Oral Answers to Questions
Joe Morris Excerpts(1 day, 20 hours ago)
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Yvette Cooper
We have provided an additional £200 million for neighbourhood policing as part of more than £1 billion of additional funding for police forces across the country. That is how we are putting an additional 3,000 neighbourhood police officers and police community support officers on our streets this year, after the decimation of neighbourhood policing under the Conservatives.
Joe Morris (Hexham) (Lab)
Yvette Cooper
My hon. Friend is right. That sort of graffiti and serious hate crime divides communities and needs to be taken seriously by police across the country. It is one of the reasons we are strengthening the law to give the police stronger powers to prevent intimidating protests around not just synagogues but mosques.
Oral Answers to Questions
Joe Morris Excerpts(1 month ago)
Commons ChamberRead Full debate Read Hansard Text Watch Debate Read Debate Ministerial Extracts
Dan Jarvis
The Online Safety Act 2023 will require tech companies to take measures to prevent fraudulent content on their platforms or face significant fines. Under the Act, the largest firms will be required to do all they can to prevent fraudulent advertising from appearing on their platforms.
Joe Morris (Hexham) (Lab)
The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for the Home Department (Jess Phillips)
We are already taking significant steps to make sure that violence against women and girls is treated as the national emergency that it is. That includes launching our domestic abuse protection orders, and investing almost £20 million this year in specialist services for victims and in projects to help prevent VAWG and improve our response to it. Later this year, we will publish our cross-Government VAWG strategy, which will set out our long-term plan to tackle the crisis.
Joe Morris
For some families of victims, further review of release decisions can provide some solace, but it cannot do so for my constituent Doreen Soulsby. Her daughter’s murderer was released before the Victims and Courts Bill passed through this place. Will the Minister meet Doreen and me to discuss clause 61 of the Bill and the release of life prisoners?
Jess Phillips
Yes, of course. As my hon. Friend knows, I have had a strong bond with Doreen for many years. Of course I would be delighted to meet him and her.
Rural Depopulation
Joe Morris Excerpts(9 months, 3 weeks ago)
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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.
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Joe Morris (Hexham) (Lab)
It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Ms Vaz; I will be brief.
I applied to contribute to this debate because I wanted to speak not just about my experiences, but about the experiences of people I grew up around, people I was at school with and people who, in many cases, were forced to leave my constituency of Hexham, which colleagues will be surprised to learn is the largest in England. As the hon. Member for Dumfries and Galloway (John Cooper) spoke about the beauty of his constituency, I feel compelled to remind people of the beauty of my constituency, which is in the county of Hadrian’s Wall, and to note that we will be marking the anniversary of the loss of the Sycamore Gap tree during the conference recess later in September.
When I go through so many towns and villages in my constituency, I see that they are marked by exactly what Members have spoken about today: a lack of younger people, who have been forced—they have not chosen—to move away. They have been forced, by a lack of jobs and opportunities, to seek to make their lives elsewhere, often leaving behind families and caring responsibilities, which means large amounts of travel back home to meet those obligations. The last Government failed to grapple with this issue, which we know is a huge, inherited, generational and demographic challenge, and one that I urge our Government to take on fully.
I spoke to some of the businesses in my constituency on the campaign trail. They want to take on more people, but they simply cannot find the skills they need or people who want to work and can afford to live in such an overheated and over-inflated housing market. That leads to a decline for those businesses and, for some of them, a slow death. One of the larger employers told me during the election that if they take on someone and train them up, but then they cannot afford to live in my constituency and move somewhere else, they bear all the training costs, only to see that individual go and work in a far more urban part of the country. We have spoken a lot about the rural premium and the rural cost of living, but there is a rural cost of doing business as well, which we should note very carefully.
As the representative for the Hexham constituency—the first Labour representative for the constituency—and as someone who was privileged to be out knocking on doors with my school friends and my schoolteachers, I know that we are not just letting our young people down, but letting our older generations down. I am privileged to be able to go back to visit my grandma every week when I am back in the constituency, but I have friends who now live three or four hours away and are unable to do the same. This is having a genuinely devastating impact on a lot of families, particularly given the acute social care crisis that this Government have inherited.
Ultimately, only by addressing this issue and the really biting crisis of rural depopulation can we turn our communities around and ensure that they can become the thriving engines of growth that the economy needs them to be.