Blair McDougall MP: speeches

Speeches

• 18 Mar 2026 · Social Enterprises and Community Ownership · Hansard source

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  My hon. Friend makes an important point. We are having a wider conversation at the moment about how enterprise education in general should go through people’s experience in school, and the co-operative and social interest models should be part of that. The co-operative development unit in MHCLG is helping to develop guidance and partnering with local authorities to see how we can improve access and advice. On community ownership, we are committed to communities and we are going further than ever to ensure that they have powers to take advantage of the assets that they value. My hon. Friend the Member for Stroud (Dr Opher) asked specifically about the community ownership of power. He will be aware that the local power plan announced by colleagues in the Department for Energy Security and Net Zero is designed to address the barriers to community energy ownership and is backed by £1 billion to fund those local projects. At the beginning of the debate, my hon. Friend the Member for Leigh and Atherton (Jo Platt) asked whether the Government are willing to back local areas in taking control of the things that they value and that are important to them. I hope some of the measures that I have set out show that the Government’s answer is a resounding yes.

• 29 Jan 2026 · Business Operating Costs · Hansard source

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  The Government are working hard to reduce operating costs for all UK businesses, including those in Chichester. We are working to reduce the annual administrative burden of regulation by £5.6 billion by 2029, enabling businesses to unlock growth and boost innovation across key sectors. We are introducing the most significant legislation to tackle late payments in over 25 years, providing a support package worth more than £4 billion over the next three years to help business rate payers and fully funding apprenticeship training costs for all eligible 16 to 24-year-olds.

• 29 Jan 2026 · Economic Growth: Coastal Communities · Hansard source

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  I am due to come to my hon. Friend’s constituency in little over a month—I do like to be beside the seaside. We often think of constituencies like hers as tourism and hospitality hotspots, but, as she said, they can also be a hive for the creative industries, of which she is such a champion. Through the £380 million creative industries sector plan, we are boosting innovation, skills and access to finance nationwide, which is helping firms, including in her constituency. She will know that businesses in her area also benefit from such a strong talent pipeline coming from her area’s great universities, and I look forward to working with her and learning more when I visit soon.

• 11 Dec 2025 · Economic Growth: Colne Valley · Hansard source

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  I am envious of my hon. Friend’s meeting Lee Child. If I had known, I might have asked him to put in a word for me to be the next Jack Reacher —I think I have the build for the role. The Government continue to reach businesses through the West Yorkshire mayoral authority’s £1.4 billion investment over 30 years, including £30 million annually for local priorities. The West Yorkshire growth hub, along with help to grow and the apprenticeship reforms we have announced, will further boost local skills and productivity. SMEs in West Yorkshire will also be able to access the Made Smarter adoption pilot programme for professional and business services—a particular strength of my hon. Friend’s part of the world—with the aim of driving productivity through digital adoption and skills investment. We will continue to work with him to make those programmes a success.

• 10 Dec 2025 · Seasonal Work · Hansard source

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  I beg to move an amendment, to leave out from “House” to the end of the Question and add: “notes the Government’s strong support for small and medium-sized businesses, including those employing seasonal workers; further notes that the Government’s Employment Rights Bill will help seasonal workers by bringing the UK’s outdated employment laws into the 21st century; welcomes the policy paper entitled Backing your business: our plan for small and medium sized businesses, which sets out a comprehensive vision for productivity and success; further welcomes action to tackle late payments through the introduction of the toughest laws in the G7, helping SMEs maintain cash flow during peak periods; supports measures to cut energy bills for SMEs through investment in clean power and reducing levies; commends investment in high streets via the Pride in Place fund, boosting footfall for seasonal trade; also notes consultations to reduce burdens on hospitality businesses; and further commends targeted support through the Business Growth Service to help SMEs access skills, finance and growth opportunities.” Around this time every year, I like to re-read “A Christmas Carol”. Last night, I read that passage from Dickens where the protagonist says: “every idiot who goes about with ‘Merry Christmas’ on his lips, should be boiled with his own pudding, and buried with a stake of holly through his heart”. I have to say that the tone of the shadow Minister’s speech made Ebeneezer Scrooge sound positively festive! The Government recognise that it has been a hard few years for business. Despite the appalling economic legacy the hon. Gentleman’s party left us, in this festive period we can look forward to the new year with a sense of optimism. Living standards are rising and wages are growing faster than prices. The Productive Business Index found, a few days ago, that nearly three quarters of small businesses expect revenue increases over the next three months and nearly two thirds have seen rising order volumes in the last three months. The hon. Gentleman mentions, as did other Members, Small Business Saturday. Small Business Britain reports that spending during Small Business Saturday last weekend was the highest it has been in five years. Despite what the hon. Gentleman says, I ran a business for a decade and I know how hard the last decade was. [ Interruption. ] It would be immodest to agree with what he says from a sedentary position.

• 30 Oct 2025 · Industrial Strategy · Hansard source

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  I thank the hon. Lady for her kind words on my new appointment. I will not get ahead of announcements on that, but given the importance of skills to the industrial strategy, we are not waiting for those announcements. We have had TechFirst, a £187 million investment in secondary school pupils, undergraduates, PhD students, entrepreneurs and businesses, to help them get ahead on that. We have the engineering package of over £100 million, and the defence package of £182 million. We are making those investments now to ensure that the pipeline is there for those industries, which are the priority within the industrial strategy.

• 30 Oct 2025 · Industrial Strategy · Hansard source

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  As I said to the hon. Member for South Antrim (Robin Swann) a moment ago, we have already met with the Northern Ireland Executive on these issues. Skills are an essential part of the industrial strategy because we see, again and again, industries around the country that are desperate to grow, and have the orders, but are unable to create the high-paying jobs that we need. That is an absolute priority for us as we implement the industrial strategy.

• 30 Oct 2025 · Industrial Strategy · Hansard source

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  My hon. Friend has been a constant advocate for the energy potential of Pembrokeshire. That is why the industrial strategy supported south-west Wales’s clean energy potential through targeted investment in infrastructure and workforce development. The strategy will build on that using the potential of the port of Milford Haven, floating offshore wind in the Celtic sea and carbon capture technologies. The £800,000 skills pilot that he refers to underpins that clean energy industries sector plan. The National Wealth Fund will also benefit Wales, as it will invest in the sectors he mentions that are prevalent in that area.

• 22 Jul 2025 · Crown Immunity (Prisons) · Hansard source

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  I beg to move, That leave be given to bring in a Bill to make provision to remove Crown immunity as it applies to prisons for the purposes of health and safety legislation. Katie Allen lived in Clarkston in East Renfrewshire. She had a loving family and a very happy childhood. She was bright and did well at school. She took herself off to Malawi to volunteer, and she returned from Africa determined to help people. Instead of studying geology at university, as she had intended, she switched to study human geography, because she decided and realised that it was people whom she cared about and not rocks. She was excited about the future. She had moved into her own flat. She was full of life. She was beautiful and she was loved. She was found hanging in a cell at 5.50 in the morning on 4 June 2018 at His Majesty’s Prison and Young Offender Institution, Polmont. The problem of prison deaths is UK-wide, but these losses are a particular problem in Scotland, and the loss of young people in prisons is felt especially. Research in April by the Scottish Centre for Crime and Justice Research found that our prison death rates are akin to those in Azerbaijan. An earlier study by the Council of Europe found Scotland’s prison suicide rate was more than two-and-a half-times higher than the average and about double that of England and Wales. I begin with Katie’s story because focusing on her case helps makes sense of why this problem is so alarming, so acute, and so avoidable. In 2017, after a night out, Katie drove home after drinking, clipped the kerb, and lost control of her car. She had not realised it, but she had hit and injured a pedestrian. She had no previous convictions. Her victim asked for her not to be given a custodial sentence, but she was jailed for 16 months anyway. If anyone deserved a second chance after a stupid, youthful mistake, it was Katie. That second chance was taken away because of failings by the Scottish Prison Service. We cannot mention Katie without also mentioning William Brown, whom my hon. Friend the Member for Glasgow North (Martin Rhodes) represents. William also died from suicide in Polmont. The fatal accident inquiry into the loss of both those precious young people found their deaths to be preventable. Thanks to the sheriff’s findings, the failings of the prison service in these cases are now well documented, detailed and damning. One thing out of the 400-page report, with its many findings and recommendations, especially sticks in my mind. When we look into prison suicides, we learn an awful new vocabulary. We come across terms such as “ligature anchor”. For William, the ligature anchor was a bunk bed that the inquiry found could have been removed and, worse, had been used previously for suicides in the prison. In the case of Katie, the ligature anchor was a simple doorstop high up on the wall of her cell. A doorstop that would have cost a few pounds to replace—a small cost for saving a young life, but it was not believed to be worth it. Years after both deaths, nobody in the prison or the prison service had thought to remove the doorstops, or to replace them with safer, sloping alternatives. The bunk beds had not been removed. The fatal accident inquiry into the deaths found that internal reviews carried out after both deaths had not even mentioned the possibility of removing fixtures in cells that could have been used again for further suicides. For me, nothing signifies the institutional lack of care more than these failings for which somebody, somewhere should have been held legally responsible. Before a fatal accident inquiry, there is an investigation. The police and the Crown Office and Procurator Fiscal Service concluded at first that there was insufficient evidence to prosecute. The families of Katie and William challenged that conclusion, and eventually the authorities said that, yes, there was enough evidence to charge the Scottish Prison Service with breaches of the Health and Safety at Work etc. Act 1974. However, there was no prosecution. Why? Because of Crown immunity. The Health and Safety at Work etc. Act places duties on state-run prisons, but Crown immunity means that they cannot be prosecuted for breaching those duties. If the two people had died in a privately run prison, there would have been a prosecution. In theory, individual prison officers can be prosecuted, but in practice they rarely are when their employer is not also prosecuted. Indeed, the reason those prosecutions do not happen is that it is argued that individual shortcomings happen in the context of systematic failures. In theory, the prison services can also be prosecuted under corporate manslaughter legislation, but in practice they are not because the systematic failings are often judged to take place at the prison level, rather than at the senior management level of the overall service. Those at the bottom pass legal responsibility upwards; those at the top pass it back. Even with the support of the dogged campaigners at the charity Inquest, which focuses on state-related deaths, nobody is found legally responsible. The best that the families of the lost can hope for in such circumstances is a censure by the Health and Safety Executive, but even that toothless sanction is almost never used—in a decade, only one prison has received a censure. We have been here before. Three decades ago, Crown immunity was removed from the NHS and it has had an impact. To take one grimly comparable case, the Essex partnership university NHS foundation trust was fined £1.5 million for allowing suicides after failing to manage the risks caused by ligature points on its estate. Our prisons are responsible for many more such deaths, but they are untouchable because of Crown immunity, and an untouchable service remains unaccountable. Institutional impunity removes the incentives for institutional change—institutional change that is needed at the local Scottish level and the UK level. Locally, a review of mental health at Polmont warned that it needed a suicide prevention strategy, but instead it opted for another review—a review that was never finished. In Scotland, the Human Rights Commission has warned that recommendations agreed decades ago have still not been implemented across the Scottish Prison Service. Just last week, the inspector of prisons for the whole UK issued an urgent indication warning about conditions at Pentonville and a failure to address repeated concerns following recent suicides. Without legal consequences, prisons across the country appear to be incapable of learning lessons or making changes. Every day of immunity brings the risk of more avoidable deaths. The Scottish Prison Service and the Government in Edinburgh have called for Crown immunity to be removed, but they need us in this place to do it. I want to be very clear: this campaign should not be used as an excuse for inaction now. These places should not have to wait to be prosecuted to fulfil their responsibility to protect lives, but if those running our prisons will not act—and they have not done so—they should lose their protection from legal consequence. In conclusion, I remember a friend of mine who lost a child saying how a parent grieves twice for such a loss: once for the young person known and loved, and a second time for the life that they would have gone on to live. For Katie’s family, the knowledge that she wanted to live a life devoted to helping and serving others invites them to imagine all the change that she would have made as she grew into adulthood. Instead of a life that would have changed the world, we in this place are left with the tragic responsibility of making sure that it is her death that changes things. Katie’s extraordinary mother, Linda, told me that she said of her experience in Malawi in Africa: “you know mum, prayers are great, but what people really need is practical help.” Katie’s family, William’s family and the others who have lost dear loved ones due to these institutional failings do not need our prayers, our sympathies or our condolences. They need action. They need us to provide the accountability that will avoid future tragedies and change the culture that allows these deaths. That is why it is time to end Crown immunity in prisons in Scotland and across the UK. I urge Members to support my Bill. Question put and agreed to. Ordered, That Blair McDougall and Martin Rhodes present the Bill. Blair McDougall accordingly presented the Bill. B ill read the First time; to be read a Second time on Friday 12 September , and to be printed (Bill 294 ).