Alec Shelbrooke MP: speeches

Speeches

• 16 Jun 2025 · Child Sexual Exploitation: Casey Report · Hansard source

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  I welcome a lot of what the Home Secretary has said today; she keeps referring to institutional failures. In Bradford in 2020, a little girl, Star Hobson, was murdered by her mother’s partner. Evidence came to light from neighbours and social services that the case was dismissed because it involved a lesbian couple and people feared being accused of being homophobic. I have also had issues in my constituency since the last election where social workers have been worried about the other labels that they may get; they have a tick box and leave the child at the bottom. I ask the Home Secretary to consider that institutional failure where people are afraid to offend one group or another, and they often lose sight of the fact that the child is the most important part of the care service.

• 3 Jun 2025 · Dementia Care · Hansard source

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  It is a genuine pleasure to follow the hon. Member for Hartlepool (Mr Brash), who has hit the nail on the head when it comes to how terrible this disease is. Forty years ago this August, my paternal grandfather was dying of lung cancer. My father went to the hospital with him. The day went on and on, and eventually, my grandfather said to my father, “Go and give your mother a call—let her know where we are at.” She answered the phone, and my dad said, “Just to let you know, mum, we’re delayed at the hospital. Dad and I are going to be late.” She said, “Oh, I’ve not seen your father in three weeks.” At that point, he said, his blood ran cold. Tragically, my grandfather died just two weeks later. The funeral came, and the funeral went. My grandmother constantly asked, “Where have all these flowers come from?” Within four years, my grandmother had to go into a nursing home. Making the right decisions during those four years put a huge strain on my father. “Do we sell the house? How are we going to pay for the care?” My grandmother was walking the streets at 3 am. She was leaving the gas on. Neighbours were saying, “The whole street is going to be destroyed. Derek, you have got to do something.” Then she was put into the home. What I have found during my work on dementia is that that is often the pattern. The spouse, or the partner, protects his or her spouse or partner. They pick up the slack—and this is such a ratcheting disease, which comes so slowly, that they do not realise that they are under more and more pressure and taking on more and more work. Tragically again, in 2019, my father-in-law died suddenly, and it soon became apparent that he had been hiding my mother-in-law’s dementia. My mother-in-law is doing very well: she has a carer, and on some days she is still pretty sparky. She was a formidable woman in her time. She is 87 years old now. She still remembers me, and there is an important point there: I will be the person she forgets next, because I was the last in. I say to my wife, “For as long as she remembers me, we are still in a roughly good place.” That is quite a sad statement, is it not? It is sad that we are moving down that road. However, I was inspired by something I saw shortly after I was elected, in 2010 or 2011, at a dementia café down in Rothwell. I went there when it first opened, and I quickly became aware of the support that it was giving people, and of how much they appreciated it. That brings me back to what the hon. Member for Hartlepool said about how cruel this disease is. Because people are gradually supporting their loved ones more and more, they reach a point at which there is enormous pressure. They are not going to take a step back, go on to Google or try to get on to the local Facebook to try and work out what is going on locally. People do not know what is going on out there, and that was even more true 10 or so years ago. A huge number of voluntary organisations take clients. Let me name just two in my constituency: Wetherby in Support of the Elderly—WISE—and the Easingwold Hub Club. They provide a huge amount of support for people with dementia, but dozens of other voluntary organisations supply an incredible service that helps to take the pressure off carers, who are also able to take their loved ones out, which in itself can be stimulating. That gave me an idea, and I created the Dementia Directory and one of the first dementia-friendly constituencies. The directory breaks up the constituency up into parts, and lists all the events that are going on. We are working on the new one now. It is a complex process; it is a bit of a spider’s web, because we find one event and then another is off, and then another is off. We try not to miss any, but inevitably we do. It is because the last directory had such a huge and positive impact that we are preparing this one for the new constituency, following the boundary change. All that we need now is the sponsorship that will enable it to be printed and posted. It will make a difference, because, as the hon. Member for Hartlepool said, this is a terribly cruel disease. There is a statement that upsets and annoys me greatly: “It is not such a bad disease, because the person who has it does not know they have it.” That is an awful thing to say. I can never hold back a tear when I see the advertisement in which a chap sitting on the end of the bed says to his wife, “I want to go home.” How many of us, as children, became homesick? I was homesick when I went to university. It is a terrifying thought that as you get older you will not know your partner, and you will be constantly homesick. For Members who may not know this, I have a tip, because I have done dementia training. When I went to a care home, there was an elderly lady of about 90, who said, “I don’t like it here. They never let me see my parents. I just wish they’d let me see my father.” I had been told to get into a memory of the person and mention somewhere their relative may be, so I said, “Well, your father’s down at the allotment.” She said, “Oh, yes, that’s right,” and she calmed down. Do not argue with those people, because that will just make them more upset, but try to take them back to a memory. As well the directory being used to notice events, it highlights things that may help, such as hydration. One of the things that happens with elderly people is that they do not want to keep going to the toilet and they get worried about doing so, so they are often quite sparky in the morning when they have had a cup of tea, but by 3 o’clock they are getting memory lapses because they have not drunk enough. That is also something we have to tell people. How many Members in this Chamber, when they said they were going to speak in this debate—they do not have to put their hands up—had somebody say, “Oh, don’t forget to go there”? Everybody seems to know what dementia is, but nobody really knows what it is. It is a real paradox. Everybody makes that comment, “Don’t forget,” but do they really understand the depth and impact of this disease? Dementia includes Alzheimer’s disease. I recently read a book about Ronald Reagan, which at the end said that he did not open his eyes for the last four years of his life. Just think about that, and what this terrible disease does to people and all the impact it has. This debate is about dementia care, and several contributions have been made about things the Government can do. I raised this issue back in 2012-13, and the then Prime Minister, David Cameron, did put funding into research for dementia. The trouble is that we have learned how to preserve all the organs of our body with medical research and medical advances, but we have never bothered with the brain. The blunt truth is that, before this disease had the prevalence it now has, most people were dead before they got it. However, there is something we can do all do as Members of Parliament in our constituencies, and that is to draw together all the voluntary organisations that give such relief to families and help to stimulate the sufferer along the way.

• 3 Jun 2025 · Dementia Care · Hansard source

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  I am most grateful to my hon. Friend, who does indeed make an important comment. My constituency of Wetherby and Easingwold has an older demographic, and that will become more acute over time. He is right to say that there is a dedicated band of volunteers, but most of the people who do the voluntary work during daytime are of an age to be retired. There are people who I think do an incredible job in supporting people—they really do—and they deserve nothing but our gratitude and thanks. As I have said, there is something positive that we really can do as Members of Parliament, so I urge everyone when they are back in their constituencies to look at what goes on and see what they can do to promote it. I promise them that it will make a transformational difference not just to the lives of the people affected, but to their lives as Members of Parliament in doing what they can do for their local community, which is why we are all here in the first place.

• 11 Mar 2025 · Employment Rights Bill · Hansard source

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  I will focus first on new clause 83, tabled by the Opposition. The hon. Member for Hamilton and Clyde Valley (Imogen Walker)—who I think I am just catching before she leaves the Chamber—said that a fair day’s work deserves a fair day’s pay. The right hon. Member for Birmingham Hodge Hill and Solihull North (Liam Byrne) also said that we all agree that an honest day’s work deserves an honest day’s pay. A lot of today’s speeches have been focused on banning zero-hours contracts, and the argument has been made that people deserve to know what their contracts are, what they are going to be paid, and that they are going to be treated properly. One of the reasons I think this Bill is rushed and is falling down goes back to a question I put to the Secretary of State when this Bill began its passage through the House: why does it not cover unpaid internships? Looking at this Bill, and with today’s debate having focused so much on zero-hours contracts, I find it difficult to understand why we would leave a whole section of society out of the Bill—people who can work for up to 12 months without any pay. Banning unpaid internships has been in Labour manifesto after Labour manifesto. In every Parliament I have been a Member of, I have tabled a Bill to ban those internships. My Government did not want to do it, despite Prime Ministers making promises at the Dispatch Box when I first raised the issue, but there are Members on the Government Benches who stood on manifestos that said they would ban unpaid internships. Now we have this great Bill, which was trailed in the general election and is being promoted by the Labour party, yet there is nothing in it about unpaid internships. When the Bill goes to the other place, that has to be looked at, because such internships are wrong. We have heard a great deal today about opportunities for people, but what opportunities are there for people such as my sister and me, who had to work and earn a living to be able to do what we have gone on to do? We could not have spent 12 months working in London unpaid. The fact that a whole section of society can go unpaid is still not being addressed, and that fundamentally undermines what I am hearing from Labour Members about what the Bill will do to create equality. I think that is wrong. The review of the impact on employment tribunals that is proposed in new clause 83 needs to be wider, and it needs to be understood that if the aim is to create equality, it is not in fact being created.

• 15 Jan 2025 · Endometriosis: Women in the Workplace · Hansard source

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  There has been a lot of cross-party work on this issue. I led a debate—the last one before the general election was called, I think—on endometriosis education. It is not prescribed that schools should educate about what a bad period is—I still meet women born in this century who do not know. If someone does not know what a disease is, how do they know that they have it? I urge the Minister to ensure that those messages are pushed in the Department for Education, as we need to ensure that people know what diseases they could have.

• 15 Jan 2025 · Endometriosis: Women in the Workplace · Hansard source

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  It is fortuitous that you are in the Chair tonight, Madam Deputy Speaker, given all the work you did on these issues in the last Parliament as Chair of the Women and Equalities Committee. I think that the hon. Lady attended my Westminster Hall last year, and I am grateful to her for securing this Adjournment debate. As a direct consequence of my Westminster Hall debate, Essex police contacted me, saying, “We are looking into doing this. Can you give us advice on the workplace?” It was a great example of the impact of this place, and employers will be listening to her debate. Des she agree that education and sunlight will help a lot of employers make the right decisions?

• 5 Dec 2024 · Cumberlege Review: Pelvic Mesh · Hansard source

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  My right hon. Friend has just made an important point. He spoke about the removal of protrusions and seven surgeries. That almost puts a gloss on what has happened. We have all heard from women who have had the surgery and the experience of many of them is that they have been butchered. It is important to make that clear in this debate, especially for new Members, because we have discussed this in Parliament before: when we think of surgery, we think of any other normal surgery, but this surgery leaves huge amounts of scar tissue and has butchered women in ways that I will not go into now. That must be recognised when we describe some of the remedials that have happened, mainly because those carrying them out do not really know what they are doing at this stage.

• 5 Dec 2024 · Cumberlege Review: Pelvic Mesh · Hansard source

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  It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mr Stringer. I congratulate the hon. Member for Harlow (Chris Vince); it is encouraging that new-intake MPs are already raising this issue. As he said in his opening remarks, constituents have been to see their Members of Parliament because of the pain, suffering and injustice that they have gone through, and they are still not getting anywhere. I am not sure who the lady is, but it is very nice to see her in the Gallery because it is an exceptionally important issue for women. Can we get back to one very important fact about this? We are dealing with people who have had their lives destroyed in the prime of life because of something they were recommended by the NHS. In all honesty, if we were at, say, the dentist’s and they said, “We need to do this to your tooth”, we would say, “Okay.” We would not say, “Can I come back tomorrow?” and then google for any issues. We trust the clinicians and listen to what they say. Let us flip that coin and give the other side: at the time, a lot of those clinicians genuinely thought that vaginal mesh was, for want of a better description, a bit of a miracle cure. As time has gone on, it has become apparent that it was one of the worst procedures that could ever have taken place, and it is the time lag that has created the problem. I have spoken about this topic many times. I have described some of the things that have happened to some of my constituents, including people who were once extremely active now not being able to stand up. When my constituent came to see me, she had to do the entire surgery stood up and leant over the table because she could not sit. She was younger than I am now. She eventually managed to take out private loans and have the mesh removed. There lies one of the big injustices: this was something done by the NHS, and the NHS has run away from its responsibility to solve the problem. I accept that it is difficult for someone who has had the procedure to accept that the surgeon who put the mesh in might be the person who will remove it. But we do not have enough experts in this area, which goes back to the intervention I made on the hon. Member for Harlow: as the review of the NHS comes forward, resourcing must be considered. I have said it before and I will say it again: I believe the NHS to be a misogynistic and sexist institution that was too quick to pat women on the head and say, “Oh well, it’s just what women go through,” in so many aspects of gynaecological health, as well as other things. I have known the Minister for a long time. I consider him to be a friend, and I know that he is in the job because he fundamentally believes in people’s rights. He has a hard task ahead of him. That hard task is not because of what the Minister wants to drive into place; it is because of the pushback that he is going to get from the NHS and the Treasury, which will say that it cannot be done. He is going to have a tough time, but we can already see that this is not a party political issue in the House. Many of us on the Conservative side criticised our own Government in debates on this subject, because they were getting the pushback from the Department of Health and Social Care and the Treasury—and we said that it was not good enough. Removing mesh is like taking hair out of chewing gum. It is not a simple operation. It is not just that it breaks up and starts to infect other organs in the body, which is what can cause the incontinence, as it makes its way into the gut; it has now been shown that there are low-level infections within the mesh. My constituent who finally had mesh removed had a period for the first time in 10 years. Think about that for a moment—being told, “Well, we’re not quite sure what is wrong,” and then, when the mesh is removed, suddenly having periods again after a decade. That shows how much the issue has not been taken as seriously as it should have been. The shadow Minister, my hon. Friend the Member for Sleaford and North Hykeham (Dr Johnson), and I were speaking only last week about a constituent who has a similar issue. Where could she find the mesh centres? There are nine mesh centres, but the issue affects the entire country. The hon. Member for Shipley (Anna Dixon) mentioned the NHS compensation scheme. We moved on from that because it simply was not working. People were not getting the compensation from the scheme because it was not really accessible, and it was confrontational. That comes back to the point of the NHS doing something but not wanting to take responsibility for it. I am afraid that the Minister will be under pressure from people saying, “You must defend the NHS. That is your job. You represent the NHS. When people criticise the NHS, they are criticising you and the Government.” But that is not true: the Minister will have our full support for pushing back in that way. This is the Thalidomide situation again—it is as controversial and, frankly, as scandalous as Thalidomide. We are talking about the “miracle drug” that women took in pregnancy to stop them from getting morning sickness, and it took years before it was banned; in some countries, it was used for several years after that. We pay compensation to victims of Thalidomide for the rest of their lives. I am proud to have been the Member of Parliament who in 2012 got the health grant extended for another 10 years. It is now a lifetime health grant. I am proud of that; it is something we did in this House. People turn around and say, “Redress is something we have to assess because there are so many people,” but why is that? There are so many people because the procedure was done willy-nilly and now those involved do not want to take responsibility. Many other Members want to speak, and I will let them have their say. The Minister has my full support and, I am sure, the full support of many Members here—and he is going to need it. I ask him to stay strong, to keep in mind why we are doing this and to remember the victims who have had their lives destroyed in every single aspect. They must have the redress and the ability through the NHS to have the situation rectified so that they are not borrowing £25,000 to go privately to the same surgeon they would see on the NHS.

• 21 Oct 2024 · Employment Rights Bill · Hansard source

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  I will speak to the amendment, especially about the Bill being rushed through without full consultation. On 13 May 2014, I tabled a ten-minute rule Bill on the Prohibition of Unpaid Internships, as Members will see in volume 580 of Hansard , column 593. On 14 November 2016, I tabled a private Member’s Bill, the National Minimum Wage (Workplace Internships)—volume 616 of Hansard , column 1156. On 27 October 2017, Lord Holmes of Richmond tabled the Unpaid Work Experience (Prohibition). And on 5 February 2020, I co-sponsored the Unpaid Work Experience (Prohibition) Bill introduced by Alex Cunningham, the former Member for Stockton North, now retired. Despite unpaid internships being mentioned in the Government’s policy documents on work, they are not in the Bill. The Government have said that they will tighten up the ban, but there is no ban on unpaid internships—they exist, as they did in the last Parliament, not least with many a Member on the opposite side of the House. If there were such a ban, it would not have to be mentioned in policy documents. A ban should have been brought in alongside the Bill. There will be a lot of hubris on the Government Benches about bringing forward a landmark employment Bill, with Labour Members saying the Conservatives did nothing, despite all the evidence laid out by my hon. Friend the Member for Thirsk and Malton (Kevin Hollinrake) in his excellent opening speech. [Interruption.] It is all very well burying one’s head in the sand, but every one of the Bills I brought forward got kicked into the long grass, not least my private Member’s Bill, when the only Labour Member present was the shadow Minister. If Labour MPs had turned up, we might have been able to get a closure motion, but they decided not to. That has been the story throughout. If the Deputy Prime Minister does want the Bill to go through, she needs to fight off whatever it was that stopped it each time; I always started out with the commitment that it would happen, and then somehow people were convinced not to do it. I say that in a constructive way to the Deputy Prime Minister, who I know very well. An intern should be defined as a worker. We were talking about an amendment to the National Minimum Wage Act 1998 that says that work experience is important, but after 20 days or four weeks in work, an intern should be treated as an employee. Work should always pay, and if someone is contributing after that period of time, they are adding something to the business.

• 18 Jul 2024 · Foreign Affairs and Defence · Hansard source

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  Recruitment has become a big problem in the armed forces, especially now that unemployment is at historically low levels. One of my colleagues said to me recently that it was not officers but the ranks who were difficult to recruit. I do not have an immediate answer on how we can change that, but I can say this. In my short tenure as the procurement Minister at the MOD, it became blatantly obvious within 24 hours from looking at the letters and written questions on my desk that accommodation is one of the biggest issues facing the services. I make no criticism of any of my successors or predecessors in that role for trying to handle the issue of accommodation, because I quickly discovered just how difficult it is. I wanted to make front-loading the capital expenditure budget a priority in order to sort out accommodation, but there are so many legal hurdles in the deals that have been done in the past that it becomes difficult. I want to put on the record that I see service accommodation as a defence capability, and it should be treated like all other defence capabilities. If we are asking our service personnel to go to war, do we want the last thing they hear before they go on to the battlefield to be that their family are moving out and going somewhere else because they cannot live in such conditions any more? Do we want the last thing our personnel on Trident hear before disappearing for four months to be, “I’m leaving; I’m going back to my family home with the kids. We can’t live like this”? That means it has become an issue of operational capability. We need our highly trained and highly professional personnel to know that they are being looked after, which starts with accommodation. I wish the Government all success in trying to grasp this issue and take it forward, because it is exceptionally complex. I am looking at the shadow Secretary of State for Defence, my hon. Friend the Member for South Suffolk (James Cartlidge), who was one of my successors. I know that he personally tried very hard to sort this issue out and carry it forward. I know there is a body of work taking place, but this is a priority and needs to be sorted. I hope that the new Minister for the Armed Forces, the hon. Member for Plymouth Sutton and Devonport (Luke Pollard), makes good on the 50 written questions he submitted on 23 and 24 May this year about accommodation, and on the several questions tabled by the now Secretary of State. They obviously recognise that it is a huge concern, and we look forward to finding out how they will approach that as soon as possible. I will move on to foreign affairs. Without a shadow of a doubt, one of the most contentious issues in the previous Parliament, as well as outside and during the general election, was the war between Israel and Gaza, which has inflamed passions on all sides. I fear that the general election campaign showed that some of the militant pro-Palestinian protesters are stepping over the mark. That does not apply to all pro-Palestinian protesters—there are very different sets of people—but I am talking about the militant pro-Palestinian protesters who seek to use fear and intimidation to try to achieve their objectives. Mr Deputy Speaker, I have not given notice to the hon. Member for Birmingham Yardley (Jess Phillips) about what I am about to say, but it is not a criticism, so I hope she will accept it. As she pointed out in her acceptance speech, it was one of the most horrific campaigns she had ever been through. Nobody putting themselves forward in a democracy, let alone for public service, should have to experience what not just she but several other people experienced. Do you know what most of them had in common, Mr Deputy Speaker? They were women. Female candidates in the election, especially Labour female candidates, had the most horrific, misogynistic abuse hurled at them over the issue of Gaza and Israel, and we have to call that out. Everybody elected to this place is here as a parliamentarian to speak up for the things they passionately believe in, and no one should ever dismiss someone’s passionate views about a particular subject, even if we ferociously disagree with them. However, it is incumbent on all of us to call it out when we see, in what should be a fair democracy, people having their tyres slashed, being screamed at and being intimidated, which happens to women especially. If we want to have a strong democracy, we have to make sure that this House says with one voice that everybody who wants to stand for Parliament, whatever their views, has the right to campaign safely and put their views across. As a country, we have fallen a long way behind that. Whatever anybody’s view, we have to call that out. I am a strong defender and supporter of Israel. I believe that Israel has a right to exist, and a right to defend itself. I believe that a close eye must be kept on whether international humanitarian law is being broken. If it is, the people who are responsible must be brought before the courts and prosecuted. The hon. Member for Oxford West and Abingdon (Layla Moran) made a very powerful speech, and I listened intently to every word she said. Her personal experiences bring value to this House, as she is able to talk about what the Israel-Gaza conflict means to her, given that her family are on the ground. Who in this House does not want to see a ceasefire? We all want to see a ceasefire, but there are two sides to the coin. It is still Hamas’s objective to wipe out the state of Israel, which we have to address. We have to keep a balance. As the shadow Foreign Secretary, my right hon. Friend the Member for Sutton Coldfield (Mr Mitchell), said, a pogrom was launched on 7 October, and we must make absolutely sure that what happened on that day cannot happen again. This House has always pushed for a two-state solution, but it cannot be down to Israel alone to make the ceasefire happen. I will carry on defending Israel’s right to defend itself and maintain its security. I will also carry on defending international law and making sure it is abided by. If it is not, I will hold people to account. But the call for a ceasefire cannot just be on one side. Hamas have to release the hostages and give up their objective of wiping out Israel, and then we may be able to move things forward.