Policing (England and Wales)

Laura Farris Excerpts

Monday 24th February 2020 Commons Chamber

[Laura Farris (Newbury) (Con)]

It is an absolute honour to make my maiden speech today, 100 years to the day since Nancy Astor, the first woman to take her seat in Parliament, made hers. It is also an honour to make this speech as the MP for Newbury, succeeding Richard Benyon, who represented us for 15 years. Richard was totally dedicated to the community. He was a brilliant campaigner who, during his time in this House, slashed rough sleeping, championed mental health services, secured transformative upgrades to the train service and, after some devastating winters, brought in permanent flood defences that have protected thousands of homes during the battering we have seen over the past fortnight. He was an outstanding Minister at DEFRA and a true environmentalist. Whether it was protecting global marine life or introducing beavers to the River Kennet, there was no issue, big or small, that he would not fight for. He is missed in Newbury. Even now, 10 weeks after my election, there are people who have taken the trouble to look up their new MP, written out my email address and begun their email with, “Dear Richard”—I think perhaps more in hope than expectation.

It is the honour of my life to represent my home in Parliament: where I was born and where I grew up. That place is in my bones. The constituency takes its name from the town but it includes two others, Thatcham and Hungerford, surrounded by a web of west Berkshire villages that run approximately from the west of Reading to the Wiltshire border. It is home to Vodafone, the constituency’s biggest employer; the Atomic Weapons Establishment in Aldermaston; and the famous racecourse, of course. As of last week, I can add that we boast the best pub in the country—the Bell at Aldworth.

Ninety-five per cent. of our schools are good or outstanding, but the thing that I am particularly proud of is the quality of provision for special educational needs. We have Mary Hare School for the deaf, which has the largest sixth form for deaf students in the country and sends many of them on to further education and university. We also have The Castle School, which provides an outstanding education for children with particularly complex special educational needs.

It is a beautiful part of the world. If you go up to the Berkshire downs in Lambourn to see the racehorses training at dawn, you will find country that is as wild as Dorset, but if you plunge down the pathways that link the villages of Bucklebury, Stanford Dingley and Frilsham in the east, you will find woodlands that are as mythic as anything in English folklore. It has context in the story of this nation. During the civil war, there were about 48 hours when the history of England was determined on the battlefields of Newbury. It has felt the smack of resistance during the Greenham peace camp and the pulse of insurgency during the protests over the Newbury bypass. And it has experienced catastrophic human tragedy—the Hungerford massacre, the dark day in 1987 when that little town endured the mass shooting of 17 people.

Those incidents took place during my childhood and are scored deeply on my memory, because at the time it was my father who was the MP. He served the seat for 18 years until 1992, and he was the MP when I was born. The way that he supported, defended and championed that community, particularly through its darkest hour, shaped my entire view of public service. I am not the first daughter to take her father’s seat—it has happened once before: on the Labour Benches, in the seat of North West Durham—but it is the first time that it has happened in my party. Nearly 30 years have passed since my father died, and I was young when he did, but he sparked a passion for politics, and he always taught me to think freely and to keep testing my ideas. I think of him every day that I walk through these corridors and I am proud to follow in his footsteps.

This debate concerns the new funding settlement for the police. My constituency welcomes the £33 million for the Thames Valley police, from which we will benefit and which will lead to 50 new police officers. Before I entered the House, I worked as a barrister with a specialism in employment law, and I bring that interest to Parliament. I saw that, as with so many sectors of work, the primary challenge in employment is not always recruitment but the retention and development of staff in a modern society.

One of the great challenges we face is the age of our workforce. In the last 20 years, the number of people working beyond their 60s has quadrupled and, with an ageing population, that trend is likely to continue. I noticed in the cases I worked on that there was a fundamental divide between those who felt that, by their late 60s, they had earned the right to retire, and those who found the suggestion of retirement an insult and felt that there was still a place for their skills and experience in the workplace. While we must, of course, respect personal choices, the fact remains that those who wish to continue working into their old age are sometimes treated as an eccentricity or an indulgence, rather than people of vigour and capability. There is an imperative for us to recalibrate our attitude to the potential and prospects of older people in the workforce.

We also need to think about the way we work. I am delighted that my party’s manifesto raised the possibility of making flexible working the default for all jobs. For too long, flexible working has been confined to women, usually linked to motherhood and—tacitly, perhaps—to an inferior participation in the workplace. But all the research shows that, regardless of gender, the benefit that employees most value after their pay is the ability to work flexibly, whether in terms of location or hours. We know that flexibility has a crucial role to play in the retention of women, the reduction of the gender pay gap and the equitable distribution of home and childcare responsibilities, all of which I know to be core objectives of this Government’s one nation agenda.

I conclude by saying that, in the cases I worked on, I saw that, for so many people, their job—which they had usually lost by the time they reached me—was about so much more than pay. It was fundamental to their sense of self, in terms of what it said about their talent, their dignity and their place in the world. So I will always fight for the jobs and security of my constituents, and it will be their opportunities and their aspirations that will guide my work in this House.