics that came out last week show that since this Government came to power knife crime is down 8%. We have taken 60,000 knives off the street, knife murders are down 27% and hospital admissions are down 11%. The Government will not shy away from doing everything we can to tackle serious violence and knife crime. Violence is not inevitable; we will not accept it and we will keep bearing down on it. I thank all those who have played their part in tackling that epidemic.
As so many Members have eloquently said, we know that the epidemic of everyday crime in our communities drives a sense of a lack of safety. I can tell Members that there are now 2,400 more officers in our neighbourhoods than there were when we came to power. There will be 3,000 more by March, and there will be 13,000 more by the end of the Parliament. Our communities are calling out for officers to be in our neighbourhoods tackling crime and doing the things we ask them to do, rather than being burdened by bureaucracy, which we will take away through new technology in our police reforms. Officers and PCSOs are the people who will help us to tackle the epidemic of everyday crime.
Members asked me to respond on many issues, but sadly I do not have the time. It would be remiss of me not to point out to the hon. Member for Bromley and Biggin Hill (Peter Fortune) that London will have 420 extra neighbourhood officers on its streets by March, and has received a £180 million increase in its budget this year.
Many Members talked about retail crime, and we are making changes in the Crime and Policing Bill that will help on that. Through our big summer of action, and the winter of action we have just completed, we have seen real results when there is good working among retailers, police and the charitable organisations that help with, for example, drug addiction, which is a driver of retail crime. My area has seen a substantial reduction in retail crime thanks to the persistent offender approach, whereby we go after those people. Some 80% of retail crime is committed by 20% of offenders, and most of them have a drug addiction of some kind. We have to join the dots and make sure that we give people the treatment they need and that they face up to the crimes they have committed.
Some Members talked about organised crime, and violence reduction units were also mentioned. I am proud to say that we are funding violence reduction units this year to increase their effectiveness. They do an absolutely brilliant job. We of course have to tackle the issues that lie behind the crime and not just the crime itself.
Members talked about what was happening in their constituencies. My hon. Friend the Member for Morecambe and Lunesdale (Lizzi Collinge) talked about the street wardens in Morecambe. Street wardens are an interesting model, as we have seen over the winter.
My hon. Friend the Member for York Central (Rachael Maskell) talked about taxi licensing. I have seen some good work with taxi marshals who help to identify unlicensed taxi drivers and to protect and support women and young girls, who do not feel as safe as we want them to when they are out in our communities.
My hon. Friend the Member for Bolton West (Phil Brickell) talked about economic crime, which we have talked about previously, and he was absolutely right. Many Members talked about the increase in the number of vape shops or other shops that we know are actually laundering money. I know the police are dealing with that—I have been on a raid with them to tackle it—but my hon. Friend is right that more needs to be done.
Members will forgive me for not having looked once at my prepared speech. [Laughter.] The Government are doing many things that are designed to crack down on crime, but I want to end my speech in time for my hon. Friend the Member for Derby South to respond.
I had the honour of meeting the family of Danny, who was murdered in my hon. Friend’s constituency. He wanted me to meet the family, and I did. We all know the horror that crime can cause in our constituencies, whether that is everyday crime or the most horrific crime. The Government will not rest until we have tackled the issues that our constituents put us here to tackle. I thank everyone for taking part in the debate.
Baggy Shanker
It is great to speak under your chairship again, Mr Dowd. I thank all Members for their contributions and interventions. I remind the Lib Dem spokesperson that the UK extends beyond London’s boundaries, and I remind the shadow Minister that the debate was about town and city centre safety—maybe he picked up the wrong notes.
Collectively, we have managed to highlight the serious issues that constituents across the UK want Ministers to hear. I put on the record my thanks to the Minister for meeting the family of Gurvinder Singh Johal, as she did recently, and for her reassurance that the Government have already increased policing numbers by 2,400. I look forward to getting that number to 13,000 during this Parliament, as she says.
Peter Dowd (in the Chair)
I thank everybody for their forbearance—everyone got in to speak—and the Front Benchers for their slightly truncated responses.
Question put and agreed to.
Resolved,
That this House has considered town and city centre safety.
Taxation: Small and Medium-sized Enterprises
(1 day, 10 hours ago)
Westminster HallRead Hansard Text Read Debate Ministerial Extracts
Westminster Hall is an alternative Chamber for MPs to hold debates, named after the adjoining Westminster Hall.
Each debate is chaired by an MP from the Panel of Chairs, rather than the Speaker or Deputy Speaker. A Government Minister will give the final speech, and no votes may be called on the debate topic.
This information is provided by Parallel Parliament and does not comprise part of the offical record
Gregory Stafford (Farnham and Bordon) (Con)
I beg to move,
That this House has considered the impact of taxation on small and medium-sized enterprises.
It is a pleasure as always to serve under your chairmanship, Mr Dowd, and I am grateful to colleagues for attending this debate. Small and medium sized-enterprises are the backbone of our economy. They create jobs, sustain local communities and keep our high streets alive. However, since the autumn Budget 2024, they have been met with higher taxes, higher costs and a Government who appear indifferent to whether they survive at all.
It is almost impossible to know where to start with this debate, given the Government’s complete failure on the economy and sustained neglect of business and enterprise. The Prime Minister speaks the language of growth, but lacks the backbone to take the decisions needed to achieve it. If the debate were simply an exercise in cataloguing failure, we would be here all day. Instead, I will focus on the real-world consequences of that incompetence for the small and medium-sized businesses that keep our economy moving.
In my constituency, I repeatedly hear the same message from business owners about staffing pressures, soaring energy bills and rising financial costs, which in many cases have more than trebled as a direct result of decisions taken by this Government. That is not anecdote; it is reflected clearly in the data. Research from Xero shows just how precarious the situation has become: two in five SMEs do not even know whether they were profitable last month. That is not confidence; that is business flying blind.
Since the 2024 Budget, Labour has made a deliberate political choice to increase the burden on retail, hospitality and leisure. Those are not marginal sectors—they are the lifeblood of our town centres, as major employers and key drivers of local economic activity.
Peter Fortune (Bromley and Biggin Hill) (Con)
Last week I was lucky enough to host a roundtable with some SMEs from Bromley, including the excellent Martin from the Crown and Anchor. They said to me that this Government’s policies, including the jobs tax, are restricting their ability to grow and to hire young people. Would my hon. Friend agree that abolishing business rates would give small businesses the boost that they need to thrive?
Gregory Stafford
I entirely agree with my hon. Friend. Like him, I have held roundtables with hospitality businesses, which are saying the same thing as others: they want to see a cut in business rates. The Conservative pledge to entirely scrap business rates for businesses with bills under £110,000 is the right step and would be welcomed by business. I hope the Minister will take up that idea; good ideas should be taken up by the Government, but they seem to have a problem with doing that.
In mentioning business rates, my hon. Friend reminds me that the Labour party manifesto—which I am sure you read, Mr Dowd—pledged that
“Labour will replace the business rates system, so we can raise the same revenue but in a fairer way.”
That clearly has not happened, because businesses are being hammered.
Rachael Maskell (York Central) (Lab/Co-op)
I am grateful to the hon. Member for securing this debate. I held a business rates summit in my constituency last week, and what came across is that in York we are seeing an average increase in business rates of 35% compared with the national average of 19.4%, so there is a geographical element to this issue too. Does he agree that we need to revise the whole system, not least because a profit-related tax or a turnover tax could bring in more revenue and cost small businesses far less?
Gregory Stafford
I hope the Minister is listening; this is a problem not just for constituencies in the south but across the country. It is not just Conservative or Lib Dem Members raising the issue—clearly Labour Members have the same problem. The Minister should look at all good ideas, but current Treasury orthodoxy is to carry on with what it is doing, and to tax anything that looks like enterprise, business or job creation, which will destroy our economy and harm our high streets.
Jim Shannon (Strangford) (DUP)
I commend the hon. Gentleman for bringing this matter forward, and he is absolutely right to outline this story. To reinforce the point, the Chancellor and the Finance Minister in Northern Ireland have rightly rolled back the proposed enhanced taxation because of its impact on tourism. However, that feels more like a stay of execution than a solution. This is happening everywhere, not just in England but in Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland, to a great degree. Does the hon. Gentleman agree that the number of small uplifts—in rates, national insurance contributions, the price of goods and so on—can no longer be absorbed by knife-edge profit margins, and that unless we stop these tax rises, which is the Government’s responsibility, our local economy will pay a deadly price?
Gregory Stafford
I thank the hon. Member for, as always, bringing his experience from Northern Ireland. That emphasises the point that I was making: this is a whole-country problem. He is absolutely right that we are on a knife edge. We are at a tipping point for our small and medium-sized enterprises, and if they go under, the consequences will be dire. If one wants to speak Treasury speak, that means the Treasury will actually raise less money. The only way that the Treasury will raise more money is by freeing up businesses to expand, grow and employ more people. That is how we will get our economy going, not by taxing every single business until the pips squeak.
I turn now to hospitality, which has been a focus of mine since I was elected. It underpins community life and provides work for young people and for those who rely on flexible hours. Yet the Government slashed retail, hospitality and leisure relief from 75% to 40%—an ideological and damaging decision—which will be followed by eye-watering increases in rateable values from April this year.
UKHospitality data shows that the average pub will see its business rates rise by 15% in the first year, climbing to a 76% increase by year three. At the same time, online and out-of-town competitors are being protected. Distribution warehouses used by online giants will see increases of just 9% in year one and 16% by year three. This is not a level playing field; it is actively tilted against the high street.
The Government’s so-called emergency pubs relief, announced this year, does little to address the scale of the problem. It is a sticking plaster, not a solution. Just one in 20 retail, hospitality and leisure businesses will benefit, and even then the average pub will still be paying £5,700 more in business rates than before.
Business rates are simply not being reduced, and those pressures are compounded by the changes to employer national insurance contributions introduced at the 2024 Budget. For the hospitality sector alone, that amounts to £1 billion every single year. More than 774,000 hospitality workers have been dragged into employer national insurance for the first time, disproportionately affecting part-time staff such as bar workers and waiting staff. Flexible work is being punished. Young workers are being hit hardest, and employing people is becoming more expensive at precisely the wrong moment. That is not pro-growth and it is not pro-work.
VAT policy has also failed small businesses. The £90,000 VAT registration threshold actively discourages growth and creates perverse incentives for firms to cap expansion. The Government have ignored repeated calls for a reduced VAT rate of 12.5% for hospitality, a policy that would support growth, improve competitiveness and align the UK with many of our European neighbours. The refusal to act is holding back an entire sector.
The Parliamentary Private Secretary, the hon. Member for Hitchin (Alistair Strathern), is chuntering from his seat. I am sure he will be able to hold his own debate at some point to tell us all what is going on in his constituency. I suspect that, if he were honest, he would tell us about the impact that his Government’s policies have had on the sector, and how they are absolutely destroying his high street, as they are mine.
These pressures are not theoretical; they are being felt by real businesses across my constituency. For example, at Birdies café in Farnham Park, business rates have increased by 450%—from £290 to £1,600 a month—a change that has already cost the business a member of staff. Energy bills have risen from £300 to £400 a month to £3,500 a month, while rising wage costs and changes to employment law have forced the owner into rolling three-month contracts—a worse outcome for workers, driven entirely by the Government’s pressure and policies. At the Bat and Ball pub, business rates are doubling from £800 to £1,600 a month. Minimum wage changes have added £56,000 a year to its wage bill.
Across my constituency, community businesses such as the Antiques Warehouse, the Packhouse, the Bluebell pub, Serina, the Six Bells, the Healy Group, and Hamilton’s in Farnham; Acorns Coffee, the Dairy, Issaya and Smallworld IT in Bordon; Oliver’s café and wine bar and Davids menswear in Haslemere; Passfield Stores in Passfield; Little Latte in Tilford; the General Wine Company and Stedman Blower in Liphook; and the Greatham Inn in Greatham have all written or spoken to me and are facing the same relentless squeeze from Government tax and regulatory decisions. These are not failing businesses; they are community anchors being priced out by this Government’s policies.
These issues are not confined to hospitality. Yesterday I met representatives of Medicines UK to discuss the impact of Government policy on suppliers of generic medicines. They raised serious concerns about the extended producer responsibility packaging tax. Packaging is obviously mandated by the Medicines and Healthcare products Regulatory Agency for safety reasons, leaving companies with little ability to reduce their tax liability. As a result, costs are either absorbed or passed directly on to the NHS and therefore the taxpayer.
Peter Fortune
I know that my hon. Friend is talking specifically about businesses and enterprises, but on that last point, the decisions taken by the Government are also impacting charitable institutions. Indeed, I have met some in my constituency of Bromley and Biggin Hill that are having to let charitable staff go, which is having a further impact on the NHS.
Gregory Stafford
My hon. Friend is absolutely right. One perverse outcome of the many taxes that the Government have put on is that although the NHS is, rightly, exempt from some of these tax rises, those who operate around the NHS—for example, care homes, hospices and other charitable institutions—are being hit. Even GP surgeries are being hit. This is the nonsense that we are seeing from this Government: people taking policy off the shelf from Treasury civil servants without understanding the real-world impact that it will have on businesses, the charitable sector and, in general, our constituents.
As my hon. Friend suggests, these are taxes on the NHS by another name. Extended producer responsibility sits alongside the VPAG—voluntary scheme for branded medicines pricing, access and growth—levy, which takes 10% to 35% of NHS sales from manufacturers. If the measures are taken together, the Government are heavily taxing lifesaving medicine, often at higher rates than in comparable systems overseas, with clear implications for supply and sustainability.
In my November debate on alcohol duty—which I am sure you read in detail in Hansard, Mr Dowd—I was disappointed by the Exchequer Secretary’s dismissal of the impact of tax rises on hospitality. Since October 2024, 90,000 hospitality jobs have disappeared. If that many jobs had gone from a car plant or an oil refinery, the House would be in uproar, but because it is pubs and cafés, Ministers look the other way. That is a scandal.
Mr Angus MacDonald (Inverness, Skye and West Ross-shire) (LD)
The Scottish Affairs Committee is doing an inquiry into the viability of high streets. We heard from a professor at Glasgow University who specialises in the subject, and he made an extraordinarily convincing case that Amazon is basically being subsidised by the high street—that Amazon is being hugely undertaxed and the high street is being overtaxed. Would the hon. Gentleman support me in asking the Minister to look into that subject and the cost of whether it is actually killing the high street?
Gregory Stafford
The hon. Gentleman makes an interesting point. It would be fairer to see some equity between the online providers and the retailers that are physically on the high street and that have to pay things like business rates. I can see the Minister has heard his point and, I am sure, will respond to it; whether the hon. Gentleman will get the answer that he wants, I am less certain.
To go back to my point, because it is pubs and cafés that jobs are being lost from, Ministers look the other way, which is a scandal. I urge Treasury Ministers to review the cumulative burden placed on small and medium-sized enterprises through tax and regulation. I will take any response from the Minister today directly to the hospitality roundtable that I am hosting this Friday with publicans, restaurateurs and café owners.
I will return to where I began. The Prime Minister talks about growth, but refuses to show the backbone required to deliver it. The Government’s failure on business and enterprise is not abstract; it is written into higher taxes, lost jobs and boarded-up high streets. If Ministers continue to ignore that, we really could spend all day listing the consequences.
With the spending review now replaced by an Office for Budget Responsibility forecast, the Government have eight or perhaps nine months before the next autumn Budget. I urge them to use that time wisely. Boost business; do not blight it. Support SMEs; do not punish them, because when local businesses fail, communities pay the price.
The Exchequer Secretary to the Treasury (Dan Tomlinson)
It is a pleasure to serve under your chairship, Mr Dowd. I am grateful to the hon. Member for Farnham and Bordon (Gregory Stafford) for securing the debate. I believe it is the second debate of his that I have had the pleasure of responding to in Westminster Hall and I look forward to many more in my time as Exchequer Secretary. I am grateful for his contribution, and I am sure the businesses in his constituency will be grateful to him for representing them in this place; it sounds like he has a fantastic set of small and medium-sized enterprises in his constituency.
On the broader point of the impact of this Government on the economy, I believe the hon. Member was being too downbeat and gloomy. We have seen six interest rate cuts since this Government took office because of the stability that we have brought back. That is bringing down borrowing costs for businesses and improving the cost of living for families up and down the country. That means hundreds if not thousands of extra pounds in their bank account rather than going on their mortgage. Economic growth has increased—we outperformed the OBR forecast by 50% last year—and wages have increased across the economy faster in the first year of this Government than in the first 10 years under the Conservatives. Higher wages and better living standards for people in our communities, in his constituency and in mine, mean that there is more money to spend in the shops to support our high streets.
The hon. Member raised a range of policies. I would gently say that some of them were implemented by his Government. For example, the extended producer responsibility for packaging was, I believe, a Michael Gove initiative. The Labour party in opposition learned the lessons of rubbishing the record of a previous Labour Government, and once we stopped doing that we found ourselves re-elected because people put their trust in us. I gently suggest that the Conservatives be careful what they wish for when they criticise policies that the Conservative Government introduced.
The debate follows two Budgets in which the Government did have to ask businesses and individuals to contribute more to support our public services. But we did all we could, particularly in the last Budget, which I was closely involved with in the Treasury, to keep the contribution we were asking for as low as possible by pursuing fair reforms to our tax system that were long overdue. I am happy to go through them in detail, but I will not do so for the sake of time and because it is slightly off topic. Those changes allowed us to provide support for businesses, for example in the business rates system. The main ask of the public was keeping income tax thresholds frozen at the end of the decade for a further three years in addition to the seven years for which the Conservatives decided they would be frozen.
This Government do back and value small and medium-sized enterprises. They are at the heart of so many communities; I am sure they are at the heart of your constituency, Mr Dowd, and those of all Members in this room. We value such businesses, their contribution and the hard work and graft that the people who set them up do to grow them, to expand to multiple premises, and to hire more people. The work that they do is fantastic, really valued and vital to the culture, life and vibrancy of our high streets and communities. Sometimes these small businesses are the only business in a village or a rural community, whether it be a pub, post office or café. We know how important they are to rural and coastal communities.
Mr Angus MacDonald
I have spent a great deal of my life looking at small businesses. There are 4.1 million sole traders or self-employed people in the UK and that £90,000 VAT restriction is a block on building businesses. Were it increased to, say, £250,000 and 10% of those businesses employed people, that would mean 400,000 youngsters in work, and the modelling that I have done shows that His Majesty’s Revenue and Customs would get a lot more money. I would be delighted to go through it with the Minister. If we want real growth from UK micro-organisations, I would really appreciate a chance to meet him to discuss this.
Dan Tomlinson
We do have one of the highest VAT thresholds among large economies in Europe and of course the Government keep all tax policy thresholds, rates and so on under review. I would be interested in the analysis that the hon. Member has carried out, though my understanding is that significantly increasing the threshold would not be revenue generating but would cost revenue for the Exchequer.
This goes to a point that the hon. Member for Farnham and Bordon raised. He suggested that we should almost halve the rate of VAT for some businesses. The challenge and trade-offs that we must grapple with in government are not grappled with by those who want to see such significant cuts to VAT, because we have to make sure we maintain revenue to fund the NHS in the hon Member’s constituency, and fund local councils to fill in the potholes and provide the social care that constituents need.
Mr MacDonald
I met the Institute of Chartered Accountants in England and Wales this morning and am meeting the Federation of Small Businesses later. We have done all the modelling and I assure the Minister that our numbers are being checked out by all the experts. I think that the Government might be missing a trick on this one.
Dan Tomlinson
I am always happy to receive representations from Members on both sides of the House. I will look out for correspondence from the hon. Member in my very large weekend correspondence box, which I always enjoy on a Sunday evening.
Rachael Maskell
It might not have filtered through, but I have written to the Chancellor on behalf of many Labour MPs regarding concerns about small businesses and the fact that many of them will not receive the vital support that they need. They are very fearful of what is going to happen in just eight weeks’ time. Will the Minister look particularly at small businesses, which are not getting the relief and support that they need, and ensure that we are able to mitigate some of that? These businesses form a vital part of the whole economic ecosystem. If they are not growing and are instead shrinking then that will have an impact on our whole economy.
Dan Tomlinson
I thank my hon. Friend for her question and the representation that she provides in this place for the small businesses in her constituency—it is a wonderful part of the world. If my team have not been in touch already today, I am hoping that we can find time to meet next week for a conversation. I know that this issue is one that is really important to her. York is a fantastic, vibrant and growing part of our economy. I expect that some of what is happening here is that the businesses in her constituency have seen their values increase by more than others in parts of the country that have not been doing as well. That is why the Government have provided a range of support for businesses. I look forward to talking about that with her in the coming days.
We are fast running out of time, so let me turn to the topic of business rates, which Members have raised. It is worth noting that we are implementing significant reforms to the system. On the point around large online retailers, as far as I am aware, throughout the whole history of the business rates system—including the 14 years under the previous Government—the multiplier, otherwise known as the tax rate, for large online giants was exactly the same as that paid by a typical business on the high street. As part of fulfilling our manifesto commitment to reform the business rates system, we have introduced a really significant wedge into it: the multiplier for large online giants and their warehouses is now 33% higher than for a high street business.
I am aware, and we have had lots of discussions about it in this place, that that reform—the significant underlying reform to the business rates system—has happened at the same time as the revaluations since the pandemic have come into place, and at the same time as the Government have chosen to unwind, slowly and with significant transitional reliefs, the temporary pandemic support. That issue was raised by the hon. Member for Farnham and Bordon.
When the Conservatives stood for re-election, the OBR forecasts did not earmark any funding whatsoever for continued support within the business rates system for our high streets. The Conservatives say now that they would not have stuck with those plans, but had they done so—and they are the plans that they presented to the country before the election—the relief would have ended overnight in 2025.
Dan Tomlinson
Yes, and we extended the relief by a year, at a lower rate, and now, rather than ending it overnight, we have introduced significant transitional relief, so many of the businesses in the hon. Member’s constituency will see their increases, if they experience increases, being capped at 15%.
Overall, across the system as a whole more than half of businesses are either seeing their bills flat-falling or staying at zero, and this tax change—this 33% wedge that has been introduced to the system—is, in effect, a transfer of almost £1 billion in business rate liabilities away from the high street and towards the largest businesses, which have properties worth £500,000 or more. This transfer will benefit 750,000 smaller properties on our high streets.
Pubs have also been mentioned. We saw 7,000 pubs close over the 14 years between 2010 and 2024. I am aware that pubs, and indeed all hospitality businesses, experienced challenges, particularly in 2022 when inflation surged to 11% as energy costs went up. To be clear, that was in large part a result of Putin’s illegal invasion of Ukraine and the impact it had on the global economy, but inflation did rise significantly, which impacted individuals and their bank balances. The Government understand that times are tough for businesses on the high street, in part because of that legacy.
The hon. Member for Farnham and Bordon mentioned some statistics about pubs that are now out of date because of the change that was introduced last year; the 76% increase is not going to happen any more. In fact, three quarters of pubs, live music venues and other businesses affected by the changes that were announced last week—
Dan Tomlinson
Three quarters will see their business rates fall or stay the same this year. Then, those rates will be frozen for two years. The crucial point, which relates to whether it is delayed or not, is that we are launching a review of the methodology that is used to assess pubs. I am sure that this issue will have come up in the roundtable on business rates organised by my hon. Friend the Member for York Central (Rachael Maskell) with businesses in her constituency, and in the engagement that other Members have with businesses in their constituencies.
Pubs are valued in a relatively distinct way: their takings are used to assess their value, rather than their floor space. That can be quite opaque for pubs. It can also mean that increases in their business rates can appear to be the result of higher takings but really just reflect underlying increases in higher costs, so they can feel like they are running to stand still. We will therefore look closely at the methodology used to value pubs, and hotels, and I hope that we can find a long-term—indeed, permanent—solution in time for the next revaluation, which will come in 2029, as planned.
I will respond briefly to the point that was made about the increase from £800 to £1,600. I urge the hon. Member to check with the particular pub that he mentioned, but I assume it will be the case—each business is different, and I should not comment on individual businesses precisely—that the 15% relief will probably apply there too now, so there should not be a further £800 increase. I note, of course, that there is an increase for that business, as he set out.
We are also publishing a high streets strategy. We will work on that in the coming months and it will be a cross-Government effort. Yes, the Treasury will be involved, but so will Departments such as the Home Office, so that we can support businesses that are struggling with shoplifting. We will also work with the Department for Business and Trade, and with the Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government.
I hope that I have responded to a range of points that were made in the debate, and I thank Members for their contributions to it. In the coming months, in my role as Exchequer Secretary I will of course continue to engage with businesses—small and large—on the important points that have been raised today, to see what more the Government can do to support them as they seek to grow, to support employment in their communities, and to support the life and vibrancy of our high streets and town centres.
Peter Dowd (in the Chair)
I assure the hon. Member for Farnham and Bordon that I read his parliamentary contributions assiduously, side by side with the Labour manifesto—so there.
Question put and agreed to.
Transport in the South-East
(1 day, 10 hours ago)
Westminster HallRead Hansard Text Read Debate Ministerial Extracts
Westminster Hall is an alternative Chamber for MPs to hold debates, named after the adjoining Westminster Hall.
Each debate is chaired by an MP from the Panel of Chairs, rather than the Speaker or Deputy Speaker. A Government Minister will give the final speech, and no votes may be called on the debate topic.
This information is provided by Parallel Parliament and does not comprise part of the offical record
Jess Brown-Fuller (Chichester) (LD)
I beg to move,
That this House has considered transport in the south-east.
It is a pleasure to open this debate under your chairmanship, Sir John. I thank the many hon. Members here who hope to raise transport concerns with the Minister. I know from my experience that transport issues take up a significant proportion of our casework and inboxes. I also thank the constituents who have been in touch with me about transport since the election, particularly in the past few days when I was preparing for this debate.
How we move around our communities affects everybody. It is one of the most regular issues that comes up on doorsteps in and around Chichester. When done correctly, transport systems make people’s lives easier and support thriving local economies. When done badly, it is a noose around the neck of an area that has so much to offer. The south-east has much to be proud of with some impressive pieces of transport infrastructure, vital not only to our communities but to the nation more widely, whether it is the beautiful Ouse valley viaduct, our strategically important airports, the channel tunnel or the admittedly long overdue but now incredibly satisfying M25/A3 junction. I had the pleasure of driving through there at the weekend and enjoyed it immensely.
Mr Tanmanjeet Singh Dhesi (Slough) (Lab)
I congratulate the hon. Member on securing this important debate. As she may know, I have long championed the western rail link to Heathrow, which would enable speedy and sustainable surface access for the good people of the south-east—indeed, 20% of the UK population—without the need to go in and then out of London, getting people out of their cars. Does the hon. Member agree that, given that the Government prioritise investment in infrastructure, they should finally commit to that link, because it is the perfect example of a project that would deliver for people, the environment and the economy?
Jess Brown-Fuller
The hon. Gentleman will be pleased to hear that he is much closer to the Government than I am and has a brilliant opportunity to have his concerns heard by the Minister. He is right to raise the nonsense of having to go in and then out of London to reach vital pieces of infrastructure.
I am sure many hon. Members across the House will wax lyrical about their transport woes today, but it will come as no surprise that the focus of my contribution will be the impact that poor transport infrastructure has on my constituency. The Minister knows that the A27 is one of the busiest trunk roads in the UK and the main arterial route for those travelling down to the coast all the way from Wiltshire in the west to East Sussex.
Months ago, I invited the Transport Secretary during Transport questions, to come and sit in traffic with me, and I have no idea why she declined. My point was that it did not matter when she came—what time of day or day of the week—I could guarantee we would be caught in congestion. The Transport Secretary did offer me a meeting with the Roads Minister, the hon. Member for Wakefield and Rothwell (Simon Lightwood). I am grateful to him for sitting down with me so that I could explain the issue in more detail. If I were to pull up Apple Maps or Google Maps at this exact moment, there will almost certainly be a red ring round my city with traffic at a standstill.
Jim Shannon (Strangford) (DUP)
I commend the hon. Lady for bringing this forward. I find myself in a similar, frustrating circumstance to the one she indicates. In my case, it is the proposed Ballynahinch bypass, which would breathe new life into the town. Like the project mentioned by hon. Member for Slough (Mr Dhesi), it has been postponed repeatedly since I was first elected in 2010. Does the hon. Lady agree that infrastructure projects, such as she seeks for her constituency, will have major local effects, boost the economy, clear up long waits in traffic and create jobs? They must never be relegated to a dusty shelf where they have clearly been for the last few years.
Jess Brown-Fuller
It is almost as though the hon. Gentleman has read my speech in advance. I will go on to a lot of the things he has just raised. If it is bad today in my constituency, it is hard to imagine how much worse it is on a sunny day, when tourists for the Witterings queue for miles to reach our lovely sandy beach or Goodwood hosts an event that attracts visitors in their thousands.
Caroline Voaden (South Devon) (LD)
My hon. Friend talks about coastal roads. The A379, a glorious coastal road in my constituency, had already been damaged by storms in January, but last night huge chunks of it were literally washed into the sea. It is absolutely devastating, and I was shocked to be told by officials at the Department for Transport this morning that there is no national emergency fund for repairs to roads damaged by storms. Does my hon. Friend agree that, as we see more intense and frequent storms caused by climate change, the Government need to ensure that they have funding ready to support communities like those around Torcross in South Devon that have been devastated by this damage?
Jess Brown-Fuller
My hon. Friend has shown me the photos of what has happened in her constituency, and I share her distress that a main road—an A road—has literally fallen into the sea. Our constituencies share the fact that we are low-lying coastal plains at the forefront of climate change. As we see more storm events, we are seeing the damage in our communities.
That brings me on to paying particular tribute to my residents living on the Manhood peninsula, who get completely trapped in the summer months because of congestion on the roads and are unable to get out of the area. Today, they are trapped because all the roads in and out of the Manhood are completely flooded. Georgia, a constituent of mine, left her job as a nurse because her commute was taking two hours, with one hour spent travelling just the handful of miles from Emsworth to Tangmere. Chris’s son has school transport, and has to leave an hour before school starts due to the traffic on the A259 on to the A27; again, he is only travelling a small number of miles.
Melanie is planning on packing up her successful mental health business because the gridlock is, perhaps ironically, negatively affecting her mental health. Shaun owns a funeral company, and he told me of the time he had to get out of the hearse to physically clear the traffic to get to the local crematorium on time. Daniel owns a home carers company, and he regularly reports that staff get stuck on the A27, which means that the people they care for in the community miss medicine times and hospital appointments, and the backlog means that people get seen later and later in the day.
I am in no doubt that the congestion on the A27 is strangling the city and putting off investment from businesses. It is stopping people shopping in the city or business parks and is impacting people’s daily lives. The A27 Chichester improvement scheme has a long history dating back to the 2000 south coast multi-modal study. Following several iterations, the scheme was included in the 2013 “Investing in Britain’s Future” White Paper and the 2014 road investment strategy. The scheme went to consultation in 2016, when 93% of respondents to a National Highways survey said that congestion was a problem on the A27.
However, in 2017 the Secretary of State removed the funding for any improvements along the Chichester stretch. There remains significant anger and frustration among residents that they were never given the opportunity to vote on a preferred model of road improvements, especially as the Chichester district has seen more than its fair share of house building over the past decade. If the Government expect areas such as ours to continue to sustain such an increased level of development, residents need to see the investment in infrastructure too. Instead, it seems that their local services, be it GPs, schools, roads or buses, are expected to manage the additional capacity with no extra resource.
Jim Dickson (Dartford) (Lab)
I pay tribute to the hon. Member for securing the debate and for the great speech she is making. She mentioned the role of buses. There tends to be an assumption made by people outside the south-east that we all have bus networks similar to those in London, but they would not have to go very far from London—to my constituency of Dartford, for instance—to find that the bus services become extremely limited, yet bus services can be such a driver of a better quality of life for people in getting to education and work or accessing other opportunities. Does the hon. Member agree that the extra money that the Government have given to county councils—in my instance, Kent county council has been given an extra £42 million to spend in the coming year on improved bus services—must be spent to provide better connectivity for all our residents, irrespective of whether they are in Kent, Sussex, Hampshire or other parts of the south-east?
Sir John Hayes (in the Chair)
That intervention tested my legendary patience to its very limits, so just bear that in mind in the future.
Jess Brown-Fuller
I thank the hon. Member for his important intervention; he is right to mention that county councils should be using that money effectively to ensure that people across the constituencies that we represent can get to the places they need to. That is certainly not the case in my constituency, especially in more rural villages and hamlets.
Dr Chambers
It will be. In the rural villages in my constituency such as Colden Common, people rely on the bus service to maintain their independence. If the bus service goes, they cannot get to hospital appointments and they cannot stay in the house they may have lived in for years. Does my hon. Friend agree that there is more than just an economic impact to having good transport; it actually allows people to live a full and independent life without relying on care?
Sir John Hayes (in the Chair)
Dr Chambers is showing how interventions should be done.
Jess Brown-Fuller
My hon. Friend makes an excellent point and he allows me the opportunity to thank organisations that offer community transport, such as the Selsey Venture Club in my constituency or Contact 88, which help people get to the places they need to go when transport infrastructure is lacking.
I have met representatives of National Highways on multiple occasions since being elected, and I know that the original proposals for the A27 still exist in a drawer somewhere ready to be brought back to the table to address a road that does not function and remains in the top 10 nationally for casualties. National Highways has agreed to fund a study into the Fishbourne roundabout, which desperately needs addressing. That is due to report in the spring and I hope the Government will be forthcoming with funding for the proposed improvements, as it is such a dangerous roundabout. I am one of many who have nearly been involved in an accident on that roundabout and I fear there will be a fatality before long.
The A27 Chichester bypass remains part of a future road investment scheme and the Roads Minister has met me to hear my plea to fund its improvement. It would be great if the Minister here today could provide reassurance that funding will be attached to the A27 for that future road investment scheme—something all my constituents will be desperate to hear. If she is unable to commit to the level of funding required, will she please meet me and National Highways to explore alternative schemes to address how people move around in my area?
The Government are keen to get more people on to public transport to reduce reliance on cars in particular, but the increase in fares from £2 to £3 has had a significant impact on constituents who are trying to do just that. Cristina’s children get the bus to school every day. She encourages public transport, but the cost is £26 for a seven-day child pass and the young people do not always get a seat—it is totally unacceptable. If Cristina chooses to take her three children into the city for the day, the cheapest option is a DayRider. That costs her £17 for two bus journeys that last approximately 10 minutes each way. All this makes travelling by car by far the easier and more sensible option. That is why we are calling for the reinstatement of the £2 bus fare cap and for fees to be halved for under-18s.
At the same time, bus routes are being amended to cover new housing developments without any additional services being added, so routes take longer than they did and cost more—a perfect cocktail to disincentivise bus use. What steps are the Government taking to encourage more people to use buses and to ensure that in places with major developments, such as Chichester, adequate work is being undertaken to make sure that bus services for current residents are not affected? Importantly, what steps are they taking to make sure that public transport is a material consideration on new developments, rather than an afterthought?
There are some great examples of active travel in my patch, particularly making the most of the disused railway lines along the Centurion Way into the South Downs. The issue that councils such as West Sussex county council face is that funding for those schemes is often linked to performance-related measures set by Active Travel England. That creates a self-fulfilling prophecy, with councils that are already delivering good provision being rewarded and provided with further funds, while those that struggle being left behind. Can the Minister say if the criteria linked to funding for active travel schemes will be reviewed by the Government so that areas like mine are not left behind with poor infrastructure because the county council has historically struggled to deliver them? There should not be a postcode lottery in active travel provision, and projects to create cycle lanes and footpaths take far too long from the ideas phase to the delivery phase.
I will briefly touch on rail. Chichester is not endowed with services that are quick, punctual and affordable. Last year, one in five Southern Railway trains arrived in Chichester late, despite an annual season ticket to London costing nearly £8,000. The Liberal Democrats have long called for a freeze in rail fares, so we were glad to see the Government provide that last year, but my residents are still paying well over the odds for the service that they receive, which is severely lacking. The service to London is dreadfully slow relative to services from cities that are similar to ours and at a comparable distance. That is partly due to infrastructure issues that have been ignored for years, such as the Croydon bottleneck, where the Arun Valley line joins the Brighton main line. Network Rail has said that that causes a ripple effect of delays across the system, prevents future expansion of the line and creates delays across the entire network when there is a failure in service much further up the line. It does not go down well in my constituency when people ask, “Why are there delays in Chichester?”, and I say, “Oh, because of something happening in Croydon.”
It is disappointing that there has not been a commitment to the relevant scheme, despite widespread campaigning by Members from across the House. Reliable services are vital if passengers are to see value for money and the benefits of choosing rail, but that is not currently being offered by Southern Railway. When the Government bring Southern Railway into public ownership, will they commit to reviewing a fast service for residents in Chichester and reconsider rail investment to deal with the Croydon bottleneck?
I hope the Minister has heard my plea today on behalf of my 120,000 constituents in the Chichester area and the south-east region, because they do not ask for much. They are playing their part in the Government’s growth agenda and seeing large-scale development in their area. All they ask is to move around their community safely and easily, which is becoming less of a reality every day. I do not expect a magic money pot to appear suddenly, or even in advance of the next funding round of the road investment scheme, but I do expect fairness. I hope that, when those decisions are being made, the Minister will remember that the previous Government promised something to my constituents and then took it away. That is simply not fair.
Several hon. Members rose—
Sir John Hayes (in the Chair)
Order. I remind Members that they need to bob, although I can see that they know that already.
Sojan Joseph (Ashford) (Lab)
I congratulate the hon. Member for Chichester (Jess Brown-Fuller) on securing this very important debate. It would not be a debate about transport in our region if I did not use it to mention international rail services returning to Ashford International station. Last month was the 30th anniversary of the first ever international service calling at the station. For nearly a quarter of a century, daily services operated between the station and continental Europe, making it a vital link for residents and businesses in Kent, Sussex and the wider south-east to get to mainland Europe. Ashford was developed as an international hub, and its connectivity was a key factor in attracting businesses to my constituency and the wider area. However, during the covid pandemic, the decision was taken to suspend services to and from Ashford, and they have not restarted, despite the fact that they continue to pass through our station.
To mark the anniversary of the first service calling at Ashford International, I was delighted to join other local MPs, council leaders, business people and other local residents at the station in the latest part of our campaign to restore international services. The return of international services is much more than a transport issue. It is central to maximising our region’s economic potential and would be a major boost for jobs, businesses and economic growth. I know that the Government recognise that, and I am pleased that the Prime Minister, the Transport Secretary and the Rail Minister have all given their support to our campaign. The demand and support for international services are there, so I once again urge all operators that want to run services between the UK and continental Europe to work with local MPs, councillors, business representatives, the Government and other stakeholders, so that as soon as possible we can make Ashford International an international station again.
The perception is that because of our region’s close proximity to London, the south-east is prosperous and uniformly well off, but large parts of our region were forgotten about or ignored by the Conservatives when they were in power. The poor transport connectivity in the rural parts of my constituency is a good example of this. Poor connectivity contributes to economic underperformance by restricting access to jobs and causing increased reliance on private cars. That obviously has a disproportionate impact on those who do not have access to a car, such as young people, elderly residents, the disabled and those from lower-income households, especially in rural areas such as Hawkinge and the surrounding villages. Poor transport connectivity not only limits those people’s access to work opportunities, but impacts their ability to attend healthcare appointments or access local amenities.
That is why I have been prioritising the need for improved bus services across Ashford, Hawkinge and the villages. I recently had a good meeting with Stagecoach, which operates bus services locally. I was delighted to see the Government allocate £78.2 million in bus services funding in Kent over the next three years. The short-term funding cycle that has been in place until now has made it difficult for local authorities to make medium to long-term decisions about local transport infrastructure. It is good news that Kent county council can make funding decisions to give all my constituents an improved and more reliable bus service in both urban and rural areas.
One other area of transport infrastructure that Kent county council needs to act on is to urgently do more to deliver road improvements for residents. Potholes have been a blight on the roads in my constituency for far too long: they are another symbol of how the previous Government left things to decline. My constituents deserve to have road infrastructure that is fit for the 21st century, and I welcome that Kent county council has been allocated more than £274 million over the next three years. That record investment from the Labour Government gives KCC the long-term certainty it needs to save drivers in my constituency money on repairs to their cars and to make our roads safer.
I was concerned that, in the recently published ratings on how local authorities are maintaining their local roads, Kent county council received an amber rating. My constituents know that our roads need improving, and that rating confirms that the Reform administration at Kent county council has not delivered on my constituents’ needs.
Luke Murphy (Basingstoke) (Lab)
Does my hon. Friend share my concern about Hampshire county council’s amber rating? My constituents are extremely concerned about the money that repairs and accidents are costing them, and the traffic caused by this huge pothole problem. Like Kent county council, Hampshire also has an amber rating; is it not time that they used the extra money provided by the Labour Government to get on and fix potholes as a priority for our constituents?
Sojan Joseph
I was really pleased that our Government brought in the rating system so that we can hold local authorities accountable. I completely agree with my hon. Friend.
Since being elected, I have written on multiple occasions to the Reform administration at KCC, as well as to their Conservative predecessors, to ask that they take the issue of our local roads seriously and do the necessary work to fix them. It is clear from the road maintenance ratings that despite record funding from the Labour Government, they have so far failed to do so. My constituents expect and deserve better, and I look forward to seeing tangible improvements.
John Milne (Horsham) (LD)
It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship today, Sir John. I thank my hon. Friend the Member for Chichester (Jess Brown-Fuller) for securing this debate. I can vouch for everything she said about the ring road around Chichester, which I have spent more hours on than I would rather. I agree that it has an impact on the commercial health of the city—it is off-putting to go anywhere in that direction. I was formerly a county councillor serving in Chichester, so I had to go there many times.
I also echo what my hon. Friend said about the pressure of new house building; in Horsham we also have many new estates. The section 106 funding goes towards roads within the estate or access roads, but it does not remedy deficiencies in the network as a whole—that is not what it was designed to do, and it does not do it. We have more and more housing going up along the same roads. In Horsham we have one dual carriageway running north to south, and that is pretty much it. The A29 is single-track and is severely overloaded already—and it will only get worse. I empathise with all the things my hon. Friend said. Horsham is also impacted by the Croydon bottleneck that she referred to. We suffer from delayed and cancelled trains as well, so I thank her for raising that issue.
I want to concentrate mainly on public transport, particularly buses. In my time on the council I was on the transport committee, so that is an area I campaigned on in the past. I know the severe pressures of budgets, so what I am suggesting to the Minister is looking at a number of budgets to do with public transport and possibly combining them.
The home-to-school transport budget in West Sussex has grown by over 100% in recent years, and the Government’s decision to un-ringfence funding and increase the distance cap from 20 to 50 miles is a welcome recognition that existing rules simply did not allow councils to meet their statutory duties. That particularly applies to special educational needs and disabilities pupils. In West Sussex, around £33 million is now allocated for home-to-school transport. The vast majority of that is on SEND provision and it is ballooning. At present, 63% of pupils are travelling via private taxi or minibus services rather than the West Sussex county council internal fleet. That fleet currently includes over 500 vehicles and represents a long-term investment by the council. It supports not just home-to-school transport but adult social care and transport for older residents.
I fully recognise that many SEND pupils do require individualised transport to meet their needs but, wherever possible, we should look at whether that could be delivered through internal fleets rather than outsourced contracts. Reliance on private providers brings higher costs, hidden inefficiencies and less resilience, while direct investment allows councils to build capacity and plan for the long term. In the meantime, however, we cannot ignore the pressure facing those private providers that are keeping SEND transport running. Providers in Horsham have raised serious concerns with me about the impact of national insurance contribution rises on their running costs. Some are questioning whether they can continue to offer these vital services at all.
Andy Mahoney, chair of the Licensed Private Hire Car Association’s SEND Transport Operators Group—that is some acronym—has been clear about the risk. The increase in employer national insurance will substantially raise costs for SEND transport operators, pushing already tight contracts into loss. If providers are forced to walk away, local authorities will be left struggling to meet their statutory obligations. The industry has calculated that a ringfenced emergency SEND transport grant of around £40m for 2025-26 would cover the shortfall across England, Wales and Northern Ireland. That is a modest sum when set against the disruption that would be caused if services collapse. The Government’s claim that the £515 million announced to offset NI rises for councils will address this issue simply does not hold, because that does nothing to address indirect costs passed on by private suppliers. That is why the Government should look at exempting smaller vehicles—those with fewer than 10 seats—from VAT when they are used for transport provision. Removing VAT would lower costs for providers, reduce pressure on council budgets and support more flexible, community-based provision. Cost saving is vital in the context of stretched local government finances.
The national Government already recognise remoteness as a factor in adult social care funding and they must do the same across other funding streams. County councils face an uphill battle otherwise, with County Councils Network estimates suggesting that 98p of every pound will be funded by residents rather than by central Government, compared to just 58p in metropolitan areas.
Rural bus services in Horsham have faced significant challenges in recent years. In particular I have raised concerns both locally and in Westminster on behalf of residents in Slinfold and Partridge Green many times. The No. 63 and No. 17 bus services, which serve those villages, have both faced damaging cuts. In Slinfold, residents like Lynne relied on the No. 63 bus to access Horsham town centre and the rail network. Good public transport links were a key reason for moving to the village in the first place. That service has been rerouted and no longer serves the village at all. In Partridge Green, residents have raised concerns for years about declining services and their ability to reach essential destinations. The removal of direct services to Horsham has cut people off from health services, the high street and basic utilities. Students no longer have a bus taking them to school or college, undermining access to education. Workers cannot commute between villages in Horsham, limiting employment opportunities. I chair the all-party parliamentary group for rural business and the rural powerhouse, and that is one of the things we are looking at. It is a major reason why rural areas have lower productivity rates than urban areas, and it could be reversed.
At the Horsham District older people’s forum last year, one gentleman told me that the only way he could reach appointments in Horsham from Partridge Green was to walk over a mile to the neighbouring village on his crutches. What is most shocking in Horsham is that recent service cuts were made without consultation. Villages were given little or no warning. Community campaigns were strong, passionate and well organised, but of course the decision had already been made before anybody knew it was even being discussed.
The bus operator, Stagecoach, told us that there is no formal requirement to consult residents and that, where changes are driven by commercial necessity, consultation does not normally take place. However, there is nothing to stop West Sussex county council from consulting, particularly where amendments would result in the complete loss of a service for the community. Other county councils do that. That is why I tabled an amendment to the recent Bus Services Act 2025 to make consultation compulsory, and I regret that it was rejected by the Government—not least because residents, given the opportunity, can come up with alternative solutions that would work better for everyone.
This is part of a wider national picture. Back in 2012, only 59% of rural households had a bus stop within a 13-minute walk that had an hourly service. Since then, councils have been forced to make deep cuts, in some cases losing up to 43% of funding. Nationally, bus service provision has fallen by 28%. With economic inactivity almost 2.5% higher in rural areas, ensuring access to education and employment through public transport must be a priority. The Liberal Democrats are clear about what needs to happen. We want simpler funding streams for councils, a return to the £2 bus fare cap and the removal of VAT on smaller public transport vehicles. We need to look at co-ordinating all local transport needs and budgets, including schools, SEND, buses and community transport services. Yes, money is tight, but we can make the same money work harder.
Local councils face huge challenges. We must reduce reliance on private transport providers over time through sustained investment in internal fleets, but in the short term, we also need to work with private providers, offering tax relief where possible, and supporting them so they can continue to operate. We have to reverse the slow death of rural transport services.
Several hon. Members rose—
Sir John Hayes (in the Chair)
If Members speak for about six minutes each, everyone will get in. I am going to call the Front-Bench spokespeople at 3.30 pm, so Members should work on that basis.
Alison Bennett (Mid Sussex) (LD)
My speech is significantly shorter than six minutes, so we should be good. It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Sir John, and I thank my hon. Friend the Member for Chichester (Jess Brown-Fuller) for bringing us a debate that is really timely, particularly at this time of year, because I am going to focus my remarks on potholes.
In my constituency of Mid Sussex, potholes are a daily hazard. They make journeys unpleasant and dangerous, they damage vehicles and they are a symbol of a road network that has been allowed to crumble for far too long. One constituent wrote to me that after walking their dog in the pouring rain recently, a car hit a water-filled pothole at speed and they were sprayed not just with filthy water but with shards of broken road surface. They told me,
“our roads are dangerous—simply because they are not being looked after properly”.
Another constituent described how a pothole had burst their stepson’s tyre, leaving him more than £120 out of pocket through no fault of his own. West Sussex county council acknowledged that it knew about the pothole— it even repaired it—but the claim was rejected because the inspection time limit had technically been reached. As the constituent put it,
“how can this be right that hard-working people suffer, through no fault of their own?”
That question goes to the heart of this issue. Families in Mid Sussex pay road tax, council tax and income tax. They should not be left footing the bill for damage caused by neglected infrastructure, nor should pedestrians, cyclists or drivers feel unsafe on roads that are meant to connect our communities and support our local economy. The problem is only getting worse. Burgess Hill and the surrounding villages are seeing significant new housing, yet road maintenance has not kept pace. People are rightly asking, “How will our failing roads cope with thousands more vehicles?” We need more houses, but much like our water system, we need to know that we have the infrastructure to support them first. Under the former Conservative Government, our transport system was neglected; up and down the country, families and businesses are paying more for less, and semi-rural communities across Mid Sussex can see that the roads they rely on are neglected and left to crumble.
The Liberal Democrats have been clear that transport links are essential for our economy, for getting to work or school, for leisure and for exercise, which is why we campaigned in the general election for funding to fix 1.2 million potholes every year, and for long-term investment to stop the endless cycle of patch and repair. We welcome the Government’s £7.3 billion commitment in November’s Budget, but funding must be based on need. As my hon. Friend the Member for Wimbledon (Mr Kohler) said last year, too many councils with the worst roads are receiving less funding than those with roads that are already in better condition. That simply makes no sense.
In Mid Sussex, we want safe roads, fair compensation when things go wrong and a transport system that works. I do not think that is unreasonable. Banging on about potholes is sometimes described as being peak Lib Dem, but it matters to folk every day and it is critical to safety and to our economy. I know that I and my colleagues will keep being peak Lib Dem by fighting until our roads are brought back to the standard that the public deserve.
James MacCleary (Lewes) (LD)
It is a pleasure to serve under you, Sir John. I thank my hon. Friend the Member for Chichester (Jess Brown-Fuller) for bringing forward this important debate. As a fellow A27-suffering MP, I can attest to the constant traffic problems around Chichester, and I will touch on the impact they have on my constituency.
Over in East Sussex, transport is not a peripheral concern but the backbone of how communities earn a living, how people get to work, and how rural and coastal towns stay connected to the rest of the country. Right now, in a number of places in my constituency, that backbone is cracking. The A259 is the principal coastal route through East Sussex; it links Seaford to Eastbourne, serves Newhaven port, home of the excellent and valued daily ferry service to Dieppe, and connects two of the country’s key growth areas. It is an economic artery and it is under serious pressure.
The most serious bottleneck is the Exceat bridge. This is a single-lane bridge originally built in 1870, and it has been a known problem for years. I welcome the fact that the Secretary of State confirmed the compulsory purchase order in October 2025, and that construction of a new two-lane replacement is planned to begin in the spring of 2026.
I will, however, be frank—the disruption that the work will cause will be very significant. The advisory diversions run through villages such as Litlington or Friston—with narrow lanes not designed for through traffic—and will be enormous. The official diversion is via the A27, but that is not credible. Particularly when traffic congestion reaches peak levels on the A27, traffic will divert through our small country lanes. We need a credible mitigation plan alongside a credible timetable, not one or the other.
Beyond the A259, the condition of East Sussex county council’s roads is a genuine concern. I do not want to get all peak Lib Dem here, but I hear constantly about potholes across my constituency, whether on some of our bigger roads or the C7 small road that stretches between Lewes and Newhaven, which is in a shocking condition, to the extent where it lost some of its surface during recent flooding.
Potholes, poor surfaces and patches that wash out within weeks of being laid all cost drivers money in vehicle damage and slow journeys, and on narrower roads create real safety risks, particularly when verges start to collapse, narrowing already narrow country lanes. Between 2022 and 2024, East Sussex county council paid out nearly £600,000 for vehicle damage caused by potholes. That cannot be a good use of taxpayers’ money.
I also note that the county council elections in East Sussex, originally due in May 2025, have now been postponed for a second year. The effect is that voters have not had the chance to hold their county councillors to account at the ballot box for over two years. Councillors serving seven-year terms is not democratic. On road maintenance—squarely a county council responsibility on almost all our roads—that matters.
I now turn to the A27, and I will be direct because lives are at stake. Just last week, on 28 January, a man was killed in a collision on the A27 near Falmer. Last September, an 18-year-old man died in a fatal crash near Wilmington. These are not isolated incidents; the A27 through this corridor sees frequent serious accidents, and the pattern is well established. I have spoken to Sussex police requesting a full breakdown of accident data on that stretch. I ask the Minister, does National Highways have a current safety review there, and if so, what is its timeline? Does the Minister plan to review the current up-to-two-year wait time for reports to be provided to National Highways following an incident by the police, which is causing a major lag in safety improvements, particularly where traffic conditions change—not least as they are affected by things such as housing developments? This delay creates a significant gap in the crucial data needed for road user safety.
That brings me to the issue of rail services, or lack thereof. There is currently no direct train from Seaford, the largest town in my constituency, to London. Every commuter, student or business traveller must change, typically at Lewes or Brighton. For a town of Seaford’s size, that is a significant barrier. I recently heard from a woman who lives in Seaford and works in London, like many of my constituents. She used to be able to get a direct train to Victoria station. However, that service was removed during covid and has still not been reinstated six years on. It can easily take three hours to get to London, due to delays and tight connections at Lewes. She told me that her colleagues in Manchester find it quicker and easier to get to their office than she does. That is unacceptable, and lets my constituents down on a daily basis. The Seaford to Victoria direct service must be reinstated immediately. Over time, this kind of friction drives people and businesses elsewhere. I ask the Minister to engage with Govia Thameslink Railway and Great British Railways as it develops, to make the case for a direct service.
I turn now to one of the most persistent issues during my time as an MP so far—parking in Polegate. The deeper problem is enforcement: Wealden district council has never decriminalised parking, so responsibility falls to Sussex police, who, understandably, have other priorities. The result is that pavement parking goes unchecked. That means that wheelchair users and parents with pushchairs are forced into the roads, pavements are damaged and the town centre feels less acceptable and less welcoming. That impinges on businesses and other road users, particularly cyclists and pedestrians.
Scotland and Northern Ireland have acted on this issue and Wales is moving, but England is stuck in limbo. I would welcome engagement from the Department for Transport on a deliverable plan for Polegate that includes clear signage and ticketing, sensible resident permits and proper local enforcement powers, because pavements are for people, not vehicles. Key to reducing traffic and congestion is getting people out of their cars and on to public transport. However, so often public transport is too expensive. That brings me on to buses.
Helen Maguire (Epsom and Ewell) (LD)
My constituents have got in touch about a significant fare increase that they are experiencing with Southern Railway. The Leatherhead to London Victoria single fare at 8.51 am has increased 39.4% from £12.70 to £17.70. That is because of the introduction of contactless by Transport for London, who determine prices for peak and off-peak trains differently. Does my hon Friend agree that such discrepancy over pricing erodes confidence in our railways and undermines Labour’s plans to make rail more affordable?
James MacCleary
Pricing is one of the biggest barriers to people using the railways. If we want people to use the railways and move out of their vehicles then we have to make it affordable for them. Speaking specifically about buses, for many families in my constituency they are not a lifestyle choice—they are the only way that a child can get to school or college. Yet, from Monday 16 February, East Sussex county council will increase the under-19 freedom weekly ticket from £15 to £20—a one-third hike in one go. For parents already juggling the cost of living, that is not a marginal change: it is the difference between a young person getting the bus and being priced off of it.
Affordability is only half the problem. Too often, the network is unreliable and poorly designed. That is why I have been campaigning for a direct bus from Eastbourne to Lewes along the A27.
None of this is a luxury. Rural and coastal communities cannot be treated as an afterthought in transport planning. Too often, the south-east has been neglected and forgotten when planning or improving transport infrastructure. In the Chancellor’s first Budget, every single major transport project in Sussex was cancelled. After London, the south-east is the most densely populated area of the country and its biggest economic driver. However, as we frequently get grouped together with London—who are rightly allotted a comparatively large amount of funding—our figure is augmented, and the south-east rarely gets the funding that we so desperately need.
The A259 is, unfortunately, a perfect example for the south-east as an overcrowded region with insufficient infrastructure. There is a clear plan to improve it, but the Government have so far declined to release the funding, so it remains a disaster. The Minister kindly met with me on the issue of the A259 after I met with the Prime Minister, and maybe she will have some good news for me today. Who knows?
Poor roads isolate people, unreliable rail makes it harder to keep and get a job, and unsafe roads cost lives. These are matters of public safety and economic fairness. I want to finish by extending an invitation to the Minister and her colleagues to come and visit my constituency. It is a very typical example of the transport challenges in the whole of the south-east—a primarily rural constituency with small and medium-sized towns and a collection of villages. There are lanes, railways and an international ferry service, and we are within striking distance of Gatwick airport; yet we remain poorly connected and served, and it is holding back growth in our area.
If the Minister comes by train, she will experience at first hand the joys of a journey that is too often overcrowded and sets back Lewes commuters nearly £6,000 a year for a season ticket. However, if she prefers to come in the ministerial car, she will meet the potholes soon enough.
Bobby Dean (Carshalton and Wallington) (LD)
I thank my hon. Friend the Member for Chichester (Jess Brown-Fuller), not only for securing this debate but for the clarity with which she articulated the case for transport improvements across different modes, including both infrastructure and operational improvements.
I will focus on one particular infrastructure issue: CARS. Not the cars that the former Roads Minister is used to, but the Croydon area remodelling scheme—a train infrastructure project, as I am sure she will know. This is one of the most important commuter corridor projects not only in the south-east but in the whole country. It is a Network Rail-backed plan that is designed to add capacity, modernise a couple of key stations, improve track and signalling, and unclog the Croydon bottleneck, as was mentioned earlier.
What does that mean? Well, it centres on the so-called Selhurst triangle, in which so many trains running through to the south of England get caught up. Its inefficient layout bungs up the whole line, particularly for those who rely on the Brighton main line, but it also has a knock-on effect on other lines because trains are not able to get to stations on time, operators cannot get their stock back, and so on. This small bottleneck, with a radius of a couple of miles, causes cancellations, reduces frequency and leads to poor punctuality and slower journey times right across the south-east of England. When we think of what the Government are trying to do with their growth plan, and particularly things such as Gatwick airport expansion, it makes no sense not to invest in a project like CARS.
This needs to be put in context, because some of the infrastructure projects across the country that have been committed to cost tens of billions of pounds. We are talking hundreds of millions of pounds to get CARS off the ground and through phase 1, with a total lifetime project cost in the low billions. I know that will sound a lot to many people, but in the realm of infrastructure, this is really good value for money.
CARS has been raised for years as a project that should be invested in, and the last debate in the House was an Adjournment debate secured by the hon. Member for Croydon East (Natasha Irons)—not to be confused with East Croydon station—in which she made an extremely strong case, just ahead of the spending review, but we saw nothing about it in that spending review.
When I think of the opportunities that the scheme would unlock, I have to wonder why it has not been chosen. On its merits, it should be pursued. I think the Government have not invested in the project because, like the last Government, they have a strange aversion to investment in London and the south-east. I understand that there are deep regional inequalities in this country that need to be addressed, and we all recognise that there has been severe under-investment in other parts of the country.
However, the political consensus in recent years has been to pit the regions against each other, and almost to neglect investment in the south-east and London at the expense of projects elsewhere—not because of the basis of those projects, but because it is politically convenient to do so. I think the Government need to look again at which projects can deliver maximum value, to ensure that we are not making the regions race against each other by selecting each project on its merits.
I have already explained how investment in this small area around Croydon would provide benefits across the south-east of England, but we would be naive not to think that it would also create benefits right across the country. Where would the suppliers come from? The project would create jobs and business revenue for companies across the country, and that is only the direct effect. It does not include the indirect effects from improving the commuter experience into London—the capital city of this country—and the wider economic benefits that would be felt by all.
It has been suggested to me that the second reason for the delay in investment in this project is to do with covid and how commuter patterns have changed. We are already starting to see a snapback to previous behaviours. If we look at passenger levels, they are almost back up to pre-covid levels, and the reduced frequency and reliability of services are stopping people going back into the workplace as often as they would like. I hear that from my wife, who goes in once a week at the moment. She wants to go in more to see her colleagues, but she does not because she cannot trust the train that she needs to catch, so there is a bit of a chicken-and-egg situation. If we really want to get people out of motor vehicles and using public transport more, we need to build those services so that people can use them.
The benefits of the Croydon area remodelling scheme are clear: we would have faster, more reliable, higher-capacity rail services across one of the highest-growth regions in the country. There would also be a particular benefit to my constituency. The London borough of Sutton is one of the most poorly served by Transport for London. We do not have a single tube station or the London Overground service. We have a couple of tram stops, but they are in the far corner of the borough and do not really serve our residents.
This project could unlock the potential of the London Overground and metro-like services that the rest of London benefits from. We are really excited by that prospect. I urge the Minister to look again at the true merits of the project, how many people would benefit from it and the potential for economic growth across the country. I look forward to her response.
Zöe Franklin (Guildford) (LD)
It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Sir John. I thank my hon. Friend the Member for Chichester (Jess Brown-Fuller) for securing this important debate. It was really interesting to hear her mention the M25/A3 junction 10, which is in my constituency. It has taken many years and has caused all sorts of challenges to my residents. As it comes close to completion, it is good to hear from colleagues—it is amazing how many MPs are interested in that project—and regular users about the difference that the upgrades are making. I hope it will show the potential for major long-term infrastructure improvements, but the learning points must be taken, because we need to recognise the disruption caused to residents and the significant financial problems caused to local businesses and the Royal Horticultural Society.
There are many issues in my constituency that I could raise, but I want to focus on Guildford town, which demonstrates the enormous opportunity and the significant strain facing transport networks across the south-east. Guildford is a thriving economic hub. It is home to a world-class university, a rapidly expanding research park, a major regional hospital and a highly productive local economy that continues to attract talent and investment, but that success has created real and growing pressure on our local infrastructure. Road usage is exceptionally high, and congestion continues to worsen. Some residents tell me that it takes them an hour and a half to travel the hundreds of metres between the research park and the hospital junction. Too many feel that, despite the congestion, they have no real alternative to relying on their car.
We have dual pressures. We have the strategically important A3 and A31—I imagine many Members have travelled down that major artery—and the concentration of employment, education and housing growth has not been matched by increasing public transport capacity. That is not just a local complaint or anecdote; the challenge is recognised at a national level. The Wessex Corridor study, commissioned by Network Rail, explicitly identifies the corridor between Reading, Guildford and the wider south-east as experiencing rising demand, constrained capacity and major unrealised potential. The study makes it clear that without targeted intervention, housing growth, employment expansion and limited rail capacity will lead to worsening congestion, increased car dependency—which we absolutely do not want—and a missed opportunity to shift journeys on to sustainable modes of transport.
That brings me to the long-standing case for Guildford West railway station, which would serve the research park, the Royal Surrey, the University of Surrey and the surrounding communities. The community has been waiting for it for well over a decade. It would demonstrably have an enormous impact on congestion, access to important services and our local economy, and it would make an environmental difference by shifting everyday travel patterns away from car dependency and towards sustainable transport.
I am committed to getting an answer on the scheme for local people and businesses. Just last week, I was pleased to bring together key delivery partners, including Guildford borough council, Network Rail and South Western Railway, to discuss the viability and next steps. Despite the overwhelming case for Guildford West station, delivery remains painfully difficult. Network Rail does not fund new stations, Department for Transport funding has become more restrictive and, although the Government have set ambitious housing targets, there is no dedicated centralised funding pot to deliver the transport infrastructure required to support the homes we are building. Local government finances are stretched to breaking point, and councils are being asked to plan for growth without the funding or power to deliver the infrastructure that it demands. No matter how much local need or enthusiasm there is, there is simply not enough money to deliver the projects that are needed.
Of course, we must remember that sustainable transport is not just about rail. Too many residents are forced to drive simply to reach the station because bus services, ticketing systems, cycle routes and secure bike storage remain fragmented or inadequate. We should also remember the disproportionate impact on disabled people, low-income residents, students and young people—anyone without access to a car.
I close by asking the Minister a couple of questions. What are the Government going to do to support communities such as Guildford that have been formally identified as critical growth corridors? Why is there no centralised funding mechanism to link mandated housing growth with the transport infrastructure needed to sustain it? How can areas like Surrey realistically unlock growth without clarity on governance, funding or long-term support? My Guildford constituency has great opportunity, but it needs Government help to unlock transport projects to support economic and community growth. I hope the Minister has heard my comments, and those of colleagues, and will respond positively to this request.
Mr Will Forster (Woking) (LD)
It is a pleasure to serve under your chairship, Sir John. I thank my hon. Friend the Member for Chichester (Jess Brown-Fuller) for securing and leading this debate. She and I, with my hon. Friend the Member for Guildford (Zöe Franklin), got a train together 18 months ago to arrive in Parliament for the first time. From that day on, I knew my hon. Friend would be a strong advocate for Chichester, and for tackling her constituency’s transport problems in particular. She has certainly done that this afternoon.
I chair the APPG on South Western Railway, and I have spent a significant amount of time tackling issues on the South Western Railway network that affect the south-east so seriously. I have been particularly concerned about the network’s deterioration since nationalisation. I hope the Minister will comment on the fact that we want better transport connections, not worse, as we nationalise our railway companies. And better transport connections are not what my constituents in Woking and the wider south-east are receiving.
I am pleased that South Western Railway’s managing director and others have appeared before MPs to answer our questions, and particularly to listen to our constituents’ concerns. Their engagement has been positive, and I hope we can move forward together. However, an APPG should not be one of the only meaningful routes for parliamentary scrutiny of a nationalised operator. I hope the Minister will take action to ensure that MPs can hold our new public sector railway companies to account.
Moving on to the wider railway network, I will be visiting Woking’s signal box on Friday. I am worried that I will see the poor-quality infrastructure faced by commuters, which is why our trains into London Waterloo are constantly cancelled and delayed. The infrastructure and signalling equipment at Woking date from when I was born. It has not had any major updates since then, which is appalling. If we are to grow our economy and decarbonise our transport network, we need reliable public transport. I hope the Minister will agree investment for Woking’s signal box and its signal network—it is a regional hub for our railways.
Woking was founded on the railways, and it is a key commuter town into London. We are under 30 minutes from London Waterloo. Despite other Surrey towns having a contactless tap-in and tap-out system, Woking does not, and we deserve to be in the 21st century. I urge the Government to introduce tap-in and tap-out at Woking to stop hundreds of people a year being fined and caught out by tapping in at London Waterloo but being unable to tap out at Woking. That injustice is not acceptable any longer.
Regarding other parts of our public transport network, I have heard calls from many colleagues to reintroduce the £2 bus fare cap, to get people back on to buses that have struggled so much since covid. As the Liberal Democrat spokesperson, I fully endorse them. The £2 bus fare cap was vital, and it should never have been increased so significantly by this Government.
My hon. Friends the Members for Horsham (John Milne) and for Mid Sussex (Alison Bennett) said that their areas have seen significant housing growth, yet bus routes have not kept up with demand. In my area, that is also true. In Old Woking, a new development was built, which was great. The developer agreed, following planning conditions, to invest in bus stops and infrastructure to support the development and its transport implications. In particular, it tried to decarbonise the development. It built bus stops, but since then, not a single bus has used them. We need joined-up thinking if we are to grow our economy, provide the housing we need and improve our transport network. I hope that the Minister ensures that buses finally use those bus stops, and that that never happens again in the south-east.
I will move on to the subject of our highway network. Unfortunately, my constituents have to cope with Surrey county council’s incompetence in managing our highway network. We have not had an election since 2021, because the Government postponed their elections this year. Since 2021, under the Conservatives’ watch, the number of complaints about potholes has gone up by 106%. The council now has to pay out almost £250,000 a year in compensation because it does not fix things, and it is endangering lives.
Thankfully, we are moving to a new local authority, which will give my constituents a chance to vote out the Conservatives, who have mismanaged my local highway network so badly. I hope that the Minister will meet the new West Surrey council to understand its concerns. I am very concerned that highway spending from central Government does not take fully into account how well used our roads are—whether that is by high-usage vehicles or others. Surrey and the south-east have a significant footprint. Our roads are well used, but that is not properly taken account of in the funding formula.
Like my colleagues, I am aware of the investment that has taken place in the M25/A3 junction, which is finally, eventually, coming to a conclusion. I recently visited Woking scouts at Birchmere scout camp, which is on the edge of the M25/A3 junction. They have had to put up with disruption for years, and now their quiet, secluded scout camp is surrounded by unreasonable and potentially unsafe noise. I have urged National Highways colleagues to support them to recover from what they have gone through, and to compensate them for that. I hope that the Minister agrees, and that she agrees to look into it.
Mike Martin (Tunbridge Wells) (LD)
On my hon. Friend’s point about National Highways, the A21 runs through my constituency. It is the road between London and Hastings, and it is single track for most of the way, between halfway through my constituency and Hastings. That is a problem and a bad investment. It is a well-trafficked road. I wonder if it reflects my hon. Friend’s view of National Highways to say that there has been a staggering degree of incompetence around simple things such as cutting back the hedges so that the road remains safe on bends. That is not done to the standard or frequency required.
Mr Forster
I agree with my hon. Friend. National Highways is far too slow at tackling issues. Only this morning, I had to report a chunk of debris fly-tipped on National Highways land, which has been there for ages. It is far too slow to tackle simple things such as that, to invest in our highway network, which is so strategically important in the south-east, above all other areas.
The M25 runs through my constituency, and residents of Byfleet and West Byfleet have to cope with unbearable noise from the concrete surface of the M25 in that area. I have pressed National Highways to take action to reduce that noise, and I hope that the Minister will agree that it is about time it did so.
Liberal Democrat colleagues have spoken this afternoon about their transport issues in the south-east. I did not realise that the Liberal Democrats dominated the south-east as much as we do! We have had no Conservative Members speak at all; they clearly do not care about tackling our potholes or trying to make our roads safer and trains more reliable. I am pleased with, and proud of, the team around me who have pressed their constituencies’ issues this afternoon.
In the south-east, spending on public transport is roughly a third of that in the north-west. That is not acceptable. That unfair funding formula is why we are raising these issues, and I hope the Minister will agree to tackle that in the future. In particular, we heard from my hon. Friend the Member for South Devon (Caroline Voaden), whose A road fell into the sea this morning and who found that there is no national emergency funding. One road in Surrey has a sinkhole that has closed that road for over a year now; it has cost the county council more than £2 million and has still not re-opened. We need emergency funding to step in in those rare, exceptional situations, and I hope the Minister will take that point away.
Whether it is for my constituents in Woking who deserve safer roads without potholes or my commuting constituents who deserve a reliable bus service and trains that get them there on time, I hope the Minister will listen to my pleas, and those of my colleagues, for investment in the south-east so that we can have our fair share of transport spending and grow our economy together.
Joe Robertson (Isle of Wight East) (Con)
It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Sir John. I congratulate the hon. Member for Chichester (Jess Brown-Fuller) on introducing this important debate. I have a direct solution to her problem of traffic queueing up to access the wonderful beaches at the Witterings. There is an alternative: those road users could stay on the road to Southsea, jump on the hovercraft and visit the wonderful beaches in Ryde, Bembridge and Sandown on the Isle of Wight. She is welcome to put my offer to her constituents in her next newsletter.
The south-east is a great economic engine of the UK. It is home to 7.6 million people and 368,000 businesses, and contributes £228 billion in gross added value to the UK economy. If the south-east slows down, Britain slows down. Its connectivity is therefore essential to supporting the economic growth that the country needs, which has been so lacking in recent months. As we have heard, the region hosts some of the most strategically vital transport infrastructure in the country: Heathrow, Gatwick, Southend, the M25, the M4, the Eurostar, the channel tunnel and the ports of Dover and Southampton. The Dover strait alone is the busiest shipping lane in the world, with more than 500 vessels passing through every single day. Responsible for more than 60% of the UK’s trade with Europe, the south-east’s geography makes it fundamental to the success of British trade, too.
To ensure that we can maintain connectivity, the Government must reverse their approach of imposing ever increasing costs on our transport infrastructure. Those costs are inevitably passed on to passengers, like national insurance increases and business rates. Earlier today, a Delegated Legislation Committee approved the emissions trading scheme for the maritime sector, which will add costs to domestic ferry services to the Isle of Wight. Scottish islands will be exempted, but not our own island in the south-east of England. As we have heard, there has been a long-standing assumption that, because the south-east is perceived to be prosperous, it can somehow cope with less spending or, at least, tolerate greater disruption. That approach is misguided. As many Members from the south-east would acknowledge, that is often London-focused, ignoring the areas around Greater London.
We know that east-west connectivity across the south-east remains weak. Productivity suffers when journeys are slower, freight is delayed and supply chains are less reliable. Spending decisions should not be judged on crude, per-capita formulas but on whether they reduce congestion, cut journey times, increase productivity, support net zero and strengthen economic resilience. Nowhere is that clearer than on our roads, yet our road network is being allowed to deteriorate. The one-off cost to clear the national road maintenance backlog is estimated to be £16.8 billion, and would take 12 years to complete.
In 2024, the Department for Transport reported that 4% of local A roads, 7% of B and C roads, and 17% of unclassified roads that should have been maintained were not. New Road in Brading in my constituency is closed for one month, and buses will not visit the town, notwithstanding the fact that there is another road and viable route into it. That raises another issue many of our constituents experience: the frustration that when roads do get upgraded, closures are often badly planned and key transport, such as buses, which constituents, particularly those who need to access healthcare or have mobility issues, rely on, is not adequately catered for.
Instead of fixing the roads we already have, the Government’s instinct appears to be to make driving more difficult. Only recently, plans were quietly published on the Government website that encourage narrower roads, under guidance from Active Travel England. Narrower roads risk slowing traffic, increasing congestion, making overtaking more dangerous, delaying emergency services and inflaming tensions between motorists and cyclists. That is not pragmatic transport policy, and it risks costing the economy billions of pounds. As Edmund King of the AA rightly said, UK roads
“have evolved since Roman times”
and they
“require…give and take which can’t just be ironed out by regulations.”
Those plans come on top of decisions such as the introduction of charges at the Blackwall tunnel after nearly 130 years of free use, which is yet another example of the Mayor of London making it more expensive and difficult to drive, particularly affecting those with no realistic alternative. Motorists already feel heavily taxed, heavily restricted and increasingly ignored.
Turning to rail, East West Rail is a project that both Labour and the Conservative party have supported and funded in principle, but delivery has been painfully slow and deeply disappointing. Despite being completed in late 2024, services remain unused; East West Rail has admitted to the most basic of design failures. The Government have set out their support for East West Rail, but prospective passengers understandably want the service now. In October 2025, the answer the Department for Transport gave to a parliamentary question from my right hon. Friend the Member for Basildon and Billericay (Mr Holden) offered no clear timetable. Passenger services to Bedford are now not expected until 2030, with Oxford to Cambridge services delayed until the mid-2030s. That is not the progress that our constituents want and deserve.
I will again touch briefly on maritime transport. The Government have proposed that they support my constituents to access cheaper, more reliable ferry travel by setting up a local group with an independent chair appointed by the Department for Transport, which is progress, and which I welcome. However, at the same time, the Government are putting cost on to the Isle of Wight through their emissions trading scheme. That is not an example of the mission-led Government they claim to be, nor an example of joined-up Government. They have exempted ferries to Scottish islands from the scheme, and that is an example of the pervasive view that the south-east will somehow cope, where other parts of the United Kingdom should have a special exemption.
Ports and ferry routes in the south-east are critical national assets, yet ferry services remain uniquely under-regulated and expensive. Rail and bus operators face obligations on pricing, performance and transparency, but ferry operators do not. Cross-Solent ferry operators are unregulated and controlled by private equity interests that fund overseas pension funds. That would not be acceptable in any other form of public transport, and it should not acceptable in ferry transport. That imbalance harms communities and undermines connectivity.
Integration across road, rail and maritime transport is essential if we are serious about resilience and fairness, and I urge the Government to give the maximum possible powers to new mayoral combined authorities to ensure joined-up, integrated transport, regardless of whether that transport is currently regulated or not. The south-east does not need grand gestures or experiments in public transport. It needs practical spending and proper maintenance directed towards how people actually travel—fix the roads, stop penalising motorists, and deliver infrastructure properly, effectively and efficiently. That is how we will keep the south-east and the UK moving.
The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Transport (Lilian Greenwood)
It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Sir John. I congratulate the hon. Member for Chichester (Jess Brown-Fuller) on securing this debate, and thank all hon. Members for giving us a tour of the south-east and of its residents’ concerns. I welcome this opportunity to highlight all the important work that this Government are doing and have already done to deliver transport improvements in the region.
Of course, we are aware of the importance of the region to the UK and how it helps to drive the country. It adds £200 billion annually to the economy, creates hundreds of thousands of jobs and is home to the nation’s two largest airports, vital port links and more than 300,000 businesses. That is why we have taken important steps to support and enhance transport in the region, backing airport expansion at Gatwick and Heathrow, and committing to deliver the vital lower Thames crossing—the most significant road building scheme in a generation.
I understand hon. Members’ disappointment that two major A27 schemes were cancelled in 2024, as both were rated poor value for money and unaffordable. As hon. Members know, the status of pipeline schemes, including the Chichester bypass, will be confirmed when road investment strategy 3 is published next month.
This Government will be investing over the coming years in major road schemes in the south-east that will bring real benefits to local people, including by unlocking housing, supporting economic growth and tackling local congestion pinch points, which many hon. Members have drawn attention to. We have approved funding for schemes, subject to the necessary business case approvals, in East Sussex, Brighton, north Thanet and Bognor Regis to Littlehampton. In addition, we are also shortly due to announce the outcome of our major road network programme review, which will provide clarity over other major road schemes in the south-east. The new structures fund is intended to deal with precisely the sort of unforeseen problems affecting the constituency of the hon. Member for South Devon (Caroline Voaden).
The Government are also committed to ending years of poor service and fragmentation on the railways by creating a unified and simplified system that puts passengers first, rebuilding trust in the railways and, in doing so, helping to build up local economies. The new passenger watchdog, which is probably being debated at this very moment in the Railways Bill Committee upstairs, will be a powerful champion for rail users and will hold Great British Railways to account. Publicly owned Southeastern is driving forward a £2 million station improvement programme that benefited more than 100 stations between March 2024 and March 2025, and is investing a further £2 million in fleet improvements.
As the hon. Member for Chichester confirmed, the Government froze rail fares this year for the first time in 30 years. I am sure that the Rail Minister will be very familiar with the bottleneck in Croydon and will be happy to write to hon. Members to respond to the points raised, including by the hon. Member for Carshalton and Wallington (Bobby Dean). I am sure that the noble Lord the Rail Minister will also be happy to write to the hon. Member for Guildford (Zöe Franklin) on her station proposals.
This Government have recognised the importance of listening to what local government needs. We are simplifying local transport funding to bring decision making over local transport closer to the people who use it and to empower local leaders to drive change in their communities. We are providing all local transport authorities with multi-year consolidated funding settlements, delivering our commitment in the English devolution White Paper to simplify funding. Those consolidated local transport settlements will give those authorities greater freedom and flexibility to make the strategic decisions that best impact their areas.
I welcome the determination of the hon. Member for Mid Sussex (Alison Bennett) to bang on about potholes. Our roads matter to us all, whether we are drivers, bikers, cyclists or pedestrians, and the previous Government left our roads in a parlous state. That is precisely why the spending review settlement includes a record £7.3 billion investment in local highways maintenance funding over the next four years, including £1.5 billion in the south-east region.
Crucially, that four-year funding certainty gives councils the confidence to plan ahead, move away from costly short-term fixes and invest in proper, preventive treatments that stop potholes forming in the first place. That is a major step towards delivering smoother, safer roads for everyone who depends on them. As my hon. Friends the Members for Ashford (Sojan Joseph) and for Basingstoke (Luke Murphy) noted, the Government’s rating system enables local people to hold their council to account and ensure that they are using the additional funding effectively to make a visible difference to all road users.
We also reaffirmed our commitment to invest in bus services for the long term, confirming more than £3 billion from 2026-27 to 2028-29—including £369 million in the south-east—to support local leaders and bus operators across the country in improving bus services for millions of passengers. We are giving local authorities the power and funding to address precisely the issues that hon. Members have raised: lost services and the need for new routes to serve housing growth.
The Government are also providing funding to investigate the use of franchising in rural areas. That will be combined with our recently announced active travel grant of £626 million across the UK, with more than £133 million going to the south-east; our record investment in the local transport grant, which sees all south-eastern authorities’ funding increase year on year; and electric vehicle infrastructure funding to create a large funding pot for all local transport authorities so they can decide what to spend it on in line with their priorities.
Active Travel England, which the hon. Member for Chichester mentioned, works to support local authorities to improve their capabilities and benefit from the additional funding that we are investing. The hon. Member for Lewes (James MacCleary) said that pavements are for people, and I could not agree more. That is why this Government have acted where the previous one failed to. On 8 January, we announced that we will give local councils new powers to crack down on antisocial pavement parking. I remember, alongside a former Chair of the Transport Committee, looking at some of the problems in his area and on the south coast where parking was not properly enforced.
I also want to pick up on the important concerns about SEND transport raised by the hon. Member for Horsham (John Milne). I am sure he knows that the Department for Education, which leads on that point, is currently carrying out a review of home-to-school transport along with their wider review of SEND. He is right that we need to work across Government to ensure that we make the best use of the funding available.
In conclusion, this has been a wide-ranging debate; I have taken so many notes, and I am trying to pick up as many points as I can, but I am conscious that I will not have addressed every issue raised by hon. Members. I hope I have been able to demonstrate that south-east authorities have been given record amounts of funding to deal with their local transport issues and they have the flexibility to direct that funding towards the things that local people are most concerned about. To help to bring all that together in a coherent approach that sets out our ambitions for transport in the UK, we will shortly be publishing our integrated transport strategy.
I will also mention our recently published road safety strategy. In 2024, 192 people were killed and 4,754 were seriously injured on roads in the south-east. Our ambitious target to reduce the number of people killed or seriously injured on British roads by 65% by 2035 will aim to drive that number down. We want to work in partnership with all authorities and stakeholders in the region. I extend my thanks to the chief constable for Sussex, Jo Shiner, who is also the National Police Chiefs Council lead for roads policing, for her work in enhancing road safety to keep those in the south-east and across Great Britain safe on our roads.
I finish by thanking the hon. Member for Chichester for giving me the opportunity to discuss transport in the south-east region. I apologise that, as the Minister for Local Transport, I am no longer the Minister for Roads—that is my hon. Friend the Member for Wakefield and Rothwell (Simon Lightwood)—but I am sure he will be interested to read this afternoon’s debate and respond to any points that I have missed. He, I, and my ministerial colleagues are always happy to receive invitations to visit hon. Members’ constituencies, and I look forward to future opportunities to see more of this vital and very beautiful region.
Jess Brown-Fuller
I thank the Minister for her comprehensive comments at the end of this debate. I also thank Members from across the House for contributing to a wide-ranging debate on all the topics that touch on transport in the south-east. I am especially glad that the hon. Member for Isle of Wight East (Joe Robertson) was here to talk about ferries; if I am ever in a room with him and he does not mention ferries, something does not feel quite right. I am glad that he had the opportunity to raise his specific concerns relating to the Isle of Wight.
I reflect on how, when they talk about their frustrations, residents are often told that this Government are investing additional money. They talk in large figures that sound incredibly impressive, but when residents cannot see that investment—when they are still sat in traffic, day in, day out; when they are not seeing their local bus services improve or their county council deliver investment into active travel strategies—it leaves a bitter taste in their mouths. All those figures mean nothing when they still cannot travel from A to B and see their mum who lives on the other side of the constituency, get to work or drive their kids to school. When we talk about these transport issues, the figures can sometimes make us lose sight of the impact on people struggling day to day.
Local authorities getting additional money is all well and good. However, we see councils such as West Sussex county council deciding to cling on to power with their very fingertips, cancelling elections twice—two years in a row—meaning that its cabinet will end up serving a seven-year term—that is incredibly frustrating for people in my local area, who do not get the opportunity to hold it to account when it has failed us in addressing the potholes crisis and active travel.
Finally, the Minister mentioned that she would happily visit any constituency, so I extend an invitation to her and the new Roads Minister to come and sit in traffic with me around Chichester. She can come any day: I guarantee I will be able to find us some congestion so that she can see the impact it has on my constituents.
Question put and agreed to.
Resolved,
That this House has considered transport in the South East.
Educational Outcomes: Disadvantaged Boys and Young Men
(1 day, 10 hours ago)
Westminster HallRead Hansard Text Read Debate Ministerial Extracts
Westminster Hall is an alternative Chamber for MPs to hold debates, named after the adjoining Westminster Hall.
Each debate is chaired by an MP from the Panel of Chairs, rather than the Speaker or Deputy Speaker. A Government Minister will give the final speech, and no votes may be called on the debate topic.
This information is provided by Parallel Parliament and does not comprise part of the offical record
Alistair Strathern (Hitchin) (Lab)
I beg to move,
That this House has considered educational outcomes for disadvantaged boys and young men.
It is a pleasure as always to serve under your chairship, Sir John. I am pleased to have secured a debate on this important topic today.
Last week, I had the pleasure of joining some truly inspiring parliamentary colleagues to launch the Labour group for men and boys. The group is based on one simple premise: for too long, the Labour party—and progressives more widely—have not been confident enough to speak directly about some of the specific challenges faced by men and boys growing up in Britain today, and it is time to put that right. The Labour party is rightly proud of its deep traditions in championing equalities causes, and has made great progress in everything from the barriers women have faced in the workplace to accessing the right and appropriate healthcare—and there is far more to do on both of those.
However, at times, that agenda has led to a shyness on our part about being equally confident in speaking up about some of the challenges that men and boys—and particularly disadvantaged men and boys—can face throughout this country. That is simply wrong-headed. It not only does a deep disservice to the men and boys across Britain who are held back by some of those barriers, but leaves the field open to far more toxic voices that seek to pit women’s equality and male advancement in opposition to each other, rather than recognising that they are two sides of the same coin and are deeply progressive causes that, together, any progressive should be comfortable championing.
Within all that, the topic for today’s debate, the achievement of young men—and particularly disadvantaged young men—in education settings across the country, is an important cause. The statistics could not be more stark: the Centre for Social Justice highlighted that across early years settings, when we look at the Government’s target of readiness for school, boys constitute the entirety of the gap to where we would like to be based on their progress. At GCSE level, men achieve on average half a grade lower than their female counterparts, while at A-level, across their best three grades, men will again often achieve a grade and a half lower on average.
Rachel Gilmour (Tiverton and Minehead) (LD)
The west Somerset side of my constituency bears many of the hallmarks of a forgotten coastal community. In Somerset, 7.5% of young men aged 16 and 17 are not in education, employment or training, which is significantly above the national average in England. Does the hon. Member agree that when young people grow up without the educational infrastructure, networks and opportunities that others take for granted, it shapes their outlook profoundly? It is little wonder that that leaves them feeling neglected and undermines their sense of aspiration.
Alistair Strathern
The hon. Member is absolutely spot on. She highlighted a number of important themes that I hope to touch on later in my remarks.
Jim Shannon (Strangford) (DUP)
I commend the hon. Gentleman for bringing this forward. He is absolutely right, and this is a massive issue in Northern Ireland, as I said to him earlier. There are a number of young Protestant males who do not achieve, are disadvantaged when it comes to free school meals and come nowhere close to achieving educational standards. Our Government back home have put a policy in place to try to address that, but does the hon. Gentleman agree that the Minister should work on this matter collectively with the regional Administration? If there is a disadvantage, not just in Northern Ireland but elsewhere, it is time to work on that together.
Alistair Strathern
The hon. Member is right to draw attention to the particular challenge faced by disadvantaged young men. While there has rightly been a lot of focus on challenges holding back all boys and men across education—the Education Committee was due to hold an inquiry into that during the previous Parliament—the compounding impacts of socioeconomic inequality and gender are often less explored.
Alex Easton (North Down) (Ind)
On average, disadvantaged boys are already behind in vocabulary and communication by the time they start school. Does the hon. Gentleman agree that there is an urgent need for a targeted, UK-wide speech, language and communication strategy focused on disadvantaged boys, not just in our constituencies but right across the UK?
Alistair Strathern
The hon. Member is spot on in drawing attention to the fact that a lot of these problems have early roots, and that our interventions must be as focused as the challenges that we are seeking to address.
Boys’ Impact found that when looking at early years settings, only 30% of boys on average seem to be making a good level of progress, compared with 88% of girls who are not eligible for free school meals. When it came to GCSEs and getting grades 5 to 9 in English and maths, Boys’ Impact found that men, particularly from disadvantaged backgrounds and eligible for free school meals, were achieving half the level of those who were not eligible for free school meals.
Chris Bloore (Redditch) (Lab)
Redditch was a town built on unionised workers, needle making, aerospace and engineering, and that heritage matters. Too many boys now leaving schools in my area leave without a clear vocational route into decent jobs. Does my hon. Friend believe that the industrial and skills strategies should be place based, with apprenticeships funding, employer-college partnerships and union involvement, so that education in towns such as Redditch can lead directly to rewarding jobs?
Alistair Strathern
I completely agree. I know that my hon. Friend is a big champion of some of these issues, for the benefit of Redditch and well beyond. Some of the important steps that he has highlighted are fundamental to tackling some of the challenges that we are looking to address here today.
It is clear that there is a case for action, but what should we be doing? It is regrettable that although the Education Committee intended to set up an inquiry into this issue in the last Parliament, that has yet to be picked back up in this Parliament. I think a renewed focus by the Select Committee on this topic would be especially welcome, particularly if it explored where the compounding impact of socioeconomic factors, along with gender, is further holding back young men and boys across education. But we should not need to wait for any such inquiry to act. Given the wealth of evidence that we have been talking about today and that other Members have thought to highlight, it is important that the Government set out their own plan and strategy to treat this priority with the urgency that it deserves.
Adam Dance (Yeovil) (LD)
About 90% of children in higher-income households can get a dyslexia diagnosis when needed, compared with only 43% in lower-income households. Does the hon. Member agree that not identifying neurodiversity has a huge impact on education outcomes for disadvantaged young boys and, to start changing that, we must roll out universal screening for neurodiversity to all primary school-aged children?
Alistair Strathern
The hon. Member is spot on in highlighting the fact that, particularly when we are talking about boys’ lack of achievement, ensuring that we identify the full suite of needs they have early and put in place appropriate interventions is vital. It is an often overlooked fact that 70% of young people with education, health and care plans across the country are boys. The gendered aspect to some of the special educational needs and disabilities challenges faced right across the education system will be fundamental to ensuring that we get our reform agenda right.
The heartening thing for the Government should be that there is lots of good practice to build on. When I look back to my own time in teaching, which I assure you, Sir John, was not a catalogue of universal great practice to be learned from, and think about some of the young men where I was able to have the impact I wanted, it came down fundamentally to one thing—the quality of the relationship I was able to build with them. That observation might seem so simple as to be banal, but in Westminster discourse and in policy making, we can often overlook this simple fact. When dealing with vulnerable and isolated young men, who often feel quite alienated, relationships are everything.
Luke Murphy (Basingstoke) (Lab)
Will my hon. Friend join me in paying tribute to Chris Edwards and Peter Beeching at Brighton Hill community school in my constituency? They have set up the GOAT Boys scheme—the greatest of all the boys’ schemes—standing for growth, ownership, attitude and tenacity. It is a mentoring scheme designed to tackle that very issue—to ensure that every child has a trusted adult outside their family, to build resilience, purpose and connection and help to tackle the educational attainment gap, which this debate is all about. Will my hon. Friend join me in endorsing schemes such as that? It has already signed up 70 pupils locally and 50 schools nationally. Would he encourage similar schemes elsewhere?
Alistair Strathern
Absolutely. My hon. Friend makes a really important point. It was a real pleasure to meet Chris, his constituent, at an event as part of the Lost Boys Taskforce work earlier in the year. They are doing really inspiring things. I hope that together we can better showcase those and build on some of the successes we have already seen in relation to the Government’s youth strategy, which recognises the importance of trusted adults at its heart.
Carla Lockhart (Upper Bann) (DUP)
The hon. Member is making a really powerful speech. Even one intentional male role model can transform boys’ engagement at school, yet 2.5 million children in the UK grow up without a father figure. The “Lost Boys” report from the Centre for Social Justice shows boys falling behind girls at every stage of education, with Northern Ireland facing very stark outcomes. Does the hon. Member agree that there is a need to promote more role models, so that boys can thrive in education and beyond?
Alistair Strathern
The hon. Member puts the point incredibly well, and I hope to be able to touch later on some of the powerful schemes available to already deliver some of these role models. They do not always have to be parents; that is not always going to be available for every child we seek to support.
When we consider these vulnerable young men, it is sometimes little wonder that they feel mistrustful and alienated from the system. They have reasons for that. All too often, media and social discourse can paint them sometimes as problems or, even worse, as abusers in waiting rather than recognising the real strength and assets they could be and often are to our communities. Indeed, research by Boys’ Impact found that those narratives can be incredibly pervasive in media commentary about young men’s achievements and, worse still, are believed by a significant minority of teaching staff, too, with all the impact we would then expect in terms of how comfortable young people feel in those classrooms, and their sense of belonging and willingness to engage.
We have to put this right. We need to put a strength-based relational model connecting with young men across the education system back at the heart of our work. There have been some really good examples of delivering that already, not just those already mentioned by hon. Members. It has been a real privilege to work with groups such as Football Beyond Borders and Beyond Equality to see at first hand the inspiring work they are already doing in schools across the country to demonstrate the impact that relational practice can have, giving young men space to define and talk through on their own terms what it is to be a man in Britain today, and what their aspirations for a good, progressive life could look like.
It is little wonder, seeing the incredibly moving and powerful impact that these interventions can have, that they have been held by so many school leaders, but the really important thing to note is that these interventions are scalable. Boys’ Impact has shown through its 16 hubs across the country, working with hundreds of educational leaders and organisations, that by rolling out strength-based relational approaches to working with disaffected and disadvantaged young boys, we can have really powerful impacts, improving attainment, attendance and a sense of belonging. We should consider and learn from that as part of our wider approach to curriculum reform and the schools White Paper.
It should not just be the mindset that we need to change. We also need to learn from specific interventions that can have a meaningful impact. Other Members have rightly highlighted the importance of role models. When working with disaffected young men, we know that family figures, father figures and community figures can have powerful impacts in transforming their life chances for the better. That is why we should look to learn from models like Australia’s powerful dads’ clubs, which convened dads across 250 schools in Australia to provide greater support, greater engagement in their child’s learning and activities such as read-along clubs and after-school sessions, which help support fathers to take a more active role in their child’s development, with all the powerful impacts based on the Fatherhood Institute’s work that we would expect for that young person’s attainment, achievement and sense of self.
It is important to recognise that not every young person will have a father figure available to them, but the encouraging thing is that it should not matter when it comes to establishing positive male role models. Lads Need Dads is already doing inspiring mentoring work in schools across the country to show the value of bringing in volunteers to work as peer mentors for young men, particularly with a focus on literacy. At a time when we know that reading for pleasure is far less common among young men than it is among women, and literacy is so important for underpinning so much of success in early years and beyond, those types of interventions have shown that it can be a powerful tool in driving up literacy and engagement with reading among young men, and also improving young men’s own sense of self and belonging by providing them with that important male role model as an effective peer mentor.
The Government’s wider work to encourage more male role models in early years settings and primary settings is to be encouraged. We know the gender disparity in workforces has been allowed to fly under the radar for far too long, so I am glad to see it achieving a central role in the new workforce strategy, but we need to build on that. We also need to recognise that there are a wider range of factors that can sometimes hold back boys’ success. As Richard Reeves put it, sometimes when dealing with young people, particularly at an early age, rather than seeking to address their needs we can simply see them as “malfunctioning girls”.
The Institute for the Science of Early Years rightly points out that when young people, particularly very young people, lack access to the exercise and activities they sometimes need to burn off steam as young men, it can lead to their misbehaving in ways that are too often construed as misbehaviour, rather than actually just simple failures to self-regulate. Again, there are lots of interventions in early years and primary settings that are leading the way in showing how we can address this. Greater use of outdoor active learning and daily miles have been shown in primary and earlier settings to help improve boys’ sense of belonging, behaviour and engagement. As we think further about how we can forensically break down these barriers for young boys’ achievement, I would like to make sure we consider those tools, too, as part of our work in early years and primary settings to make sure we really are setting up every young man to succeed.
I could go on for far longer than I have time for today, talking about examples of great practice. It has been inspiring to hear so many examples from colleagues in the room. There is a wealth of evidence out there. It is deeply compelling about the need to act, so we have simply no excuse not to. I hope I have left the Chamber today in no doubt about the urgency of the issue and the need to address it, but also no doubt about the fact that it is a deeply progressive cause that Labour colleagues should feel a real strength in championing. It is central to our mission to break down barriers for disadvantaged young people who would otherwise be set up to succeed, which is the underlying reason why I am a Labour politician. We have a great chance to put things right. Inspiring colleagues from across the House are looking to support us, and I look forward to working with the Minister to make sure we succeed.
Sir John Hayes (in the Chair)
We will now hear brief contributions from a couple of Back Benchers who have gone through the proper process and notified both the mover of the motion and the Minister.
Leigh Ingham (Stafford) (Lab)
It is an honour to serve under your chairship, Sir John. I congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for Hitchin (Alistair Strathern) on securing this incredibly important debate.
Education should be the great leveller in this country, but for too many disadvantaged boys and young men it is drastically falling short. I was genuinely shocked by how poorly boys in Staffordshire are doing, particularly once they reach secondary school, but the warning signs start early. At the end of primary school, 79% of boys meet the expected standard in science, compared with 86% of girls. Although the gap sounds small on paper, it is the start of a stark trajectory that we see repeated again and again as boys move through their education. By the time they reach their GCSEs, the picture is deeply concerning. In 2024, just 36.3% of Staffordshire boys achieved grade 5 or above in English or maths, and that figure had fallen from the year before. Behind every single one of those percentage point drops is a young man whose life, aspirations, opportunities and future are being narrowed.
Research from the Higher Education Policy Institute shows that boys who fall behind in education are more likely not only to struggle at school but to face poorer outcomes in life. Boys who disengage from education are less likely to progress into further or higher education, and are more likely to experience economic inactivity. The report also warns that a combination of underachievement, weak employment prospects—which my hon. Friend spoke about—and social marginalisation can leave some young men more vulnerable to political alienation.
When boys struggle with learning, their difficulties are too often labelled as behavioural problems, leading to sanctions instead of support and a widening of the gaps. Targeted support too often arrives late, once the disadvantage has become entrenched. I ask the Minister, what more is being done to identify and support disadvantaged boys early, before those small gaps turn into lifelong barriers?
Disadvantaged boys and young men have talent and potential in abundance. If we care about boys’ education, we must stop being surprised—like I was—by those outcomes, and start acting earlier and more robustly.
Jodie Gosling (Nuneaton) (Lab)
It is a pleasure to serve under your chairship, Sir John. I thank my hon. Friend the Member for Hitchin (Alistair Strathern) for securing this debate and allowing me two minutes to speak.
I was a primary school teacher for 25 years and an early years practitioner, and I have seen very young children become disengaged with education—especially boys, who are already on a pathway to not showing us what they are capable of. Part of my role was to be a forest school leader, and I worked with small groups of challenging boys who were causing disruption in classrooms—not learning, and disrupting the learning of others. We used to work outside, building ambition, resilience and concentration through physical work, tree climbing and exploring. The boys and girls in the forest school—although it was predominantly boys—were given a sense of autonomy over their learning and control of their lives. The transformation of those disadvantaged children was significant. Teachers in the classroom afterwards said that their concentration, behaviour, attainment and even attendance had improved while they were taking part in those courses.
I attended Harrogate Army foundation college with the armed forces parliamentary scheme, and was absolutely blown away by the stories of 16 and 17-year-olds—predominantly boys—who told me that they had dropped out of school, sometimes years ago, had no GCSEs, spent their days playing games, watching YouTube or getting into a bit of bother, and now were up at 6 and passing exams. They had never considered that possible, and they were physically fitter than they had ever dreamed. There are many studies linking physical activities such as running and forest school to better attainment and improved concentration.
I agree with my hon. Friend the Member for Hitchin. Does the Minister believe that in order to address the decades-old issues with the gaps in boys’ attainment, we need to consider evidence from when they have engaged and succeeded, and reconsider the environment in which we are asking them to learn by taking a more creative approach to education that meets their emotional and physical needs?
The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Education (Olivia Bailey)
It is an honour to serve under your chairship, Sir John. As the mum of two boys—and two boys with two mums—I express my gratitude to my hon. Friend the Member for Hitchin (Alistair Strathern) for securing this valuable debate. His powerful speech made a clear case for the importance of supporting boys to succeed in our education system. I congratulate him on the launch of his new group on men and boys and hear his powerful argument that this is a progressive cause. I have no doubt that he was an excellent teacher and role model for the boys in his class. He made lots of powerful arguments in his speech, including about the importance of strength-based relational work when talking about Football Beyond Borders, Beyond Equality and Boys’ Impact.
My hon. Friend the Member for Basingstoke (Luke Murphy) talked about the GOAT Boys scheme as another good example of work that is happening across our country, and my hon. Friend the Member for Stafford (Leigh Ingham) made a powerful argument about the importance of early support for disadvantaged boys. Boys deserve that support early, and should not just be discounted as having behavioural problems. My hon. Friend the Member for Nuneaton (Jodie Gosling) talked about the importance of physical activity and the importance of the fantastic scheme that she visited for the armed forces where young boys who have dropped out of school have found the opportunity to contribute and find their place in the world. I thank everyone for their contributions.
We know that there are far too many inequalities in our education system and we have heard today some of the data about working-class boys. Removing barriers to opportunity in education is the driving purpose of my Department. This Government stand for excellence everywhere across education and care, for every child to break the unfair link between background and success, and to deliver opportunity for all. The foundation of our mission is to ensure that every child has the best start in life because, as we have heard today, what happens in children’s earliest years makes the biggest difference to their life chances. On average, 40% of the overall gap between disadvantaged 16-year-olds and their peers had already emerged by the age of five. Higher proportions of girls achieve a good level of development at the end of reception year compared to boys.
In our plan for change, we set an ambitious milestone for this Government: that 75% of children—a record number—will start school ready to learn by 2028. Our “giving every child the best start in life” strategy sets out the immediate steps to do that: making early education and childcare more accessible, improving quality in early education and reception classes, and expanding and strengthening family services.
Once young boys are in school, every child and young person deserves an education that meets their needs—one that is academically stretching, where they feel like they belong and have the opportunity to achieve and thrive no matter their background. However, we know that the current school system is not working for all pupils. Too many are not being included, particularly working-class children, children with special educational needs and disabilities, and every child who could be stretched to go further. That needs to change, which is why our upcoming schools White Paper will set out our vision for a system that delivers educational excellence for each and every child.
My hon. Friend the Member for Hitchin has asked for a strategy for boys in the educational system, and I am sure that the Minister for School Standards would be happy to meet with him to understand how our vision can best support boys to succeed in school. One area where we are really keen to encourage the participation of boys is our National Year of Reading. That campaign is aimed at everyone, because the decline in reading enjoyment is an issue across all sectors of society. However, there is a focus on boys aged 10 to 16, as data shows that only one in four boys say that they enjoy reading. To help reach teenage boys effectively, we have recruited a wide range of celebrity ambassadors and partners who many boys follow and engage with. That is alongside £28 million that we have committed to drive standards in reading and writing, particularly for those who need the most support, including boys, who underperform in English.
My hon. Friend the Member for Hitchin also spoke about the importance of role models, and what better role model is there than an inspirational teacher? As part of our drive to recruit 6,500 expert teachers, we are particularly keen to see more male teachers teaching, guiding and leading the boys in their classrooms. We want the profession to attract excellent male teachers who stay and thrive. Of course, that is just as important in the early years, too.
It is also important that we support boys to have strong mental health and a broad and positive understanding of masculinity. As part of that work, we will provide access to specialist mental health professionals in every school by expanding mental health support teams. That will give every child and young person access to early support to address problems before they escalate. Our revised relationships, sex and health education guidance also supports pupils to challenge harmful gender stereotypes.
When our young people leave school, we remain determined to break down barriers to opportunity and widen access to high-quality education and training. That includes our renewed focus on young people who are not in education, employment or training, where we know that the proportion of young men aged 16 to 17 has been higher than that of young women. That is one reason why £34 million has been committed to the NEET prevention package set out in the post-16 education and skills White Paper, including a new risk of NEET indicator tool to help local areas identify and support young people before they disengage. That is backed up by the Government’s £820 million investment in the youth guarantee to support young people to develop skills, access opportunities and transition into meaningful employment.
In closing the debate, I would like to underline this Government’s commitment to breaking down barriers for all and ensuring that all disadvantaged boys and young men receive the support, education and opportunities they deserve. Once again, I thank my hon. Friend the Member for Hitchin for introducing this important debate, and all my other colleagues for their excellent contributions.
Question put and agreed to.
Animals in Science Regulation Unit: Annual Report 2024
(1 day, 10 hours ago)
Westminster HallRead Hansard Text Read Debate Ministerial Extracts
Westminster Hall is an alternative Chamber for MPs to hold debates, named after the adjoining Westminster Hall.
Each debate is chaired by an MP from the Panel of Chairs, rather than the Speaker or Deputy Speaker. A Government Minister will give the final speech, and no votes may be called on the debate topic.
This information is provided by Parallel Parliament and does not comprise part of the offical record
Seamus Logan (Aberdeenshire North and Moray East) (SNP)
I beg to move,
That this House has considered the Animals in Science Regulation Unit annual report 2024.
It is always a pleasure to serve under you, Sir John, and it is a pleasure to introduce this debate. It concerns the use of animals in scientific research and the most recent Animals in Science Regulation Unit annual report for 2024, which was published in December 2025. The subject is important to me, to many of my constituents and possibly to up to half the population of these islands who have the pleasure—nay, the privilege—of sharing their lives with a pet.
I pay tribute to the work of the hon. Member for North Ayrshire and Arran (Irene Campbell), who leads the all-party parliamentary group on phasing out animal experiments in medical research, as well as to the work of Animal Free Research UK and its chief executive, Carla Owen, who is in the Public Gallery and was behind the Herbie’s law campaign. Herbie has unfortunately passed, but the campaign lives on. I also want to thank Cruelty Free International, which continues to champion the ending of animal research worldwide.
In this debate, I want to focus on the weak oversight of the regulations, which has led to shocking failures to protect animals from undue suffering; that has been highlighted in the Home Office report. The findings show just how much we are failing to prevent animals from suffering when they are used in scientific experiments, due to the incidence of non-compliance with the law or with licence conditions. The report focuses on numerous incidents from across 2024, which sadly included animals that have starved to death or drowned. Other animals were put into waste bags by mistake and others were kept alive beyond humane endpoints. The incidents in the report make for upsetting reading. I am a supporter of phasing out animal experimentation in medical research, and I believe this transition should be completed urgently. The very least we can do in the meantime for those animals used in laboratories is to ensure their welfare and minimise their suffering.
It is important to put the issue in context. In 2024, 2.64 million procedures using animals took place in UK labs: five animals used in research every minute of every day, representing a decrease of only 1.21% from 2023.
Alex Easton (North Down) (Ind)
Given the more than 2.6 million procedures and the small year-on-year decrease, does not progress on replacing the use of animals in science remain only incremental? What is needed is a truly transformational shift. Does the hon. Member accept that, unless urgent and ambitious progress is made, public confidence will continue to be undermined on this issue?
Seamus Logan
I completely agree; that is the point that I am trying to draw out.
There were 2,646 procedures on dogs and 1,936 on non-human primates. Examples include non-human primates being subjected to invasive brain surgery and deprived of fluid to induce them to perform behavioural tasks and mice being given psychostimulant rewards such as cocaine or amphetamines—and this, under licence conditions. However, the ASRU report highlighted instances in which compliance with these licence conditions was not followed; there have been failures to provide adequate care and failure to provide food and water, which are the most basic welfare needs of animals being held in laboratories across the UK.
In one very distressing incident, it is reported that a mother was removed from its cage and killed, resulting in unweaned pups starving to death. In 2024, there were 146 cases of non-compliance in British laboratories, a 16% decrease from the 169 cases reported in 2023.
Jim Shannon (Strangford) (DUP)
I commend the hon. Member for rightly bringing us this debate. He is right to say that many people are concerned. Between 2018 and 2022, only 12% of animal welfare convictions in Northern Ireland resulted in a custodial sentence. Councils and enforcement bodies need greater funding to gather evidence, because evidence is critical for successful prosecutions. Does he agree that one takeaway from the report he refers to is that we can and should do more to protect animal welfare where possible, and the Government need to raise the priority for it?
Seamus Logan
I completely agree, although the hon. Member is addressing the wider issue of animal welfare, while my focus today is on this report. Nevertheless, he is absolutely right.
I was talking about non-compliance. The cases involved more than 22,000 animals, including mice, rats, fish, cows, sheep, frogs, guinea pigs, bats, dogs, non-human primates, cats, a hamster and a rabbit. I might add that those are the reported incidents; 68 establishment audits were conducted for the report but only 3% of cases of non-compliance were identified by audits and 69% were self-reported. That can hardly be described as a robust inspection system. In 75% of cases—three quarters—the only sanction was “inspector advice”.
The ASRU is responsible for licensing animal experiments in the UK, to protect animals in science and ensure compliance with the Animals (Scientific Procedures) Act 1986. That means following the principles known as the three Rs: replacement, reduction and refinement. In other words, use non-animal methods where possible, reduce the number used to a minimum and refine procedures to minimise suffering. I know from visits undertaken by the APPG, which I referred to earlier, that there is a growing use of laboratory-grown human tissue in experimentation, which we need to support as parliamentarians.
The UK Government have stated:
“The Home Office is in the final stages of delivering a comprehensive programme of regulatory reform to further strengthen the Animals in Science Regulation Unit (ASRU), ensuring confidence in the regulatory system and maintaining robust compliance with the Animals (Scientific Procedures) Act 1986.”
Those reforms include increasing the number of full-time inspectors by March this year, but I would argue that that internal reform does not go far enough. The incidence of non-compliance shows that increasing the number of inspectors alone may not result in meaningful change.
I mentioned that 2.64 million procedures are taking place each year. We cannot rely solely on a few more full-time inspectors to turn the situation around; I note that the Minister is listening carefully to what I am saying. Labour’s publication last November of its strategy to support the development, validation and uptake of alternatives to the use of animals in science is very welcome, but meaningful change will not occur without a series of more robust measures.
I believe that the difficulty is that the UK is in danger of falling behind other international partners—in the European Union and, interestingly, in the US, which is speeding forward within three to five years to remove the requirement for animals to be used in research. It is strange that we appear to be falling behind internationally in this instance. Although the strategy is committed to increasing funding for human-specific technologies, founding a UK centre for the validation of alternative methods and setting up a cross-Government ministerial Committee to oversee implementation, it contains no timeline for phasing out all animal experiments.
We on the APPG on phasing out animal experiments have discussed implementing Herbie’s law as a practical pathway to phase out animal testing, in collaboration with the scientific community. Legal experts have prepared a draft of Herbie’s law, entitled the human-specific technologies bill, describing how Government could ensure progress and how scientists could be supported, with detail on setting up an expert advisory committee to give specialist advice on animal replacement. I think I speak for many attending the debate when I say that we are keen to see an end to animal suffering in medical research.
The ASRU report’s findings are a stark reminder of what is at stake for animals when the law is broken, when licence conditions are not followed or when measures to ensure compliance are not as robust as they could be. The UK has an opportunity not only to secure our position as a global leader in animal protection and scientific innovation, but to end animal suffering in scientific research. That can be ensured only through a full transition from animal experimentation across the next decade. The ASRU report is a stark reminder that until that transition is in place, we will continue to fail animals in laboratories across the UK.
Several hon. Members rose—
Sir John Hayes (in the Chair)
Order. I remind hon. Members that they should bob, but I can see that four Members already know that.
Ruth Jones (Newport West and Islwyn) (Lab)
It is a real pleasure to serve under your chairmanship this afternoon, Sir John. I pay tribute to the hon. Member for Aberdeenshire North and Moray East (Seamus Logan) for securing this important debate.
As the hon. Gentleman said, the 2024 annual report of the ASRU makes for very grim reading. The 146 reported cases of non-compliance with the legal requirements of licensing conditions highlight an ongoing failure to prevent appalling animal suffering in laboratories. As he said, those include extreme cases of animals drowning or starving to death. It is shocking that the ASRU continues to grant scientific licences to allow animals to be deliberately deprived of food and water.
Other worrisome incidents include cases of two cats and four dogs being kept in substandard facilities, including a pen that was too small, and another dog that was kept alive longer than authorised, resulting in significant unnecessary suffering. Two primates were also reported to have been left without food overnight, and another two were injured while caged. In total, the ASRU report identified at least 542 animals dying or being euthanised following issues of non-compliance.
The report’s detailed accounts of the suffering of 22,000 animals is in stark contrast to our much-lauded identity as a nation of animal lovers. Our national reputation as a world leader on animal welfare legislation, particularly in relation to the use of animals in science, is in real jeopardy. As the hon. Gentleman highlighted, we are falling behind.
Despite its content, I welcome the report. If Britain is to remain a world leader on animal welfare, transparency around breaches of animal welfare standards is critical. It ensures accountability and allows both the public and lawmakers to routinely assess the adequacy of existing enforcement. Having read the report, I can only conclude that the ASRU is in urgent need of reform. Despite issuing 15,626 licences at the end of 2024, the ASRU had only 8.2 full-time equivalent inspectors. With the number of licences granted per inspector at its highest since 2012, there are serious concerns about the capacity of the ASRU to ensure effective compliance. Just 68 establishments were inspected in 2024, and only 10 of those inspections were unannounced. What steps are the Government taking to reform the ASRU and improve the resourcing of its audits?
With 69% of non-compliance incidents in 2024 being self-reported, I worry that the extent of welfare breaches goes far beyond this, and I worry about the culture in our scientific institutions around safeguarding animal welfare and preventing undue suffering. I would be grateful if the Minister could reflect on this pattern of self-reporting and outline what steps the Government are taking to support a culture of safeguarding animal welfare in licensed organisations.
The adage that prevention is better than cure fits well here. Although enforcement needs strengthening and is an ongoing concern, the best way to manage the risks to animals through non-compliance is to stop animals from being used in scientific testing. As the hon. Gentleman said, the three Rs—replacement, reduction and refinement —are already a legal requirement under the Animals (Scientific Procedures) Act. Nevertheless, the embedding of this approach needs strengthening.
I welcome the Government’s new “Replacing animals in science” strategy and its recognition of the need to strengthen the ethical review approval process to ensure that animals are used only when there is no alternative, in line with the findings of the Rawle report. The commitments in the strategy are ambitious, but we can go further. Embedding in the law the targets to phase out routine tests, prioritised as parts of baskets 1 and 2, would provide absolute certainty to both the scientific community and campaigners of our commitment to end the use of animals in testing. Such a step could also crowd in wider investment in UK scientific research, strengthening our position as a global leader in the development of animal-free testing methods. I therefore urge the Minister to commit to introducing Herbie’s law and enshrining the targets committed to in recent strategies in legislation.
The 2024 report must be a catalyst for change. We must bear down on those who continue to neglect their responsibilities to uphold animal welfare with better enforcement and harsher penalties. While doing that, we cannot and should not neglect the fact that the only long-term solution to this avoidable suffering is to end animal testing once and for all.
Brian Leishman (Alloa and Grangemouth) (Lab)
It is a pleasure to serve with you in the Chair, Sir John. I thank the hon. Member for Aberdeenshire North and Moray East (Seamus Logan) for securing this debate. I add my appreciation to everyone he mentioned at the start of his excellent speech. I do not know of a bigger animal lover than my hon. Friend the Member for North Ayrshire and Arran (Irene Campbell) and I thank her for all the work that she does with her excellent APPG.
As I said in a different debate yesterday, everything comes down to:
“what kind of society do we want to live in?”—[Official Report, 2 February 2026; Vol. 780, c. 17WH.]
This topic is no different.
Currently, we live in a country that tolerates and sanctions experimentations that lead to pain, mutilation, intense suffering and, ultimately, the grotesque and very avoidable deaths of animals in laboratories. Over 2.6 million scientific procedures involving living animals were carried out in the UK in 2024. That figure shocked me. It is utterly appalling. Like the Minister answering for the Government here today, as Labour candidates, we stood on a manifesto that committed to working towards phasing out animal testing. However, in 2025 it was approved that over 5 million animals would be used in experiments over the coming years. That simply has to change.
In a debate last week I made an intervention regarding passing Herbie’s law. If we are going to meet our manifesto commitment, passing Herbie’s law really is a must. We should move towards more modern, relevant and human-specific technologies for both the animals’ sake and for people needing treatment or who will do so in future.
As I said, it is a question of what kind of society we want to live in. The moral case is surely reason enough. It is basic human decency to know that there should be an end to animal experimentation. As with everything, for things to change for the better, there must be the political will to make it so. I implore the Minister and our Government to get behind Herbie’s law. It is the right thing for the animals, it is popular and by adopting it we would be making a genuine difference and change the country for the better.
Irene Campbell (North Ayrshire and Arran) (Lab)
It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Sir John. I thank the hon. Member for Aberdeenshire North and Moray East (Seamus Logan) for securing this important debate and setting out the arguments so well.
I declare my interest as chair of the APPG on phasing out animal experiments in medical research. As some Members may already know, I have been a vegan since 1993, and this is a topic that I feel very passionate about. I have spoken on this issue several times and it does not get any easier. In a previous debate on testing on dogs, I quoted a debate from 1927, in which it was said:
“Experiments on dogs may now be discontinued. All that can be found out by physiological experiments for application to human beings has long since been discovered, and repetitions are unnecessary and cruel.”—[Official Report, 29 April 1927; Vol. 205, c. 1237.]
It is sad to think that we are still debating this topic almost 100 years later.
As a Scottish MP, I was particularly concerned to see that in 2024 over 200,000 experiments were carried out on animals in Scotland. That was an 8.2% decrease from the previous year. However, it compares to Wales, which had a 16.7% decrease in experiments from 2023. Although I welcome the decreases, they must definitely be much quicker.
As we have heard today, the Animals in Science Regulation Unit report from 2024, showed that 189 animals experienced adverse welfare outcomes; 54 of those cases were due to failure to provide adequate care, and nine were due to failure to provide food and water, sometimes for up to five days. Those cases of non-compliance are particularly concerning, and we also need to look at how well standards are being enforced in testing facilities—as we have heard already today. Given that almost 70% of cases were self-reported, this just is not good enough. We must look at another way of doing this.
I was glad to see the Government’s strategy on replacing animals in science come out last November. In particular, I welcome the £75 million of funding for new testing methods and the establishment of a UK centre for the validation of alternative methods. However, I was disappointed to see missed opportunities around, for example, the forced swim test and the LD50 test. It is vital that timelines are introduced to enable a true phasing out of animals in medical research. I am looking forward to hearing the Minister’s response.
Navendu Mishra (Stockport) (Lab)
It is a pleasure to serve in this debate with you in the Chair, Sir John. I thank the hon. Member for Aberdeenshire North and Moray East (Seamus Logan) for securing this debate. We come from different political traditions, but on animal testing we are united.
I often receive emails and letters in my constituency inbox about animal rights and animal testing. It is an issue that is important to the people of Stockport. I am the last Back-Bench speaker in the debate, and all the points I wanted to make have already been covered, so I will keep my remarks brief. I thank my hon. Friend the Member for North Ayrshire and Arran (Irene Campbell), who is a good friend, for all the work she does on this issue. Sir John, I invite you to join the plant-based parliamentary group she runs in addition to all the other work she does for her constituency and her APPG roles. I am sure you would be very welcome at the next meeting.
Sadly, the reality is that in 2024, 2.64 million scientific procedures involving living animals were carried out in Britain, including 2,646 procedures on dogs and almost 2,000—1,936—procedures on non-human primates. These figures are significant, and they are the figures we know about. Because of the lack of resources, many—including myself—would argue that more procedures and testing may be going on illegally that we do not know about. This is an important issue.
I am proud to have been a Labour candidate in the 2017, 2019 and 2024 general elections. We stood on a manifesto commitment to work towards phasing out animal testing. Sadly, in 2025, almost 5 million animals were approved for experiments in the coming years. The Government need to pay attention to this issue and prioritise tackling it.
The point about Herbie’s law has been reiterated by pretty much everyone who has spoken. The Government should work towards introducing that law in legislation as soon as possible, without delay. All 650 MPs in this House of Commons would be proud of Britain’s heritage when it comes to innovation, medical research and technological research. We should harness that for animal-free and humane testing. The UK has an opportunity to be a global leader in this field and to cut out the senseless suffering that goes on. More than 92% of drugs that show promise in animal testing currently fail to meet clinical tests and benefit patients, mostly for reasons of poor efficacy and safety that were not predicted by animal testing.
I place on the record in Hansard my thanks to Animal Free Research UK, the charity that has done so much work on this issue. I am in the process of reading a fantastic book called “Rat Trap” by Dr Pandora Pound, who is involved in the Safer Medicines Trust. I look forward to learning more about the work that organisation is doing. Once again, this debate is important. The figures are quite stark and I hope the Government will take urgent action.
Ben Maguire (North Cornwall) (LD)
As always, it is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Sir John. I congratulate the hon. Member for Aberdeenshire North and Moray East (Seamus Logan) on securing this really important debate today. I congratulate all the speakers who have participated. I thought they all made powerful and useful contributions to the debate.
The hon. Member for Aberdeenshire North and Moray East powerfully highlighted some of the horrific and unacceptable treatment of animals in research. The Liberal Democrats are champions of animal rights, and I am proud to speak on behalf of the hundreds of animal rights campaigners from my constituency today. I must add a special mention of my constituent from Bude, Steph Jones-Giles, who is a true animal rights champion and has spoken to me about this on many occasions. I see Isobel Martin from Animal Free Research UK in the Gallery; she is also an excellent advocate on this issue.
Fundamentally, Liberal Democrats believe that this country should expect only the absolute highest standards of animal welfare in the scientific experimentation and cosmetic industries. We want to get this country back on track as a world leader in this area and take concrete steps to raise animal welfare standards and get the balance right. The latest annual report by the Animals in Science Regulation Unit, the subject of our debate, shows a number of welcome steps and intentions facing the right direction of travel. It rightly places a strong focus on avoiding the use of animals in scientific testing wherever possible.
I am proud that we Liberal Democrats are at the forefront of raising these issues. Lord Clement-Jones, a colleague from the other place, is applying the right pressure to ensure that regulation in this area remains precise and adequate, with encouragement to properly prevent and punish any non-compliance that causes undue harm to animals, which has been mentioned by many hon. Members today. However, it is alarming to read, in the latest report, of the 146 cases of non-compliance in 2024. As many Members have pointed out, those are only the cases that have been reported. Although marking a drop in cases compared to the previous year, those were largely failures to provide proper care such as food and water to the animals being tested on, as we have heard, and to adhere to the strict licence conditions.
Those countless cases of malpractice involved more than 22,000 individual animals, with most being mice. It is a truly shameful statistic. In October 2024, the Regulation Unit made some welcome reforms by increasing their team of full-time inspectors and establishing a new governance board for the unit for greater oversight, which has made a welcome and positive impact.
On a wider point, I am proud to have voted against the draconian measures that were put before the House just over two weeks ago, along with my Liberal Democrat colleagues. We stood firm against expansion of the Public Order Act 2023, which bans legitimate and peaceful animal rights protests and criminalises those activists demanding better welfare for animals involved in testing. I reiterate that once more: I am talking about peaceful campaigners who are raising genuine ethical concerns being treated like terrorists under the guise of threats to our national security. Time and time again in years gone by, the Conservative party undermined our right to peaceful protest by introducing sweeping, overreaching powers that go far beyond what is needed to maintain public safety. The police already had strong powers to deal with dangerous or obstructive behaviour before the current Government and their Conservative predecessors imposed those totally unnecessary extra measures.
I will briefly refer to some hon. Members’ speeches. The hon. Member for Newport West and Islwyn (Ruth Jones) highlighted the starvation and injury of primates and, again, the possible under-reporting of non-compliance in the self-reporting system we find ourselves with, which means we may have only scratched the surface of illegal animal abuse. The hon. Member for Alloa and Grangemouth (Brian Leishman) highlighted the 5 million animals that are to be used in experiments in the coming years, and made a powerful case for Herbie’s law. The hon. Member for North Ayrshire and Arran (Irene Campbell) has been a long-standing champion on this issue; I think I am already a member of her APPG but, if I am not, I will make sure to join. The hon. Member for Stockport (Navendu Mishra) mentioned how experiments have been made on more than 2,500 dogs and 1,000 primates, and, again, highlighted the cases that have not been reported.
Liberal Democrats are unapologetic in wanting to see minimal use of animals in scientific testing and the phasing out of testing altogether wherever possible and as soon as possible. We urgently call on the Government to provide greater funding into viable alternatives. In her response, will the Minister commit to a full, new animal health and welfare Bill that looks at the wider issue of animal welfare and delivers a comprehensive national strategy to safeguard animal wellbeing in this sector? As part of their ongoing reset talks with the European Union, will the Government sign a veterinary and phytosanitary agreement as soon as possible to ensure closer alignment on standards and quality with the trading block? Finally, will the Government commit to solidifying minimum standards for all imported food, so that our own animal standards are met by every other nation looking to do business? That would prevent our British farmers being undercut by poorer-quality foreign imports that do not have the same standards.
Alicia Kearns (Rutland and Stamford) (Con)
It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Sir John. I thank the hon. Member for Aberdeenshire North and Moray East (Seamus Logan) for securing this debate and all Members who have spoken in it. There are few issues that reflect our values as a society more than how we treat creatures in our care. Many people in our communities and across our country rightly feel strongly about this, and it is clear from the debate that Members from all parties share concerns for animal welfare.
Animal testing should be a last resort, only when there are no viable alternatives. That was the view of the last Conservative Government. We did not just talk about the three Rs—replacement, reduction and refinement—but legally embedded them into the fabric of our regulatory framework. We backed that with £90 million in research and a £27 million further fund called the CRACK IT Challenges innovation scheme, as well doubling annual investment to £20 million for the 2024-25 fiscal year. We also refused to vote for bans on protests outside animal testing sites. Can the Minister confirm whether the levels of investment that we left in place have been maintained, and what steps are being taken to accelerate the development of alternatives?
Turning to the annual report, these are figures that warrant rigorous scrutiny. I welcome the fact that the number of animals experiencing adverse welfare outcomes has fallen, but the statistics on non-compliance make for very difficult reading. As we heard, there were 146 cases of non-compliance across 45 different establishments, with 63 of those involving a failure to provide basic care such as food, water or suitable facilities.
The unacceptable instances highlighted by Members are harrowing: unweaned pups starving to death after their mother was killed; mice left without water for five days; and live animals accidentally placed in waste bags. Those are not administrative oversights; they should be criminal acts. Those animals are supposed to be protected under our regulatory system, but concerningly, 75% of cases are resolved with inspector advice alone. Does the Minister agree that a letter of reprimand is not a sufficient deterrent for such a profound failure of care?
We must ensure that sanctions are not just administrative slaps on the wrist but robust measures that prevent recurrence and punish wilful neglect and cruelty. Just last month, the hon. Member for North Ayrshire and Arran (Irene Campbell) asked directly whether a letter of reprimand was adequate. The Minister’s answer referred to a compliance framework, but did not address whether this sanction was sufficient. Will the Minister before us today commit to reviewing the effectiveness of current sanctions?
On staffing, while I know the Government have committed to increase inspector capacity by March 2026, capacity is currently lower than the average over the last 10 years, so I urge a focus on adequate recruitment. Turning to the 2025 strategy, the proposed three-baskets approach provides a welcome road map. It is right that the Government move quickly where mature technology exists, such as in skin-irritation testing, and aim for total replacement in 2026.
However, I sound a note of caution: we must ensure that we do not see countries with lower regulatory standards becoming industrialised for animal testing. Some products will continue to require animal testing, and we must not rely on animal suffering being exported and happening elsewhere, because that will be under worse conditions beyond the reach of British regulation. It would be not a victory for animal welfare but an abdication of responsibility. Can the Minister also share what steps have been taken to ensure that products imported into this country have been developed to adequate standards?
We all want to see the day when animal testing is no longer needed, but until that day comes, we have a duty to ensure that every procedure is justified, every harm is minimised, and every failure of care is met with the full force of a robust and well-resourced regulator, not a written rap on the knuckle.
The Minister for Policing and Crime (Sarah Jones)
It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Sir John. I congratulate the hon. Member for Aberdeenshire North and Moray East (Seamus Logan) on securing this debate, and thank hon. Members for their contributions.
It is important to start by reflecting on the horror of some of the stories we have heard and some of the cases that have been reported regarding animal treatment. I question whether anybody in this House would want that to continue. I suspect we are all united in wanting to phase out animal testing as quickly as possible. It is understandable that there are Members of this House who are pushing the Government to go much faster than we already are, but we are all heading in the same direction and trying to get the same outcome. It is right and proper that campaign groups, Members of Parliament and others continue to push us to do everything we can, because we need to do that.
The transparency of the report was important. As my hon. Friend the Member for Newport West and Islwyn (Ruth Jones) said, we need to understand picture, and the more information and data we have, the more we can see where the challenges are. I agree with that point; we need more transparency in the system to make sure we get to where we went to be as quickly as possible.
As the shadow Minister, the hon. Member for Rutland and Stamford (Alicia Kearns), said, our laws are unequivocal that animal testing cannot be authorised where a scientifically valid non-animal alternative exists. That is the law, and we need to make sure it is implemented. It is a fundamental principle for us all, in terms of the care that we have for our animals and the need to avoid unnecessary harm. As the shadow Minister also said, at the moment, despite rapid progress in science, there are not validated alternatives for every area of research and safety testing.
Ruth Jones
The Minister says there are not alternatives, but there are. The forced swim test is a classic, as is the LD50. These need to be phased out; we do not need them any more. I gently encourage the Minister to tell us how we can phase these out as quickly as possible.
Sarah Jones
I thank my hon. Friend for her persistence with me; I expect her to continue to be persistent. We can go faster with some things than others, and I will come on to the strategy that the Government have published, which has been broadly welcomed across the House. We want to go as fast as we can in the work that we do. Obviously, we are focusing today on the animals in science regulation unit, and the annual report that it published. It is not actually a statutory responsibility for it to publish that report, although maybe it should be, so I welcome its publication.
Navendu Mishra
The Minister is making an important speech. I am pleased to learn that pretty much everyone in this debate shares the vision of phasing out animal testing. I have two questions: first, does the Home Office have enough resources for tackling illegal and unethical animal testing; secondly, would she work with the MPs in this debate to make that report a statutory requirement?
Sarah Jones
I thank my hon. Friend for jumping on something I have said and holding me to account for it, which is very good. We had a similar debate to this one last week or the week before, and what came out of it—I will come on to this—was an understanding that the regulator is going through a period of reform and increasing capacity. Good things are happening in that space, but there is concern among MPs that that is not going fast or widely enough.
In the last debate, I suggested that we should meet as a group of MPs with the regulator, have these conversations and try to flush out some of the things that MPs are concerned about. The MPs who were taking part in that debate had not had the opportunity to have those conversations with the regulator, so I took back as an action that we should sit collectively and have that conversation, which I am happy to do. The reason I am not directly giving my hon. Friend the immediate response that he is asking for in terms of changing the statutory responsibility of the regulator is just because it does not sit within my remit. I want to make sure that hon. Members are satisfied that we are going as fast and as far as we can, and perhaps a meeting with the regulator would be useful on that front.
The reform that I had begun to talk about, which is overseen by my noble Friend Lord Hanson in the other place and was agreed last year, has involved an increase. Members have rightly said, “Are there enough people focused on doing this work?” We have seen an increase in inspectors from an average of 14.5 full-time equivalents in 2023 to 22 by March 2026. By expanding its capabilities, it is able to do more; the conversation that we would want to have with the regulator is about whether it is satisfied that is enough, or whether it thinks we need to go further.
The two-pronged approach of this Government is, first, to phase out the use of animal testing. I pay tribute to the campaigners pushing for Herbie’s law and I absolutely understand the need for pace and for us to be held to account to go as fast as we can. The strategy to phase out the use of animals, alongside a beefed-up regulator, is the response that this Government are taking. We want to maintain public confidence in our animal testing processes and in our research. As the hon. Member for Rutland and Stamford said—I have now quoted her three times; I need to stop quoting her so much—we do need to make sure that the life sciences industry, which is important for this country, is not pushing animal testing abroad and that we maintain our standards here.
I heard the message from Members about the fear that we might fall behind our European Union and US colleagues in this space. I am very interested in working across Government with the Department for Science, Innovation and Technology and Lord Vallance, who are leading on the phasing out of animal research work, to push as hard as we can and look abroad. I will take that back as another action and speak to my colleague Lord Vallance—I suspect hon. Members already have—to make sure that we are learning the lessons from other countries and not falling behind; that, in fact, we are keeping pace.
Mr Tanmanjeet Singh Dhesi (Slough) (Lab)
The Minister will no doubt have highlighted the work of the Government. I know the Government are committed to phasing out animal testing, but the Animals in Science Regulation Unit report highlights the horrors that we unfortunately have in the system. Does she not agree that we need to work at pace to ensure that alternative methods are explored and implemented?
Sir John Hayes (in the Chair)
I am renowned for my generosity in the Chair and I am extremely open minded about how debates are conducted, but it is not really appropriate to come in two thirds of the way through and intervene when everyone else took the trouble to get here at the beginning. We are all busy, after all.
Sarah Jones
Thank you, Sir John, and I thank my hon. Friend for his intervention. Of course we need to go as fast as we can.
The strategy that the Government have published includes establishing a UK centre for the validation of alternative methods and 26 commitments for delivery or initiation across 2026 and 2027. It includes a commitment that from this year
“we will publish biennially a list of alternative methods research and development priorities to coalesce UK scientists around these areas and to incentivise partnerships between research organisations”.
In our most recent debate on this subject, we talked about this being an opportunity for UK science and technology to be innovators in this space and push forward new science. We want to go as fast as we can, and we will move as quickly as the science allows. Our commitment is clear: we want to work in step with the scientific community to reduce and ultimately replace the use of animals in research.
As hon. Members know, we have a three-pronged regulatory framework. It requires a personal licence—about 13,000 people have one. The procedures must form part of an approved programme of work, which must be licensed, and the work must be carried out in a licensed establishment. Our licensing is robust, in terms of the processes that people must go through before they do something as serious as test on animals. Even before a proposed project to test on animals reaches the regulator for consideration, it must undergo multiple layers of scrutiny to ensure it is justified and ethical, including from funders and animal welfare and ethical review bodies at scientific establishments. That is important.
On the work of the regulator, the transparency that we want to deliver and the changes that we have pushed through, we want to ensure we get this right. My noble Friend Lord Hanson commissioned the Animals in Science Committee—an expert committee that advises the Government on animal protection—to provide recommendations on improving the accessibility of the publicly available animal testing project summaries, and proposals are now being considered. That reflects our commitment to openness, accountability and continuous improvement.
Several hon. Members spoke about the point at which audits are made and checks are carried out. They are concerned about self-reporting. I heard that in the previous debate, and I have heard it today; that is an important part of the conversation that we need to have with the regulator. There is an important question about whether we are doing enough unannounced audits, and I am committed to going back and testing that. With the support of hon. Members, we can look at that properly.
As lots of Members said, 2.5 million procedures were conducted in Great Britain in 2024, so this is a big landscape and we need to get it right. I recognise the potential for error and wrongdoing. I want to ensure that hon. Members and campaigners are as satisfied as possible that the regulator is doing what it needs to do. There is a programme of reform under way, and we need to test it and see whether it is enough. I am committed to speaking to Lord Vallance. If any Members want to come to a meeting with the regulator, they should let me know; that will be important.
The fact that the Government have put £75 million behind the programme to phase out animal testing shows that we are putting our money where our priorities are. I know that hon. Members across the House will welcome that, but of course we need to go as fast as we can. In that vein, I again thank the hon. Member for Aberdeenshire North and Moray East for securing this debate and holding the Government to account on these very important issues.
Seamus Logan
I thank all hon. Members who have spoken, including the hon. Member for Newport West and Islwyn (Ruth Jones), the hon. Member for Alloa and Grangemouth (Brian Leishman)—a colleague who is no longer here once referred to him as the Member for aloha—and the hon. Members for North Ayrshire and Arran (Irene Campbell), for Stockport (Navendu Mishra), for North Cornwall (Ben Maguire) and for Rutland and Stamford (Alicia Kearns).
I also thank the Minister for her very thoughtful response. I cannot think of many topics on which there is such a tremendous cross-party alliance, which has included the Democratic Unionist party, the Scottish National party, the Liberal Democrats and many Labour Members. As the Minister said, virtually no MP would disagree with our intent here, so that is very encouraging.
I am particularly interested in a couple of the Minister’s comments. She said that where a non-animal alternative exists, no approval should be given—absolutely. She drew attention to the need to move as quickly as the science allows. I am sure the chair of the APPG, the hon. Member for North Ayrshire and Arran, noted her invitation to meet Lord Vallance to discuss these issues. That would be very welcome indeed.
It simply remains for me to mention my own little pet cockapoo, Lola. Anyone who knows anything about dogs know how sentient and clever they are. They have an amazing vocabulary, and they can count. The only thing they cannot do is speak—more’s the pity—although that is maybe not a bad thing in some ways. I will conclude by thanking everyone who took part, and the members of the public who attended.
Sir John Hayes (in the Chair)
The hon. Gentleman, the Minister and others might like to know that there is some evidence to suggest that bees can count. I speak as a beekeeper.
Question put and agreed to.
Resolved,
That this House has considered the Animals in Science Regulation Unit annual report 2024.