Water Safety

Julian Smith Excerpts

Tuesday 9th June 2026 Westminster Hall

[Sir Julian Smith (Skipton and Ripon) (Con)]

I thank the hon. Member for Southampton Itchen (Darren Paffey) for his very thoughtful words. One of the young women he talked about, Palwasha Akbar, was 13, from the Bronte Girls’ secondary school in Bradford, and she died in Burnsall in my constituency. I pay tribute to her family and friends, who have spoken so eloquently about her. She died in more or less the same spot as Azaz Mohmed Chanda from Blackburn in 2024; I also put on record my thoughts for his family. In that case, there was an investigation and a coroner’s report, and it was a case of misadventure.

I support all the hon. Member’s comments about education, and the specific warnings he gave to people who are swimming in open water. The “Lonely Water” campaign of the early 1970s was very effective. I have certainly had constituents write in to ask me to represent that campaign and the stark truths it laid out.

I want to talk briefly about public bodies. The Minister has been given a series of asks by the hon. Member. I represent a large part of the Yorkshire Dales national park, which has been responsible for, rightly, promoting the countryside to ethnic minorities in Bradford and the surrounding area, and has received quite a lot of money to do so. Following the death last week, I have become increasingly concerned about an issue that has been coming up in quite a lot of the recent Government reports of grey areas between public bodies. Public bodies not meeting their responsibilities or duties is very present with national parks. They have a duty to promote themselves, but also to protect local communities, and they have duties on safety.

What came out regarding the last bank holiday weekend and Eid was that, at an operational level, the Yorkshire Dales national park had not thought about the deployment of personnel in hotspots such as Burnsall in any way that I could see, and had not really thought through its responsibility for safety. That responsibility for safety is obviously as an access authority—they are often not landowners. For the Minister’s awareness, at the weekend I looked through almost all the recent minutes, chief executive reports and risk registers, and never has any issue of water safety come up in any of those writings or meetings that I could see. When there have been two of these deaths at the same spot in the last two years, that cannot be right.

I urge the Minister to listen to the hon. Member for Southampton Itchen, but I also urge her to use whatever powers she has to speak to national parks that have large amounts of water and ask them to fulfil their duties on the safety of communities. We have heard that there are huge volumes of cars and people at peak times. National parks must now take responsibility for the volume of people they have promoted their area to and encouraged to come and visit, and must look at their duties on safety.