Business of the House

Kirith Entwistle Excerpts

Thursday 8th May 2025 Commons Chamber

[Lucy Powell]

Mr Speaker, further to your statement, talks on the US trade deal developments continue at pace. With your permission, the House will be updated later today. I will come on to VE Day shortly, but may I first address the remarks of the right hon. Member for Hereford and South Herefordshire (Jesse Norman)?

I thank the right hon. Gentleman for raising what I said on an episode of “Any Questions” last week, so that I can be absolutely clear with the House today, and especially to the victims and survivors of child sexual abuse and grooming gangs, that I am very sorry for those remarks, as I made clear over the weekend. I, and every member of this Government, want your truth to be heard, wherever that truth leads. Your truly appalling experiences need to be acted on, for those responsible to be accountable and face the full force of the law, and for justice to be served. I would never want to leave the impression that these very serious, profound and far-reaching issues, which I have campaigned on for many years, should be shied away from and not aired—far from it. No stone will be left unturned.

What the victims want, first and foremost, is for action to be taken and for the many, many recommendations from previous inquiries to be implemented in full, including mandatory reporting of child sexual abuse, for which I have called for nearly a decade. Shockingly, those recommendations remained sitting on the shelf until we came into government last year. Baroness Louise Casey, who conducted the no-holds-barred inquiry into Rotherham, is carrying out an audit on the scale, nature and characteristics of grooming gangs. She will be reporting soon. It will include the questions on ethnicity. Every police force in England and Wales has been asked to look again at historic grooming gangs cases. They will be reopened, where appropriate, to get the perpetrators behind bars. I hope the House is left in no doubt about my commitment to these issues and my apology to those victims for any distress I have caused them.

I was surprised to hear the shadow Leader of the House try to claim some success in the local elections for his party. I am not quite sure that that is what those on the Conservative Benches are feeling.

Let me address the issue of our need to move to being a clean energy superpower. I am afraid that yet again at the Dispatch Box the right hon. Gentleman and his party are showing a serious misunderstanding of the economics and the reality of the transition to net zero. We face the worst cost of living crisis in generations, because his party left this country exposed to international fossil fuel markets as a direct result of their failure to invest in clean energy. It is only by investing in clean energy that we will bring down bills in future. He might want to remind himself of what his former Prime Minister, Theresa May, said about this issue:

“the sceptics say that the green transition will cripple business, we say they could not be more wrong.”

This is a global race for the jobs of the future, to get bills down, and that is exactly what we are doing.

The right hon. Gentleman should know better than anybody that new oil and gas in the North sea will not take a penny off bills, because oil and gas is traded on the international markets and therefore we are locked in. The only way to decouple that is by investing in cheaper renewable energies, as the Government are doing. It was a previous Conservative Energy Minister who said in 2022:

“more UK production wouldn’t reduce the global price of gas.”

The right hon. Gentleman might want to remind himself of that.

We have all come together in the Chamber today to honour our veterans and all those who played their part in securing peace and victory in Europe and ending the second world war. Today, we mark the 80th anniversary of Victory in Europe Day, and will shortly recreate the procession of Members from the Chamber to a service of thanksgiving on 8 May 1945. In addressing the House on that day, Winston Churchill conveyed his

“deep gratitude to this House of Commons, which has proved itself the strongest foundation for waging war that has ever been seen in the whole of our long history. We have all of us made our mistakes, but the strength of the Parliamentary institution has been shown to enable it at the same moment to preserve all the title deeds of democracy while waging war in the most stern and protracted form.”—[Official Report, 8 May 1945; Vol. 0, c. 1869.]

As we represent our parliamentary democracy today, these words ring as true now as they did then. We will never forget the sacrifice, bravery and spirit and the millions of lives lost in defeating fascism.

Today, we also remember Her late Majesty the Queen, whose youthful, joyous celebration symbolised VE Day, and whose long reign shaped the peace and prosperity that followed it. Today and every day, we remember the immense contribution of the second world war generation and thank them for their service.

[Kirith Entwistle (Bolton North East) (Lab)]

Women’s Aid reports that 82% of domestic abuse cases go unreported. Reporting and prosecution rates are disproportionately lower for black and minoritised survivors. Does the Leader of the House agree that consistent collection and publication of disaggregated data is key to assessing whether Government actions are working for all women?

[Lucy Powell]

Absolutely—I thank my hon. Friend for raising that. As she knows, violence against women and girls is a national emergency and tackling it is one of the key missions of this Government. I agree that this data needs to be brought to light and disaggregated.