Budget Resolutions

Marie Goldman Excerpts

Tuesday 2nd December 2025 Commons Chamber

[Marie Goldman (Chelmsford) (LD)]

Like many Members across this House, my team and I deal with casework about special educational needs on an almost daily basis, so I welcome the announcement that from 2028 the Government will be centrally funding SEND, in theory ending the postcode lottery of SEND provision and lessening the pressure on financially strapped local authorities. However, there was no new money for schools in the Budget, and the OBR estimated that almost £2 billion would need to be cut from the SEND Budget in 2028-29, so how will this work?

The Government and the Education Secretary have long said that the SEND reforms will not be about cutting funds, yet when asked by The Guardian whether the SEND White Paper would have any role in this cut, it was reported that His Majesty’s Treasury said that it would. It is parents and children that must be at the heart of any reform, not cost cutting, but I worry that the Budget sets the scene for just that. I encourage the Government to assure families that their children’s needs will not be ignored because, amid the cuts, they are deemed too expensive.

Sadly, this Budget worsens the economic outlook for young people. The Resolution Foundation has noted that the rise in the minimum wage for under-20s could make it even harder for this age group to find work because, coupled with last year’s employer national insurance rise, it will make hiring even more expensive. Freezing the threshold for when student loan repayments must start is not just another stealth tax; it is one that is specifically aimed at young people. The Government’s decision to again freeze tax bands will also disproportionately impact young people, who earn most of their income through wages rather than dividends and who spend a much larger share of their income on essentials that are impacted by higher inflation, such as food and rent.

Turning to disabled people, my Liberal Democrat colleagues and I welcome the long-overdue removal of the two-child benefit cap, but this change does not help families raising disabled children, who were already exempt from it and are far more likely to be living in poverty. Rhetoric suggesting that benefit claimants get luxury cars is simply misleading, unhelpful and ultimately punitive. It does nothing to fix our economy, but it does create an enemy of vulnerable people. People from disabled communities have told me that they used to be forgotten entirely, but are now upset at being scapegoated for the country’s ills, and are getting tired of it. One disabled person told me recently that they almost wished disabled people could go back to being forgotten. Research from Sense, the charity for disabled people with complex needs, points out that two in five parents of disabled children cannot properly heat their homes in winter, with the same proportion skipping meals so that their child can eat. There are so many other measures that should have been in the Budget, but it does absolutely nothing to support these communities.

Finally, on mental health, Renew Counselling, a 100-year-old charity in my constituency delivering mental health support, wrote to me after the Budget to remind me of the extra strain the rise in the minimum wage will place on it. It is not that it disagrees with paying it, but where is the support for those charities?

Maternity Services

Marie Goldman Excerpts

Tuesday 25th February 2025 Westminster Hall

[Marie Goldman (Chelmsford) (LD)]

I thank my hon. Friend the Member for Chichester (Jess Brown-Fuller) for securing this important debate. I will keep this brief and not reiterate all the things that have been said before, but there are a couple of points I want to make about how important it is to talk about women at the most vulnerable point in their lives, as well as the most vulnerable point for the babies who are being born. There cannot be a more important time in their lives than the moment when they are born, which is why it is so important to talk about this. I speak as a woman and a mother, but also as a human being. We are discussing the birth of the human race; I do not think there is anything more profound than that.

However, I will focus on something that has not been raised very much today: the role of the CQC in keeping our maternity services safe. One of the hospitals that serves my constituency of Chelmsford is Broomfield hospital, the maternity services rating of which was downgraded to inadequate at the beginning of January. That on its own is shocking and worrying enough. I have met the staff at Broomfield hospital and been to the maternity services there. I want to give it help and support so that it can improve. However, what concerns me is that the CQC carried out its inspection in March last year and only released its report in January. That is utterly unacceptable. How can we be expected to hold our services to account and how can we help them to improve if we do not even know what is wrong with them in the first place?

It is the CQC’s job to tell us what is wrong with those services and lay it out bare so that we can learn from the things that go wrong and quickly put them right. It is not okay for the CQC to turn around and say “We have had technical difficulties with our new system and, therefore, we couldn’t get the report out”. That is not good enough. It is also not good enough for them to say “We shared some of our findings with the hospital, which is also making them public at the same time”. It is simply not good enough. We need to support the CQC to do much better.

I am conscious of time and I know other Members want to speak, but I want to underline the importance of the role of the CQC, as well as the leadership across all of the NHS. From the excellent job that the midwives and the support staff do in maternity centres to the leadership of the hospitals, including the chief executives and the ICBs, everyone has a role to play in improving maternity services. The CQC also has a huge role to play, and it must do better.