Ben Coleman MP: speeches

Speeches

• 24 Feb 2026 · EU Membership Referendum: Impact on the UK · Hansard source

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  Will the hon. Member give way?

• 24 Feb 2026 · EU Membership Referendum: Impact on the UK · Hansard source

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  It is a pleasure to serve under your chairship, Sir Desmond. Eighty years ago, just after the second world war, my great-uncle Zelia stood outside this Parliament building. He doffed his hat—everyone had a hat in those days—and he said, “She saved us all.” He was a Latvian Jew who lived in Paris; I was always told he had fought with the French resistance. He certainly knew what Britain had meant to Europe. The whole of Europe knew that. At that moment, Europe looked to Britain for a lead, but we pulled back. Even when we finally joined them, we developed the habit of blaming Brussels more than reminding people of the benefits. So when the 2016 referendum came, people answered on the basis of what they had been told and what they had not been told. Now, 10 years on, the cost is clear. Boris Johnson promised the NHS £19 billion a year. Instead, we have lost £90 billion a year, every year, in tax revenue.

• 27 Jan 2026 · Medical Training (Prioritisation) Bill · Hansard source

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  I congratulate my right hon. Friend on his excellent speech and the strong points that he is delivering. I associate myself with the remarks of my hon. Friend the Member for Stevenage (Kevin Bonavia) about Malta. As a member of the Health and Social Care Committee, I have also been approached by Queen Mary University. It seems to me that we should be approaching this with a sense of fairness, and if students have entered into a GMC-recognised course with the expectation of having priority access for foundation status, we should accept that those who are currently in training still enjoy that, even if we change the rules for people who enter those courses in the future. Is that something that my right hon. Friend will consider?

• 27 Jan 2026 · Commonhold and Leasehold Reform · Hansard source

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  Residents in Chelsea and Fulham have experienced years of poor service and unfair treatment from managing agents, so I know how pleased they will be by this Government’s determination to do the right thing by leaseholders after years of, sadly, weak regulation under the Conservatives. May I take this opportunity to tell my hon. Friend how much residents in Chelsea and Fulham are looking forward to the further steps on service charges and managing agents that he has outlined? More, please.

• 15 Jan 2026 · Gambling Harms: Children and Young People · Hansard source

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  I am grateful to my hon. Friend for securing the debate. Gambling is one of the most pernicious public health issues of our times, as we have said on the Health and Social Care Committee. It has to be seen as a public health issue. Children who are bombarded with gambling ads on social media and who are learning to see betting as a normal part of the environment are just being exploited by adults. They have undeveloped risk judgment and undeveloped impulse control. We have a generation being primed for addiction. Does my hon. Friend agree that the Government should do a number of things: ban gambling ads on platforms accessible to minors, prohibit influencer promotions, enforce harsh penalties on violators, mandate addiction warnings, require robust age verification and fund prevention programmes? In short, does he agree that it is time for the Government to see this as a public health issue and get tough with the simply gross adults behind this online exploitation, who are damaging our children and their future?

• 15 Jan 2026 · Food Inflation · Hansard source

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  I am most grateful to my hon. Friend for calling for this important debate. The Health and Social Care Committee are currently doing an inquiry into food, and supermarkets will be coming in shortly to talk to us about how they operate—we will have a lot of questions to ask. Obesity and nutrition are a particular challenge for people on low incomes. It is more than twice as expensive to buy healthy food. Does she agree that we need a cross-Government strategy to bring the price of food within a range that people on lower incomes can afford, and make sure that good, healthy food is not only affordable, but accessible everywhere in the country? We need Government, business and experts to work together on that. The time is now. The problem is real and needs to be addressed.

• 14 Jan 2026 · UK-France Relations · Hansard source

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  I thank my hon. Friend for securing the debate. We talk about smoothing the relationship, so will he join me in welcoming the new entente amicale between the UK and France? Will he also join me in recognising how that is strengthened by the 11 French-English bilingual schools in our country, such as the tremendous Fulham Bilingual in my constituency, which is a partnership between the French lycée and the local Holy Cross school? It is a living, breathing symbol of the entente amicale in action, so will my hon. Friend proclaim with me, “Vive l’école bilingue de Fulham!”?

• 8 Jan 2026 · High Street Gambling Reform · Hansard source

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  The hon. Member talks about the amount of money raised in tax from gambling companies. Can he also give us the figures for the amount of money that the NHS has to spend each year on the mental health issues and other problems that arise from gambling addiction?

• 8 Jan 2026 · High Street Gambling Reform · Hansard source

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  I am extremely grateful to my hon. Friend the Member for Brent East (Dawn Butler) for securing this important debate. Gambling is a subject that the Health and Social Care Committee has looked at in some detail, and it is clear from what I have heard from witnesses, from talking to the National Gambling Clinic—it is in my constituency—and from walking round our local high streets talking to people I know, that high streets remain at the heart of the gambling harm being caused in our country and localities, particularly in our most disadvantaged and poorest communities. As we have heard, when the Gambling Act 2005 abolished the so-called “demand” test, and replaced it with the “aim to permit”, it removed the requirement to prove local need before opening a betting shop, and opened the door to a wild-west clustering of betting shops in poorer areas. That does devastating damage to individuals, families and communities, because residents in streets where every third or fourth shop can be a gambling den with cups of tea, face constant exposure to gambling during routine activities. They could be shopping for groceries, taking kids to school or commuting for work, and there is a gambling premises. Gambling becomes normalised. It is like a regular part of daily life, rather than activity that, as we know, requires caution. For those vulnerable to addiction, it makes avoidance nearly impossible and relapse inevitable, and the financial consequences can be catastrophic. Lower-income families, and people who earn far less or live on benefits, have no buffers to absorb that sort of loss. What might be manageable for someone with savings becomes ruinous for someone living from pay cheque to pay cheque. We are talking about people who cannot pay their rent, or whose bills are going unpaid and whose children are going without. The toll on mental health is huge. Indeed, it is immense: depression, anxiety, shame, and isolation. As we have heard, we cannot necessarily see a problem gambler. We may be able to see a problem drunk, but a problem gambler hides their addiction from loved ones—that was one of the points made strongly to me when I visited the National Gambling Clinic in Earl’s Court. The stress that someone is already under is compounded by the gambling, and those mental health stresses may already be more prevalent in depressed or deprived areas, where housing is less adequate and people face other stresses and challenges on a daily basis. We have heard about the redoubtable charity Gambling with Lives, to which I pay tribute. There is no doubt in my mind that the gambling industry and its lobbyists are often, in their behaviour, simply thugs. People such as the wonderful Ritchies—who set up Gambling with Lives after losing their son, and who brought a constituent to see me who talked about his own son losing his life to gambling—are still ploughing away and fighting their fight, and they have been inspirational for all Members of the House who have met them. They made me and the Health and Social Care Committee aware that there are between 117 and 496 gambling-related suicides every year. Having taken evidence, we thought that, although wide, that data was strong enough to place in our report so that it is on the public record. Gambling does not just tear families apart, it also takes lives away, and we must remember that. We must also look at the community impact of allowing the clustering of betting shops since the law changed in 2005. That clustering drives out family businesses and community services, and it feeds neighbourhood decline. Hammersmith and Fulham council tried to do something about it. We have a high concentration of betting shops, especially in deprived neighbourhoods. North End Road in Fulham has been identified as a gambling vulnerability zone, and there are two council estates nearby, which are in the bottom decile for deprivation, employment and income. That is not a coincidence, because higher levels of deprivation and the clustering of gambling premises go together. North End Road in the heart of Fulham is one of three hotspots in the borough. The council is doing its best to act responsibility within the national framework, and it is consulting on a local plan. Residents are keen for it to do that, and in the most vulnerable areas there will be a presumption to refuse, but in the end it cannot refuse premises because the law still constrains it, in a way that is out of kilter with alcohol and other licensing. The Health and Social Care Committee welcome the fact that the Government have reframed this issue as a public health crisis. We have called for local authorities to have a key role in gambling licensing and for directors of public health to be made a responsible authority when it comes to gambling planning and licensing applications. We need reform of the legislation governing high street gambling, and we need it now.

• 17 Dec 2025 · UK-EU Common Understanding Negotiations · Hansard source

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  I congratulate the Minister as heartily as everyone else has on bringing the UK back into Erasmus and ensuring that people from all backgrounds, including university students, can once again enjoy the opportunities that the Tory Brexit took away. Part of my Chelsea and Fulham constituency ranks among the 12th most deprived areas in the United Kingdom. I am looking forward, I should tell the Minister, to helping the young people there to seize the new opportunities. May I encourage the Minister to also be ambitious in concluding a youth experience scheme, which would further restore the opportunities that our young people deserve?

• 15 Dec 2025 · Industry and Exports (Financial Assistance) Bill · Hansard source

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  I am most grateful to the Minister for his statement. I hugely welcome the Government’s determination to increase trade, especially in the aftermath of Brexit. That is what it is all about: expanding and clarifying the spending limit for UK Export Finance. As we have heard, UK Export Finance has a very proud history of boosting British exports, and supporting thousands of companies and tens of thousands of British jobs. The Bill means that it will be able to do even more. I am delighted to say that I have had the privilege of seeing UK Export Finance in action at first hand in my capacity as the trade envoy to Morocco and francophone west Africa. Just last month, I had the privilege of heading the UK delegation to the francophone West and Central Africa Forum in Togo. It was attended by nearly 1,000 people from business and Government from the UK and 10 rapidly growing African countries, all of them seeking new opportunities for trade and economic partnership. UK Export Finance did an absolutely brilliant job of co-organising the event. In my opening speech to the forum, I was very proud to be able to set out a UK approach that is based on co-production rather than extraction, an approach based on mutual respect—so different from what they have perhaps learnt to expect from other countries in the past. Ambassadors have been mentioned. I very much appreciated having UK Export Finance’s expert support alongside our ambassadors in the bilateral meetings that I was able to hold with the President of the Council of Ministers of Togo and with representatives of the Governments of Côte d’Ivoire, Senegal, Cameroon and the Republic of Congo, where we explored numerous opportunities to go further on trade, for example on electricity networks or, as the Minister mentioned, Scottish whisky—that also came up. Now, UKEF is building on what it achieved. Its hard work means that the forum will turn into investable projects, which will in turn translate into jobs, exports and impact. The theme of the forum was “success breeds success”. I am delighted that, through the Bill, we are enabling UKEF to create even more success in the future for the UK economy and our trading partners. Closer to home, we should point out that UKEF also has an important role increasing our trade with the massive European Union market on our doorstep. The disaster—the absolute disaster—of Brexit has damaged our economy hugely. More than 16,000 SMEs have given up trading with the EU since it happened. We have lost billions in tax revenue for our NHS and schools. The idiot comment from the previous Prime Minister that the NHS would get money from Brexit turned out to be totally the opposite: we have lost billions in tax revenue for the NHS. Alongside my determination to increase trade with Africa, I have high hopes for increasing trade with the EU, as do many, many Members on the Labour Benches; there is no single part of the House that has a monopoly on wishing, sensibly, to trade more with the European Union. The Government’s reset is very welcome. I am keen for them to be even more ambitious. We must recognise that there is no swifter route to growth than getting rid of Brexit red tape. I welcome the fact that the UK and the EU are currently negotiating an agreement to ditch much of the Brexit bureaucracy that has hit our food and drink exports and imports. I hope that will lead to lower food prices and new job opportunities for the British people. I would like to see us go even further. For example, let us boost our manufacturing industry by seeking mutual recognition with the EU of conformity assessments. Let us boost our services sector by seeking mutual recognition of professional qualifications.

• 15 Dec 2025 · Industry and Exports (Financial Assistance) Bill · Hansard source

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  I am immensely surprised to hear that intervention—almost as surprised as I was to see Liberal Democrat Members put forward the customs union idea the other day! We struck a deal with the EU in May. We need to implement that deal. We need to see through the deal we are negotiating on food and drink. We need to talk about youth experience and a whole range of other things. Let us do those. Let us deliver on what we promised. Let us implement what we promised. Let us build the trust. I sat down the other day with about a dozen ambassadors from EU countries, and let me tell the House, there is very little appetite for Britain going into a customs union until we have shown that we can be trusted and have delivered what we are already promising to deliver. Yes, that sort of comment might arouse the interest of some, but at this stage it is not the best thing for Britain to plough forward in that direction. Let us deliver on the deals we have, not throw them aside, reject them or say they are pointless. They will deliver jobs and lower prices for British people and that is what we need in the aftermath of Brexit. As this Government seek every opportunity to enhance trade and economic growth, ensuring that UK Export Finance has the resources it needs to underpin export growth is the right way forward. The winners will be businesses in every part of our country.

• 4 Dec 2025 · EU Youth Experience Scheme · Hansard source

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  3. What recent progress his Department has made on negotiations with the EU on a youth experience scheme.

• 4 Dec 2025 · EU Youth Experience Scheme · Hansard source

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  The Chancellor said recently that an “ambitious” youth experience scheme with the EU would be good for growth and good for business. The Centre for European Reform has estimated that such an agreement could add nearly 0.5% to UK GDP over 10 years. Can the Minister reassure my constituents that the Government will maximise all the opportunities on offer for our young people from all backgrounds to work, study, do apprenticeships and volunteer in European Union countries in order to boost our economy and to rebuild cultural links after the damage of the Conservative party’s botched Brexit?

• 26 Nov 2025 · Engagements · Hansard source

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  Q14. My constituents tell me that our top national priority must remain as it is: economic growth. Does the Prime Minister agree that the swiftest way to achieve growth is for the Government to be even more ambitious in negotiating with the European Union to remove the new red tape and trade barriers that have been holding back UK businesses, especially small and medium-sized ones, since the Conservatives’ poorly managed exit from the European Union?

• 5 Nov 2025 · Fresh and Nutritious Food: Inequality of Access · Hansard source

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  That is a very important point. The availability of fast food right outside schools needs to be looked at and curtailed. The food is cheap, but it is incredibly low quality, and it is not doing our children any good. And school food standards are not properly enforced. There is a lot of cheap school food, but in some of the schools I visit, it is just orange—it is not healthy. The Government need to do a lot more to provide resources to local authorities so that they can properly enforce food standards. We also need to do other things. We need to extend the sugar tax and the soft drinks levy, and have a general levy on unhealthy foods. At the same time, healthy food must not go up in price. As we make unhealthy food more expensive, we should bring the price of healthy food down. That is a huge challenge for any Government. We have lots of creative people in supermarkets, who come up with wonderful ideas for pumping our food full of unnutritious substances, but I would love to see them take the same effort to bringing healthy food to the population at a price that can be afforded.

• 5 Nov 2025 · Fresh and Nutritious Food: Inequality of Access · Hansard source

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  Just yesterday, the Government came out with new figures showing that the prevalence of childhood obesity in the most deprived areas is more than double the prevalence in the least deprived. It may surprise many hon. Members to hear that it is a significant problem in my constituency. Although Chelsea and Fulham is among the most affluent constituencies in the country, it has huge pockets of deprivation and poverty, as do many parts of London. Just last week, the English indices of deprivation ranked the World’s End estate in Chelsea in the bottom decile for deprivation and in the second lowest decile for health outcomes. The fabulous residents of the World’s End estate live on one side of King’s Road, and literally just across the road, the equally fabulous residents of some wonderful, beautiful houses are in the top decile for income and health. I find it hard to understand, as I am sure everyone here does, why the children on the World’s End estate should be condemned to worse health outcomes than those living just across the road. Sadly, the reason, simply put—as my hon. Friend the Member for Glasgow South (Gordon McKee) said—is access. He talked about transport access, but there is simply too little access to affordable healthy food. Healthy diets are simply out of reach for too many. Healthy foods are often twice as expensive per calorie as unhealthy foods, which manufacturers shove full of fat, sugar and salt. It is cheap, and it is poisoning people, leading to the obesity epidemic. Of course, people do not make decisions in a void. It is not just about money; they are under huge marketing pressure to buy unhealthy food. The Health and Social Care Committee, of which I am a member, is conducting an inquiry into food and obesity, and I was told just this morning that the advertising budget of KitKat alone exceeds the entire UK Government budget for promoting healthy eating. Witnesses told the Committee that food manufacturers and supermarkets must do much more to be part of the solution, not just the problem. To do that, we need mandatory Government action. That would mean strengthening the Healthy Start scheme, supporting charities such as Alexandra Rose, which does wonderful work in my constituency, enforcing ambitious school food standards and building on the soft drinks levy.

• 5 Nov 2025 · Fresh and Nutritious Food: Inequality of Access · Hansard source

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  I am grateful, Mr Mundell—I will conclude. The hon. Member makes a very helpful point, particularly for constituencies that are more rural than mine of Chelsea and Fulham—what he says certainly has validity in many parts of the country. My final point is very simple: families do not need lectures. They need a Government who are prepared to do a lot more to ensure fair access to healthy, affordable food.

• 28 Oct 2025 · Obesity and Fatty Liver Disease · Hansard source

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  Will the hon. Member accept that there is now a general body of opinion that it is time to stop blaming people for not having the willpower not to eat bad food when they are constantly bombarded with advertising and marketing? Some £6.4 billion a year will be spent by the food industry on advertising and marketing to people, and in many areas it is very difficult to get food that is both affordable and healthy. Is it not time to stop blaming people for being fat and to support them to tackle obesity in the ways that I and many of my hon. Friends here have described? Is it not time to stop sticking up for the food industry and to start sticking up for ordinary people?

• 28 Oct 2025 · Obesity and Fatty Liver Disease · Hansard source

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  I suggest to the hon. Member that one of the principal reasons that non-alcoholic fatty liver disease has shot up so radically in recent years is the increasing prevalence of food that is simply bad for people and is causing them damage—in particular, food that is high in fat, sugar and salt. For that reason, the Health and Social Care Committee, of which I am a member, is currently doing an inquiry on food. Does the hon. Member agree that the Government need to focus on making healthy food more affordable and accessible, and to tackle the advertising and marketing of so much of the unhealthy food that is out there?

• 28 Oct 2025 · Obesity and Fatty Liver Disease · Hansard source

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  If I may bring the hon. Member back to childhood obesity, does she agree that there is a serious problem with sugar being pumped into so much baby food? Does she therefore welcome what the Government have finally done after many years of the issue’s sitting unaddressed? They are giving the industry 18 months to take the sugar out of baby food and to stop marketing basically unhealthy products, which no one should buy, as healthy or healthier. Does she welcome what the Government are doing here?

• 23 Oct 2025 · Black History Month · Hansard source

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  My hon. Friend makes a strong point, and I could not agree more. There is some data out there. Hospital trusts collect data each year on how their staff are feeling about a whole range of things. I looked at my local hospital trust’s data and one question it asks is: “Do you feel that you have suffered more discrimination this year from patients and from colleagues and managers?” I have not looked for a couple of years, but sadly the last time I looked it was getting slowly worse. This is definitely an issue. If people are foolish enough to think that somebody’s skin colour is going to affect their ability to do their job properly, it makes it more difficult for staff to provide care to the whole population. Black NHS staff need to have safe working environments. They encounter racism, and they should not. It is interesting that you talk about doctors—

• 23 Oct 2025 · Black History Month · Hansard source

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  I am grateful to my hon. Friend—my youthful friend—for that comment. I could not agree more. When I became aware of this problem back when I was a councillor, we instituted a programme to build trust within the black and minority ethnic community in the NHS. As a result, we had hundreds of conversations in the community with people from the NHS and with people of colour. One black gentleman, who I think was a little older than 45—he was probably not far from my own age—went and had a prostate test as a result, and it was found that he had prostate cancer. If he had not had the test, who knows what the situation would be these days. I therefore fully support my hon. Friend’s call for everybody to have prostate cancer tests. I have had one myself, and fortunately, like him, I think things are all right. When we get feedback from patients, we need formal mechanisms for registering that—it should not be done in the typical ad hoc, amateur way—and we need to co-produce the changes with the people we are actually meant to be there for. Also, when people complain about discriminatory treatment, we need to consider that seriously, and the NHS needs to respond in a much more open-hearted, open-handed and open-minded way than I am told it often does. The Committee did the inquiry and came up with specific recommendations that affect black maternal health, but I think they spread right across the piece of black people not getting as good healthcare as they should, and as white people do. I end on a specific example of something quite close to my heart because of friends: sickle cell disease. As we are talking about black history, I would like to pay tribute to Dame Elizabeth Anionwu, a wonderful woman and the UK’s first sickle cell nurse. She has done so much to educate me and other people and improve services in this country. People may not know much about sickle cell if they are not black. It causes intense pain and organ damage. Crudely, cells get shaped like sickles, and it can cause strokes; it can even cause early death. It is often overlooked, mainly because it affects black and minority ethnic people. Imperial College healthcare NHS trust is currently running a wonderful programme that serves my constituents in Chelsea and Fulham. It is one of only seven centres in the country piloting what is called a renal haematology triage unit, which is one of those sexy NHS titles, but it just means if a person suddenly get a crisis and needs to be seen swiftly, they do not have to wait for hours and hours in accident and emergency; they can get swift pain relief. That is vital for making sure that the problem does not get seriously dangerous seriously quickly. I went to visit it and talked to patients and staff. It is a terrific centre that has made a huge difference to people’s lives, as they are able to go to work and look after their children more easily. It is inspirational—but, sadly, it is a pilot. In the normal world, we do a pilot, we see if it works and, if it does, we try to find the funding long term. Often, in the NHS it means, “We have got a bit of money left over. What can we do?” or it means, “Let’s do a project for a few years and call it a pilot.” We need to keep the funding for those seven projects across the country, which are offering urgent, swift pain relief for people with sickle cell, after April. That is one thing that I am working on at the moment. We have to show everybody that they matter equally. We have to build trust. So let us build trust, let us acknowledge the harm that has been done and let us do the work on training, comprehensive data and workforce issues. Let us name racism and tackle it head on. Let us listen to black patients and ensure that services for conditions such as sickle cell are as important to everybody as they are to just a few. We cannot change history—we can recognise it, as my hon. Friend the Member for Clapham and Brixton Hill (Bell Ribeiro-Addy), who has just left the Chamber, said—but we can change the future. We have the evidence and the recommendations. We know what needs to be done. I have not said anything new or anything that will have shocked the House. The only thing that is shocking is that there is often so little willpower to make the obvious and necessary changes that are needed. I will keep fighting for that to happen, and I hope that everyone in the Chamber will fight alongside me.

• 23 Oct 2025 · Black History Month · Hansard source

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  The hon. Member makes a very good point. I will run through a few more proposals from the maternity report, but they will not surprise Members; they are not radical or new. What would really be radical and new would be if one of these reports— I think I have read at least six reports about black people getting less good treatment from the NHS—had their recommendations implemented. That would be radical. We on the Health and Social Care Committee are looking forward to the Government’s response to the report and are hoping to see the recommendations implemented. If they are implemented for maternity care, we hope that they can be applied more broadly. The maternity services development fund has sadly been slashed from £95 million to £2 million. The money has been given to integrated care boards to parcel out, but they are all facing 50% admin cuts, so maternity services will have to compete with every other local priority. We need dedicated ringfenced budgets, and we need budgets for areas where there are specific racial health inequalities, such as conditions that affect some people more than others because they are black. I am thinking of fibroids, for instance, and sickle cell awareness, which I will come to in a minute. I turn to another thing that is essential in the NHS. The Health and Social Care Committee was glad to have the new chair of the NHS, Dr Penny Dash, in front of us being interviewed before her appointment. She said that one thing that is really important to her is data, data, data—and I agree. However, the extraordinary thing is that ethnicity data collection in the NHS is not very good. But it is not impossible to do. There was some work done on assessing disparities in maternal morbidity outcomes. It was almost complete in March 2023 under the previous Government, but when the Committee asked Ministers in June 2025 how it was going, we were told that it was good news and that it was still being developed and was expected within less than three years. That means it will have taken potentially six years to complete something that was meant to be almost finished. This is very slow and unacceptable progress.

• 23 Oct 2025 · Black History Month · Hansard source

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  My remarks will be influenced by my membership of the Health and Social Care Committee, and by the fact that I am the vice-chair of the all-party parliamentary group on black health. Also, like my hon. Friend the Member for Leyton and Wanstead (Mr Bailey), I have the pleasure of being a trade envoy: for Morocco and francophone west Africa. We share a great interest in that continent. I will focus my remarks on health. When we talk about health and black people, very often we talk about the huge improvement in recognition of one outstanding person: Mary Seacole, who is now just talked about as a nurse who did wonderful things in the Crimea. She has reached the august stage of not just being referred to as “the black Florence Nightingale”; she is now referred to in her own right, but it took an immensely long time for that to happen. The hon. Members for East Grinstead and Uckfield (Mims Davies) and for Aberdeen North (Kirsty Blackman) referred to the contribution made by the Windrush generation. The history of the national health service and of our country’s black community are intertwined. The people who came on Windrush and other boats, and the successors to them, are now retired and are served by the national health service, but the people who came after them are still the bedrock of the national health service. They provide the majority of the care that we all expect to receive, but we know that their contribution has not always been well rewarded. There is still a huge issue today regarding how well the national health service serves people of colour—how well it serves black people. That was brought home to me quite starkly by one of the most challenging things that has confronted any of us in our recent history: the covid pandemic. As a cabinet member for health and social care in a London council at the time, I would see the vaccination figures every week among people of different socioeconomic backgrounds. Consistently, people from an African-Caribbean background would be the least likely to be vaccinated; they would be the most reluctant. A lot of people were saying things like, “Oh, this is just because they are prey to misinformation or have irrational fears. All we need to do is put them in front of people of religion, or footballers, and it will change everyone’s mind.” I found that slightly odd, so I talked a lot to people to try to understand why it was happening. I should say that I went to a London comprehensive school with people who were black, white and from all sorts of backgrounds. I have always been aware of racism, but I thought that things had got a lot better. From talking to black people about covid and their feelings about the NHS, I realised that things were really not as good as I had liked to pretend to myself. The situation was not driven by a need to educate people or make them aware; the problem was that there was a lack of trust in the NHS, and it did not come from nowhere. If people consistently get less good access to care, less good treatment and less good outcomes, it is not surprising that when they are told, “Trust us, we’re the NHS,” they say, “Well, you haven’t always obviously had my best interests at heart, so forgive me a certain amount of reluctance to do so.” We have a very serious problem in our country of people getting less good healthcare simply because their skin colour is different, which is completely absurd—it sounds very childish of me to put it in that way, as it is so ridiculous—and what I saw during that time on the council made me think, “How do we address it? How do we create the trust that we need everybody in this country to have equally in the NHS?” Our Select Committee is trying to grapple with those questions in different ways. The hon. Member for Chelmsford (Marie Goldman) mentioned the issue of black maternal health. She is right that maternal health services are a huge problem. The Health and Social Care Committee recently undertook an inquiry into how to improve black maternal health services. I will talk a little bit about it, because I think what we came out with provides a bit of a road map for transforming the NHS’s treatment of black people across the board, and for improving services across the board. We started by confronting the shocking fact that a black woman is 2.3 times more likely than a white woman to die during pregnancy or childbirth, or in the post-natal period. As a slight aside, the figure used to be even worse; it used to be almost five times. It has only got better because everything has got worse for white people as well. There is a huge problem in maternity services in this country generally, but the disparity still remains: black women are 2.3 times more likely to die than white women—in 2025, in one of the richest countries in the world. We heard repeatedly that the disparity was not the result of social factors, biology or other things; it was simply racism—it was not direct, not overt, not thought through, but racism was one of the core drivers of the disparity. The statistic that black women are 2.3 times more likely to die than white women is not just a statistic, because behind every number is a woman who did not come home to her family; a child left to grow up without their mother; and a partner, parent or a friend left devastated by a death that was preventable. We were encouraged to be optimistic, so I want to be optimistic against that stark background. I think things can improve if we want them to improve. The Committee made a number of recommendations on maternity care. They are specific, but as I say, I think they have some universal applications. I will share them, and suggest how each can apply to the NHS more broadly to tackle racism, so that everyone gets equal care, no matter who they are. First, we heard some really strange things. For example, we heard evidence about black women being told by both black and white doctors, “Oh well, you’re black. You can cope with more pain, can’t you?” It is incredible that people are still having that said to them. Other problems include symptoms not necessarily being identified —things like skin rashes and pre-eclampsia discolouration —because doctors and nurses are not properly trained to understand the differences in skin colours, and how to recognise these problems in black people as opposed to white people. The Committee simply thinks that it would be useful if we had mandatory anti-racism training. That is not training against being racist; it is training in cultural competency, understanding differences—they could be colour differences or cultural differences—and respecting all patients, not just some. Surely it is the job and the fundamental duty of anyone in public service to be there for everybody, not just some people. We would like the training to be not just mandatory but informed by lived experiences, not by assumptions. At the time some people said to me, “Let’s just get people in front of churchmen and churchwomen and then they’ll take the covid vaccine.” It must not be those sorts of assumptions; we must actually listen to people and understand their lived experiences in order to tackle unconscious bias and racist assumptions. The good news is that there is a model for this that works. Last night I was at a really interesting presentation by the Caribbean & African Health Network on something called the black health improvement programme. It was commissioned by the Greater Manchester Health and Social Care Partnership to address the health inequalities that were exposed by the covid pandemic, and it is now operating in Greater Manchester and Enfield. It offers GPs culturally appropriate education and training, informed directly by talking to the community. It covers institutional racism, health inequalities and lived experiences, and it is grounded in reality. We need to look at that and learn from it. We must scale up such programmes for use across the whole NHS.