"I agree with my hon. Friend, but we can sometimes use excuses to delay important issues. The important thing is to look at the experience in Scotland and the way the vote was energised. Is anybody seriously arguing that 16 and 17-year-olds in Scotland were incapable of taking in the …..." Sarah Wollaston - View Speech
"My hon. Friend is right that we need to debate it. We need to do that too, and I will be making exactly the same argument at that point, but we must not miss this opportunity to express a view as a House. I believe we should have a free …..." Sarah Wollaston - View Speech
"Let me point out to my hon. Friend that one of the things I campaigned long and hard on in the last Parliament—one of the things that perhaps drove me into politics—was the scandal of children being detained in police cells under section 136...." Sarah Wollaston - View Speech
"But the point is that these are children who are being incarcerated. The inquiry on child and adolescent mental health services that I led as Chair of the Select Committee on Health at the end of the last Parliament shows, I feel, the opposite. The point is that one of …..." Sarah Wollaston - View Speech
"There will always be inconsistencies. We will never get complete consistency on the threshold issues; we will continue to have different thresholds for different things, and the points at which we choose cut-offs tend to be around 16 and 18. I am comfortable with that. The issue is whether we …..." Sarah Wollaston - View Speech
"I thank my hon. Friend for his intervention, but I feel that this is the right age to have the opportunity. Do I think that 16-year-olds have the capacity to make decisions and weigh all the arguments in the balance in this referendum vote? Absolutely. I cannot believe how I …..." Sarah Wollaston - View Speech
"The hon. Gentleman is absolutely right. Who could have watched that extraordinary debate, the most compelling debate of the referendum campaign, with thousands of people in the stadium in Glasgow, without feeling inspired by the opportunity and enthusiasm for the whole campaign and the wide turnout? I believe those young …..." Sarah Wollaston - View Speech
"Does the shadow Foreign Secretary agree that, since nearly one in four 16-year-olds can expect to live to 100 years of age and will be living with the consequences of this decision for far longer than Members of this or the other House, and given that they have the mental …..." Sarah Wollaston - View Speech