Ben Coleman MP: speeches 2025

Speeches

• 5 Mar 2025 · Department of Health and Social Care · Hansard source

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  Will my hon. Friend give way?

• 5 Mar 2025 · Department of Health and Social Care · Hansard source

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  On that point, will the hon. Lady give way?

• 26 Feb 2025 · Grenfell Tower Inquiry: Phase 2 Report · Hansard source

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  I also welcome the statement by the Deputy Prime Minister. The people in my constituency of Chelsea and Fulham stand shoulder to shoulder with the people who lived in Grenfell Tower, who have suffered hugely. The pain is still felt throughout the whole community. I am delighted to hear my hon. Friend the Member for Kensington and Bayswater (Joe Powell) highlighting again the culpability of the local council and the contractors. I know from my own experience that there is much for the council to do to improve its respect for, and the way it deals with, people living in social housing. I pick up on the point made powerfully by my hon. Friend the Member for Vauxhall and Camberwell Green (Florence Eshalomi) about disabled people, 15 of whom died in Grenfell Tower because they had no personal emergency evacuation plan. I, like her, welcome the Deputy Prime Minister’s commitment to introducing regulation to improve the fire safety and evacuation of disabled and vulnerable people, but when will we see the details? Will those regulations apply to all disabled residents, wherever they live? What legal weight will they have? Can we be absolutely sure that everything is being done to ensure that disabled people have the evacuation plans that they need in order to escape in the event of a terrible fire, such as that at Grenfell?

• 5 Feb 2025 · Gambling Harms · Hansard source

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  I also had a deeply moving meeting last week with a constituent whose son, aged just 19, had tragically taken his own life, having become addicted to online gambling after six months of the same sort of advertising pressure my hon. Friend described. Does my hon. Friend agree that it is time for all parts of Government to acknowledge that problem gambling has become a public health emergency, that it is not enough for gambling to be left to the Department for Culture, Media and Sport alone to regulate and that it is time to stop listening to gambling operators’ siren voices?

• 5 Feb 2025 · Gambling Harms · Hansard source

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  On people appearing to be one thing and actually being something else, does the hon. Member agree that 100% of the gambling levy should be given to independent bodies that are answerable to Ministers and Parliament, not to charities backed by gambling companies?

• 30 Jan 2025 · Local Post Offices · Hansard source

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  I am very grateful to the hon. Member for Taunton and Wellington (Gideon Amos) for securing this timely debate. I was glad to have the opportunity to support him in doing so. Hon. Members have described very powerfully the closures that are happening in their constituencies. In my constituency, the last remaining post office on the historic King’s Road is threatened. It is a long time since the King’s Road heyday of the swinging ’60s, when “Please Mr Postman” was first a hit. Unfortunately, since then the number of post office branches, on what is a very long road, has dwindled and there is now only one left. Shockingly, it is one of 108 directly managed branches across the country that the Post Office is planning to shut, 32 of which are in Greater London. The Post Office says that it is doing that to save money. I hope it is not doing it to pay for the costs of resolving the Horizon scandal. We will perhaps find out over time. Meanwhile, we have a King’s Road post office that offers a buzzing, full service to lots of customers. There are regular queues—every time I go in there I have to wait 10 minutes to be served—and people love the staff. They tell me how worried they are at the possibility of it closing and how incredulous they are that it could even be considered. They depend on it. There simply are no other options nearby. All sorts of people go there. As my hon. Friend the Member for Bermondsey and Old Southwark (Neil Coyle) mentioned, it is particularly older and disabled people who rely on post office services for bill payments and access to cash, and they are the most worried. Around the corner from the post office, there is a number of sheltered accommodation and retirement housing blocks. The people who live there will be disproportionately affected. On hearing what was planned, I immediately launched a petition and was not surprised to get 1,000 signatures in a very short space of time. Many other people have got in touch with me to express their disappointment, dismay and concern. I met Post Office management in early December and left them in no doubt about the anger and shock in the community. They said that the King’s Road post office was losing money. They also said that they might consider franchising it to a retail partner or an independent postmaster, but that no decision had yet been taken. Naturally, I asked to see a full, detailed analysis of the figures. They very kindly responded that they would let me have that in the new year, which we are now in. I will be seeing them again next week and pressing them to provide that analysis. I expect to see not just the financial reasons for any decision to close the post office on the King’s Road, but a detailed impact assessment on how the change would affect the community and what steps would be taken to mitigate it. The number of customers matters, of course, but so does the type of customer that the post office serves. I have touched on this, but we cannot just brush aside the needs of older and disabled people: people who do not feel comfortable banking online, people who prefer to use cash. We cannot let some people feel that they are seen as less important, because they are not less important. We cannot let them feel they are left behind. They must not be left behind. We need to find a solution that serves the needs of everyone. That is why it is so important to me that the Post Office consults genuinely and authentically with the local community about the change. I will be seeking clarity on that as well. Finally, I will try in the meeting to get clarification on the Post Office’s thinking on keeping the King’s Road post office open by franchising it. I have heard the concerns that hon. Members have expressed about franchising, but if it proves to be the only option—we are a long way off that—I intend to pitch in and do all I can to make it a success for my constituents. When we lost a major post office on North End Road in the Fulham part of my constituency, I worked very closely with the local council to support a new franchisee. I was delighted to open a new post office on North End Road last year. It is a franchise, yes, but it provides a seven-day-a-week service from 9 in the morning to 9 in the evening. It provides a full range of services—even newspaper delivery, which does not happen very much. I was there just last week. It is thriving and very popular. People feel well served. That is good news for the people of Fulham, but I cannot help wondering why the Post Office management have to go down the franchising route. Why are directly managed branches so much more expensive to run than locally franchised branches? Perhaps the Minister can shed some light on that; I will be asking the Post Office. I am delighted by the work that the Government are doing, and their determination to revitalise our high streets. I welcome the money that has gone into the Post Office, and I welcome the proposed increase in postmasters’ pay. I look forward to seeing, later this year, the Green Paper setting out options for the future of the Post Office, but it would be helpful at this stage to have clarity about the Government’s long-term aims. Is one of them to maintain a thriving network of post offices? I do hope so. Will banking services feature in the Green Paper? Some interesting ideas have been raised here today. I can reassure my residents in Chelsea that I will continue to work with them, with the Post Office and with the Government to fight the closure of the King’s Road branch, and to ensure that no one is left behind.

• 30 Jan 2025 · Local Post Offices · Hansard source

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  The hon. Lady mentions the Horizon scandal. Is she of the opinion that the previous Government’s failure to address the Horizon scandal over such a long period of time and the billions of pounds that have had to be spent sorting out the mess since then have nothing to do with the financial problems that the Post Office now finds itself in?

• 20 Jan 2025 · New Hospital Programme Review · Hansard source

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  My predecessor in Chelsea and Fulham claimed to have secured funding for Charing Cross hospital. That claim went out on election literature throughout the constituency. At the time, I doubted it. Today’s announcement confirms beyond any doubt that the money was not there. What he was saying was not true. I welcome the honesty and realism of the Government’s statement today. It is about time the British people had a Government playing straight with them and telling them the truth. [ Interruption. ] Instead of laughing and jeering from the Conservative Benches, which is of no use to my constituents in Chelsea and Fulham who were promised the money for Charing Cross hospital when it was never there, I would like to see some contrition. On a more positive note, can the Secretary of State assure my constituents that the timetable that he has set out will be met?

• 20 Jan 2025 · Obesity: Food and Diet · Hansard source

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  That is a very good point. The poverty in this country now and the cost of energy is causing people in my constituency to go to food banks and ask for foods that they do not have to cook. We are offering people food that might not always be of the best quality, and food banks tell me that a lot of healthy, fresh fruit and veg goes to waste because people are either worried about the cost of energy or simply do not know how to cook. These are addressable problems; these are things that we can do something about if we want to do so. I strongly back the House of Lords report’s recommendation that the revenue from a salt and sugar reformulation tax should be used to make healthier food cheaper, particularly for those on low incomes. I would like some of the revenue to go to organisations such as Alexandra Rose, a charity operating in my constituency. It makes healthy food affordable and accessible to families on low incomes by handing out vouchers so that pregnant women and the families of children under five can buy fresh fruit and veg at local markets or independent shops. In the heart of Fulham, 376 families and 587 children have enjoyed £85,200-worth of fresh fruit and veg from our wonderful North End Road market, which has operated since late Victorian times. Alexandra Rose tells me that, six months after starting the project, 64% of children are meeting their five-a-day target, compared with just 7% when it began. As the Government develop their food strategy, I encourage them to consider supporting such charities to extend their work through national action. Another issue is the accessibility of food, and I do not think this point is addressed enough. Many parts of this country are healthy food deserts. In his annual report, Professor Sir Chris Whitty, the chief medical officer, said that “families in inner-city areas are less likely to have access to healthy, affordable food options” and as a result they will have shorter and unhealthier lives. We have to ensure that good food is available at an affordable price. I hope the food strategy will look at that, as well as at teaching basic cookery in schools—that is another important point. Change will take time, but it can be done. It just needs the political will. I hope we will reach a position where, if Mr Horniman could come back to see us, he would be delighted. After all, we must remember that he took immense pride in the tea his family produced; it was one of the very few to be declared free of chemicals and safe to drink in the 1850s. Let us hope we can say the same about our food in the future.

• 20 Jan 2025 · Obesity: Food and Diet · Hansard source

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  I am grateful for the right hon. Gentleman’s comments. I was not attempting to put together the whole puzzle, but additives are an extremely important part of the puzzle. We do ourselves a disservice if we pretend that sugar, salt and fats—eaten in the quantities they are today—and the ready food that can be bought so cheaply are not poisonous, and not huge problems that we need to address. I am not wild about the term “obese” because of the negative, pejorative connotations that can make people feel awful about themselves, as has been said, but it is the best term we have at the moment. Over a fifth of children in this country—22.1%—are obese. The figure is even higher in my constituency, which contains some of the country’s richest people, as well as many residents living in poverty. In the London borough of Kensington and Chelsea, 23.4% of reception pupils, aged four to five, are obese. In the borough of Hammersmith and Fulham, 22.4% of reception pupils are classified as obese. This is a problem everywhere, not just in the poorest parts of the country. It is therefore hugely good news that the Government have identified a shift from ill health to prevention as one of the three major objectives of their health mission. It is even better news that a cross-Government national food strategy is being developed. What would I like to see in that national food strategy? What should be done? I would like us to start by realising that it is time to stop placing excessive emphasis on individual responsibility. That may be hard to swallow for some people, but the Lords report makes it clear that 30 years of policies that rely solely on personal choice, rather than tackling the underlying drivers of unhealthy diets, have failed to shift the dial. Sadly, under successive Governments, these policies have contributed to widening health inequalities. As my hon. Friend the Member for Bolton South and Walkden (Yasmin Qureshi) noted, the Lords report rightly praised the last Government’s sugar tax on soft drinks. Officially called the soft drinks industry levy, it was a significant public health success—people are consuming less sugar. While obesity remains an overall problem, it has fallen to an extent, particularly among girls aged 10 and 11 in the most deprived areas. Fewer children are having to go to hospital to have their decayed teeth pulled out. That brings me to the lack of dentists after 14 years of Conservative Government, but I will not go there now. The sugar tax has saved millions, possibly billions, of pounds in healthcare costs, as well as a lot of misery. It is a pretty good example to follow, so I support the call by my hon. Friend the Member for Stroud for the levy to be extended to more food products and for similar action to be taken on salt and fats. I am glad that the Government are delivering on their manifesto pledge to give children the best and healthiest start in life by banning the targeting of junk food at children. Just as advertising restrictions contributed to a decline in the number of smokers, I hope that restricting the advertising of unhealthy foods will contribute to a decline in childhood obesity. I also agree that labelling food better, to distinguish between healthy and less healthy products, is essential. It already works, as allergy sufferers are benefiting from Natasha’s law, which requires food businesses to fully label their ingredients. However, targeting unhealthy food is not enough. Even unhealthy food is better than no food, for those who cannot afford healthy ingredients, for those who cannot find healthy ingredients or for those who do not know how to cook them. I am not arguing that we should make crap food so expensive that people are forced to go elsewhere to buy even more expensive alternatives. As the hon. Member for Newbury (Mr Dillon) said, it is of fundamental importance that healthy food should be affordable to everyone and widely available wherever they live. At the moment, it is far from either. It is no good badgering people to eat five pieces of fruit and veg a day if they cannot afford to do so or if it is not available locally—that is just patronising.

• 20 Jan 2025 · Obesity: Food and Diet · Hansard source

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  I congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for Stroud (Dr Opher) on securing this hugely important debate. When I was writing my maiden speech back in July, I did some research into my predecessors, as one does. It was fascinating to see that it had been nearly 120 years since the voters of Chelsea elected a non-Conservative MP. He was Mr Emslie John Horniman, lately of the Horniman museum. His father, Frederick Horniman, was an MP under Queen Victoria. I was thinking that Mr Horniman senior would find a lot of similarities between his time as an MP during the Victorian era and the job today. The main building is largely the same, although it was possibly even colder in those days; some of the rules and procedures are the same; and he would probably even find some familiar faces among colleagues in both Houses. Thankfully, one of the big differences between Mr Horniman senior’s time and today would be the food. That is not just because the Victorians would not be enjoying the famous parliamentary jerk chicken, but because when it came to the food that people ate in Victorian times, the story was one of adulteration and contamination. Describing the Victorian history of adulteration and contamination of food, the US professor of history Anthony Wohl says: “The list of poisonous additives reads like the stock list of some mad and malevolent chemist”. If we had enjoyed a glass of beer here with Gladstone or Disraeli, we might also have been drinking strychnine and hallucinogens. With wine, we could have imbibed sulphate of copper. The mustard with our lunch would probably have come with added lead chromate. Our Gloucester cheese afterwards might well have owed its rosy hue to red lead. It is no wonder that indigestion cures in Victorian times were so popular. Thank goodness things are so different today. Thank goodness we have food standards. Thank goodness we do not allow people to eat things that make them so ill—except that we do. Day in, day out, food manufacturers add substances to food that, on the scale at which they are eaten today, quite legally damage people’s health. Supermarkets promote them and sell them. As a result, obesity, type 2 diabetes and the many other medical problems to which my hon. Friend the Member for Stroud referred have become huge issues in this day and age.

• 20 Jan 2025 · Obesity: Food and Diet · Hansard source

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  The right hon. Member makes an excellent point that I will come to in a moment. The additives that cause so much harm today have simpler names: sugar, salt and fats. In moderation, all of those are fine, but the problem is that they are being shoved into our food willy-nilly in an effort to preserve it and—on the right hon. Member’s point—to make it cheap, alongside making it more addictive by design. As a result, we have what the House of Lords Food, Diet and Obesity Committee’s report rightly describes as a public health emergency. We now have one of the highest rates of obesity among high-income nations. Only tobacco shortens British lives more than poor diet.

• 16 Jan 2025 · Covid-19 Inquiry · Hansard source

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  I was a cabinet member during covid, responsible for public health. As I listened to my right hon. Friend’s statement, I felt so relieved that we are about to replace the chaos experienced by me and so many people across the country at that time with a forward-looking, orderly and strategic approach. Among the many things that have been mentioned, I was particularly pleased by the idea of creating a national vulnerability map. That is hugely needed. On hearing that the Department will monitor the implementation of the commitments made in response to the inquiry, will my right hon. Friend come to the House regularly to update on that implementation?

• 16 Jan 2025 · Child Sexual Exploitation and Abuse · Hansard source

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  Many of my constituents have contacted me to share their concerns about child abuse and child exploitation. They will be relieved that, unlike the previous Government, this Government are no longer allowing this matter to be kicked into the long grass and are taking action, not least through Baroness Casey’s rapid review. I think my constituents will be concerned that the official figures woefully underestimate the scale and nature of grooming activities. How can the Home Secretary reassure the House, me and my constituents that in future the reporting systems will be such that they can guarantee the confidence of victims and survivors?

• 14 Jan 2025 · UK-China Economic and Financial Dialogue · Hansard source

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  My constituents, many of whom work in financial services, will have been amazed, just as I was, when the shadow Chancellor, in a fit of pique, demanded that the Chancellor should come home from China to talk to him in this House, rather than staying to promote growth, increase access to the world’s second largest market and win new licences and quota allocations for financial services businesses. As anybody who has taken the trouble to listen carefully to the Chancellor would recognise, there is more on the way. What does she think the City, and the banks that accompanied her, would have preferred in the long-term interests of this country: stay in China to win for this country, or come home to satisfy the shadow Chancellor’s fit of pique?

• 6 Jan 2025 · Health and Adult Social Care Reform · Hansard source

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  Mr Speaker, I take that personally, in a positive way. This is a very encouraging statement. It is great to start the new year with some good news and to be so clear that we are keeping our promises as a Government. It is also very good that we are taking the necessary time to create this cross-party consensus on social care while keeping the show so firmly on the road. Carers will be supported to carry out more health tasks, as they do already in my constituency with wound dressing and medicine management. The problem is they do not have any possibility of career progression. [Interruption.] I am sorry, Mr Speaker, I forgot your initial encouragement; I will bring this to a close. Does the Secretary of State agree that as carers are encouraged to do more health tasks, they need proper opportunities for career progression even within the NHS, in collaboration with local authorities?

• 6 Jan 2025 · General Election · Hansard source

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  This is where— [ Interruption. ] I’m sorry; does the right hon. Gentleman want me to answer the question? [ Interruption. ]

• 6 Jan 2025 · General Election · Hansard source

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  This is where it turns into politics. By that, I mean that we very clearly promised in the manifesto not to raise income tax or national insurance on working people—that was directly understood—but the Labour party did not promise not to raise the national insurance contributions of employers, which is what has happened. I understand the concerns and problems that has raised; I am simply saying that we have done what we said we would do in the manifesto, and we have not broken our promises. [ Interruption. ] No matter how much you professional gentlemen who have been here for 20 years yell at me—I have been here for six months—it is simply the case that what is in our manifesto, which I am reading out word for word, is what we are delivering. I will finish by talking about borders. We said: “Labour will stop the chaos and go after the criminal gangs who trade in driving this crisis. We will create a new Border Security Command, with hundreds of new investigators, intelligence officers, and cross-border police officers.” We have already increased the number of enforced returns of those who have committed crimes and have no right to be here; the number is up by nearly 30% on the same period last year. We have also established and invested in the Border Security Command, as we said we would. Hon. Members may disagree with the things that we have done because they do not like them and have never liked them, but do not say that we have not kept the promises in our manifesto, because we have.

• 6 Jan 2025 · General Election · Hansard source

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  I am not here to say what should happen to the free breakfast clubs in secondary schools—we can have that debate another time. I am here to respond to anybody in this Chamber who says that the Labour party is not keeping its promises; I am reading out those promises word by word. I will talk about sewage, of which there is plenty. The manifesto says: “Britain’s coasts, rivers, and lakes are being polluted by illegal sewage dumping… Labour will put failing water companies under special measures to clean up our water.” We have brought in the Water (Special Measures) Bill, which has had its Second Reading and will strengthen regulation. Water companies and bosses can be fined; we can ban bonuses; and there will be new environmental standards. It is all there in our manifesto and in what we have done.

• 6 Jan 2025 · General Election · Hansard source

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  Happy new year, Mrs Harris. I appreciate that everyone is looking forward to the final speech—perhaps this will be the final speech before the Front Benchers. I did not know how this debate would go, so I was very interested to come here to hear what people would say. I hope it has been somewhat useful to people who are not used to being here, including those who, like me, have been here for five minutes. Like many Members here, I was elected in July, and I have a majority of 152, so I know that what I had to say was not universally popular with the all the people I was standing to represent. As the Member for Chelsea and Fulham, I know that I have a lot of work to do to persuade the people of the country that what the Labour Government hope and plan to do is good, and to prove to them in the long run that we should be re-elected. I know there is a lot of cynicism out there. We attack each other a lot of the time, but I hope we have learned some things today. How many years are we having to make up for? It is 14 years; I thought Opposition Members might have forgotten that. But today we have not really explored the crux of the motion, which is that our manifesto made promises that we have not kept—although a number of my colleagues addressed that very well in passing. My hon. Friend the Member for Gateshead Central and Whickham (Mark Ferguson) said that we must proceed on the basis of facts and that, to paraphrase him, we must be decent in doing so. Other Members said that we are depressing, that we have talked the economy down and that we are bringing the country to a stalemate, so it is useful to remind them of what is good, positive and exciting about this Labour Government, who were brought in to effect change. I will do that in a very boring way: by reading words from the manifesto. I used to be the deputy leader of Hammersmith and Fulham council in London. I know that nobody believes what is put in a manifesto—it is almost a given that 10 commandments come down, and the manifesto is full of lies—so we used to stick up our manifesto on the wall of the council cabinet chamber, and tick off items as we went along; anybody who came in could see us doing that. So let me tick off a couple of things that have been mentioned today. We said in the manifesto—these are the words, which I appreciate that very few people other than keen Labour candidates such as me have read—that we will “immediately abolish Section 21 ‘no fault’ evictions” to deal with the massive problem of the cost of rental and the crap quality of many of the places in which people are forced to live. We said that we will “prevent private renters being exploited and discriminated against, empower them to challenge unreasonable rent increases, and take steps to decisively raise standards, including extending ‘Awaab’s Law’”— which is about damp and mould—“to the private sector.” We have done that. We introduced the Renters’ Rights Bill. It was in the manifesto, and we have done it.

• 6 Jan 2025 · General Election · Hansard source

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  Forgive me. Thank you very much, Mrs Harris—I appreciate that reminder. I apologise to those in the Public Gallery for turning my back on them, if I may say that through you, Mrs Harris. As we are accused of not keeping our promises, I will boringly quote from the manifesto. On new homes, we said: “Labour will get Britain building again…We will immediately update the National Policy Planning Framework” to enable us to build 1.5 million homes. We are bringing in the new planning and infrastructure Bill. We said that we will “build an NHS fit for the future…Labour’s immediate priority on health will be to get a grip on the record waiting list.” I will not list all the things we have done; hon. Members can read tonight’s news. We have done masses and masses, including putting £25.7 billion into the NHS from money raised in the Budget. I appreciate that not everybody has liked the way we raised money in the Budget. They do not have to like it—there will always be differences of opinion—but we have taken the money we have raised and put £26 billion into the NHS. We also said in the manifesto that we would improve inclusivity for children with special educational needs, ensure that “special schools cater to those with the most complex needs”, and improve mainstream education for disabled children. Not everybody likes the way we raised the money in the Budget, but £1 million of that money has gone into improving education in mainstream schools for disabled children and children with special educational needs. We have a problem that people do not have enough money to live on, and the minimum wage is all that many people rely on, so we said: “Labour will…make sure the minimum wage is a genuine living wage. We will change the remit of the independent Low Pay Commission so for the first time it accounts for the cost of living. Labour will also remove the discriminatory age bands, so all adults are entitled to the same minimum wage”. We have raised the national minimum wage and the national living wage; that is a pay boost for 3 million people. We said in the manifesto that we would do it and we kept our promise: we have done it. We have asked the Low Pay Commission to end the discriminatory age bands and to look at including the cost of living. We have talked about Great British Energy; we made pledges there, and we have delivered them by establishing Great British Energy. We said: “Labour will fund free breakfast clubs in every primary school, accessible to all children.” We are doing that; we are introducing free breakfast clubs. I am sorry to quote from the manifesto at such length.