Caroline Dinenage MP: speeches

Speeches

• 14 Apr 2026 · Crime and Policing Bill · Hansard source

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  I don’t mean to bang on about this, but the fact is that the Government’s approach is too narrow. It is focused on taking down illegal content when it should be the responsibility of the company to prevent harms in the first place, rather than to deal with them after the event. We do not design any other sector’s regulation in this way. When designing aircraft, we do not wait until after the plane has crashed to worry about any of the safety features. This should be the same. During Report stage in the Lords, peers voted overwhelmingly in support of the safety-by-design approach. They also understood that when it comes to the design of something, harm includes building in aspects that are addictive and manipulative, which have been key to some of the very tragic suicides of children who have interacted with AI chatbots. What do the Government have against building safety by design into the very purpose of AI chatbots?

• 14 Apr 2026 · Crime and Policing Bill · Hansard source

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  I am very grateful to the Minister for giving way on that point. I am not sure whether she will come on to this, but the Government have tabled amendments on online safety, and have identified that the next frontline in this war is artificial intelligence. As she knows, we have already seen children taking their own lives after interactions with AI chatbots, and we know that tech companies will always prioritise profits over user safety, so there must be more focus on a safety-by-design approach that prevents AI products that could be harmful to users from coming to market. This approach has been suggested by Baroness Kidron in the other place. Why are the Government not supporting her amendment?

• 9 Mar 2026 · Funeral Directors: Regulation · Hansard source

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  The hon. Lady is absolutely right. It is crucial to know which Department will take the lead on this work and ensure that it happens, because while I think the Minister will be responding to the Fuller report, we are also awaiting the outcome of a Law Commission report that was kicked off in 2022 by the last but one Justice Minister, the former Member for Finchley and Golders Green. That report is looking at different laws on what happens to our bodies after death; it does not include the regulation of funeral directors. My fear is that, as the hon. Lady just said, efforts to regulate the sector will fall between the silos of Government Departments, and nobody will grip this issue. As we have discussed, what is required is a minimum standard of qualification, accreditation or licensing, and robust inspection. A regulator with the power to withdraw licences and sanction wrongdoers might seem like a tempting first step, and Scotland is ahead of England, having passed legislation 10 years ago to introduce a licensing and inspection regime. However, 10 years on, not a single Scottish funeral director I have spoken to has actually been inspected. I am concerned that this could be the worst of both worlds, with the illusion of regulation masking the possibility that nothing has changed in practice. A sensible approach would be to extend the scope of the Human Tissue Authority beyond public mortuaries to the whole death pathway. The Fuller report recommends that the HTA “should require the organisations it licenses to ensure that any individual who provides care to deceased people is suitably qualified, experienced and supervised.” If inspections are going to be carried out by local authorities, they need to be significantly better trained and resourced to do so, and we would have to take into consideration the fact that some of them run funeral services of their own. They cannot mark their own homework. Inspections must have public trust. The regulator can make sure of this by aligning its minimum codes of practice with those provided by the two voluntary trade bodies we have already heard about, the SAIF and the NAFD. I am also concerned about the existing marketplace in training. For sums of money reaching into the thousands of pounds, professional qualifications are delivered by the British Institute of Funeral Directors. At face value, that seems quite promising; after all, those courses are accredited by the University of Greenwich. So far, though, I have seen absolutely nothing that gives me confidence in the legitimacy of the BIFD’s work, particularly in light of the fact that Hayley Bell of Elkin and Bell fame, who has now been sentenced to four years in prison, was one of its examiners. If its own examiners cannot uphold even the most basic standards of care for the dead, what is the value of the qualifications it is selling people? Just as important as qualifications is a person’s suitability for a job. Surely, a lesson from the Fuller case is that funeral technicians and embalmers, as well as anyone else involved in the death pathway, should undergo a Disclosure and Barring Service check. As we have heard, the death pathway is open to so much abuse, and I warn the Minister that the cases I have mentioned will only be the tip of the iceberg while there is no regulation to tackle them. Doing so will require a whole system of changes, not just licensing and inspection. In some cases, this could be achieved by expanding existing legislation, such as the Human Tissue Act 2004, and it must be done in a way that is not punitive for small, independent businesses. I would also like the Government to explore the possibility of a new crime, that of the mistreatment of a body after death, because we cannot keep relying on Victorian common law. We must ensure that the death pathway is much clearer and runs more smoothly, to provide a minimum of opportunity for things to go wrong. For example, I have heard that in some cases, bodies are already decomposing by the time they make it to a funeral director because of a lack of medical examiners to sign off the death. What reassurance can the Minister give me that his Department is going to improve standards in this area as well? I believe that for there to be full accountability and trust in the system, a clear method of tracking the bodies is necessary. One of the most heartbreaking parts of the Elkin and Bell trial was the story of baby Albie, who died after just 11 minutes of life. His parents still have no clear picture of what happened to his body after it was taken into the care of Elkin and Bell. At every step of the journey, identification numbers and proof of licence should be shown when a body is passed from one responsible authority to another. Without that, families simply do not have the certainty that their family members have been well treated, or even that they have been reunited with the correct ashes. Madam Deputy Speaker, you will be pleased to know that I am coming to a conclusion. Why is this issue important? We all know people who say, “I don’t care what happens to me after I’m dead; I won’t know anything about it.” It is a truism that funerals are for the living. I have been heartbroken by the stories I have heard from families who regret the arrangements made for loved ones—stories of feeling racked with guilt and unable to say goodbye in the way that they wanted. Grieving is such an important part of human ritual, regardless of someone’s religion or beliefs. We are elected to Parliament to make things better and to improve people’s lives, but today I am asking the Minister to commit to improving people’s deaths, to restoring dignity in death, and to ensuring that our loved ones are treated with the care and professionalism that they deserve.

• 9 Mar 2026 · Funeral Directors: Regulation · Hansard source

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  The hon. Gentleman is absolutely right and I am about to make exactly that point. I am grateful to him for teeing it up so beautifully for me, because it takes only one business to do the wrong thing to erode trust, but unfortunately the case of Elkin and Bell is not the only case. There have been similar cases at Legacies Independent in Hull and Florrie’s Army in Leeds, which I think is the case he refers to, where deceased babies were staged in lifelike positions in a living room. These are unspeakable and unimaginable horrors. There have been other cases where bodies have been found in the most unimaginable condition, but no further action could be taken by the police or others because, simply and incredulously, those businesses have not actually broken any laws.

• 9 Mar 2026 · Funeral Directors: Regulation · Hansard source

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  I am afraid that it will be a rather morbid debate this evening. We spend remarkably little time in our lives thinking about the practicalities of death, and it is probably part of human nature that we do not dwell too much on the inevitable future fate that awaits us. That means we put far too much implicit trust in those who take responsibility for our bodies, and in those of our loved ones when we die. We all assume that in death we will be treated with respect and care by professionals, but his evening I am afraid I will share some hard truths about the gruesome reality of death. I warn anyone watching that what I have to say will be graphic and distressing—there in no way around that. Last year, Gosport residents and funeral directors Richard Elkin and Hayley Bell were found to have kept 46 bodies entrusted to their care in a completely inappropriate environment with an unregulated temperature. Describing entering the place to see his mother, one of my constituents said, “the awful smell is something that will never leave me”. Concerns about what was going on behind the doors of Elkin and Bell funeral directors were first raised by local residents, and then by the senior coroner at Queen Alexandra Hospital in Portsmouth. A body had been sent for a post-mortem that was “laying in pools of bodily fluids” and infested with maggots. The post-mortem also found that the deceased individual had suffered a spinal fracture after death. After a Gosport borough council environmental health investigation raised concerns but took no further action, a few months later, simply because bills had not been paid, bailiffs attended the property, where two bodies were discovered, putrefying, in a room with bloodstained floors, water dripping from the ceiling, and broken windows. One of them was an elderly gentleman who had been left for 36 days. His body was found in a badly decomposed condition. It is too much of a cliché to compare this to a horror movie, because this is real life, or real death. When the family of one of the deceased was contacted, they were surprised, because they were under the impression that their loved one had already been cremated. The company had certainly taken payment for it. As the Minister will know, it was completely legal for Elkin and Bell to keep dead bodies in a room like that. Elkin and Bell could only be brought to justice by some incredibly diligent work by Hampshire police, the Crown Prosecution Service, and John Price KC, using a variety of different offences including fraud, forgery and a piece of common law that dates back to Victorian times. The crime of preventing lawful and decent burial was dusted off from the days when it was used to convict grave robbers. That is instead of what should have been possible, which was sentencing the pair because they had wilfully neglected bodies in their care, and treated people’s loved ones as nothing more than money spinners. The case highlighted that the funeral sector is nothing better than a wild west. When this was first brought to my attention, I was incredulous and horrified to learn that there is no regulation of any kind governing the sector. In fact, the only law that governs the funeral industry is around the financial transparency of funeral plans, and that was put in place after a Competitions and Markets Authority investigation in 2021. There are simply no mandatory qualifications, no accreditation, no licensing, no designated working practices or formal inspection and, crucially, no law to fall back on when things go wrong.

• 14 Jan 2026 · West Midlands Police · Hansard source

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  Among the catalogue of failure here is the news that the decision was partly made on the basis of a hallucinated AI report about an entirely fictitious football match. What assessment has the Home Secretary made on the extent to which AI is being used by police forces across the country? Does she know of any other consequential decisions that may have been made using unverified AI? Finally, last month, after two months my Select Committee, the Culture, Media and Sport Committee, finally received a response to our letter on this issue from the assistant chief constable Mike O’Hara, who said that he was “satisfied that the policing operation conducted with communities and partners was effective, proportionate and maintained the city’s reputation as a safe and welcoming place for everyone.” What is the Home Secretary’s message to him?

• 7 Jan 2026 · Jury Trials · Hansard source

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  My right hon. Friend is making excellent points about alternative solutions to scrapping the right to a jury trial. Any MP who has spent any time in their local courts will have seen that the issue is not the juries, but poor administration, which is resulting in about a quarter of trials having to be rescheduled. Does he agree that rather than setting a precedent of scrapping the right to trial by jury, the Government should start by looking at ways to remove the pressure on an overwhelmed CPS? Does he think that giving the police greater charging powers would be a way to move forward on this?

• 18 Dec 2025 · Jury Trials · Hansard source

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  The Government have cancelled elections and are scrapping jury trials, and now we hear that they are limiting the right to appeal to a Crown court, despite the fact that such appeals have a 40% success rate. The Solicitor General talks about justice denied; surely, that is a case in point? Given that her job is to uphold the rule of law, would she push back against some of her colleagues’ more authoritarian tendencies?

• 8 Dec 2025 · Maccabi Tel Aviv FC: Away Fans Ban · Hansard source

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  This really is a catalogue of disaster, and it raises a range of issues, some of which the Committee will consider when we kick off our inquiry into major events tomorrow. In the previous Parliament, the Committee looked at the safety of sporting events and concluded that safety advisory groups have, at best, a fairly dubious record on seeking out and considering the necessary perspectives to inform better decision making. May I invite the Minister to look at our recommendations from a couple of years ago on amending the Safety of Sports Grounds Act 1975 so that police and safety advisory groups have no choice but to engage properly from the outset on such cases? When considering the competence of the West Midlands chief constable, might the Minister start by asking him to respond to his correspondence? The Select Committee wrote to him about the ban on Maccabi Tel Aviv fans, but we still have not received a response.

• 15 Jul 2025 · Human Fertilisation and Embryology (Regulation) · Hansard source

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  I beg to move, That leave be given to bring in a Bill to make provision about the regulation of online providers of fertility and certain ancillary services by the Human Fertilisation and Embryology Authority; and for connected purposes. Having a child is variously viewed as one of the most life-changing, exhausting, expensive, thankless, frustrating and ultimately magical and rewarding things we ever do in our lives. My two sons sometimes drive me round the bend, but I quite literally love them more than anything in the world. For many people, having a child requires a form of fertility treatment; in fact, one in six couples in Britain is affected by infertility problems. More than 52,000 people accessed fertility treatment in 2023—the most recent year for which statistics are available. For perspective, that is up from 6,000 in 1991. In the past 25 years, the proportion of children being born by in vitro fertilisation has doubled. The regulator for the fertility industry, the Human Fertilisation and Embryology Authority, reports that there are now enough children born by IVF for there to be one in every classroom around the UK. That is for a number of reasons. It is worth celebrating that since 1991 social attitudes towards women getting into and staying in work have progressed even further; there are now 10% more women in employment. Sometimes, however, building a successful career can make it harder to build a family. One in 10 fertility treatments are undertaken by single women, and the average age of those women is slightly older, at 36. Although the proportion of young adults in the UK who identify as lesbian, gay or bisexual has doubled in the last five years, the Government amended the law that regulated fertility access to remove the barriers for female same-sex couples for the first and only time in 2008, and that is what we are here today to discuss: apart from that one change, regulation has remained static while industry, attitudes and lifestyles have raced ahead. The Human Fertility and Embryology Act 1990 regulates fertility clinics, and despite the fertility landscape constantly modernising and moving with the times, that piece of legislation has remained largely unchanged since it was passed 35 years ago. The failure of the regulatory regime to oversee adequately the uniquely high-stakes world of modern fertility treatment was thrown into sharp relief recently with the unexpected closure of Apricity Fertility. Acting as a hub that connected parents to the very complex web of fertility services, it was effectively a digital concierge service, linking women with partner clinics and offering advice and support, yet not providing any of the medical services itself. Just days before Christmas, on 20 December, Apricity Fertility notified customers that it would cease all operations from 1 January. While families across the country were opening their Christmas presents, hundreds of Apricity customers, including women who were just about to start their IVF injections, were opening emails that would ruin their Christmas and leave them in limbo at a very crucial point in their fertility treatment. Patients scrambled to seek confirmation from clinics that they could continue with their treatment, because as we know, even a month’s delay can massively affect the chance of a successful cycle. In many cases, having already spent every single penny that they had in the world in the pursuit of having a baby, some were told by their insurers that they would have to pay thousands more up front to continue their treatment. We know that IVF is a physically demanding and incredibly emotionally fraught process. IVF cycles are more likely to be unsuccessful than successful, but Apricity boasted an above-average success rate of 46%. As IVF.net stated, therefore, for hundreds of couples, Apricity’s closure was “more than a logistical hurdle—it is a devastating emotional blow.” Even worse, families who had signed up Apricity were not offered the peace of mind that a regulator provides, because it was not regulated; it was an unlicensed online clinic. That means that the health and advice on offer could have been complete rubbish and could have been backed by no expert knowledge at all—and such online services are expanding in scope and number. The HFEA has warned: “For some time a range of activities marketed as fertility treatments have taken place outside of HFEA licensed clinics in a variety of settings, including ‘wellness’ clinics. More recently, the fertility market has started to move online, in settings which are outside of the regulated scheme”. More people are accessing the fertility market and treatments than ever before, and particularly in that way. Though the HFEA cannot put an exact number on that, precisely because such services fall outside its regulatory scope, given that 73% of IVF cycles are funded privately, it is likely to be a very large proportion. In recognition of the changing landscape, and with patient trust and safety in mind, the HFEA recommended in 2023 that the 1990 HFE Act “should be revised to accommodate developments in the way fertility services are provided.” I know that Health Ministers have met the chair of the HFEA to discuss updating the regulatory regime around fertility treatment, but such change will require primary legislation. I have had no firm commitment that the Government are seeking a change in the law, but the case of Apricity has underscored the urgent need to safeguard patients’ rights to their data, their eggs and their sperm. This is a classic case of regulation just not keeping pace with modern life. It is criminal that organisations that are in the business of making dreams come true can just disappear, along with people’s money and their hopes of starting a family. The Chancellor has made it clear that she is no fan of regulators, but in the field of medical treatment and specifically the process of IVF, a strong regulatory regime is absolutely vital to ensuring confidence and security, so I urge Ministers and Members across the House to support my Bill, to bring in the recommendations of the HFEA and to support women and families at one of the most important stages of their lives. Question put and agreed to. Ordered , That Dame Caroline Dinenage, Katie Lam, Liz Jarvis, Aphra Brandreth, Sir Ashley Fox, Joe Robertson, Christine Jardine, Jim Shannon, Sarah Champion, Florence Eshalomi, Samantha Niblett and Wendy Morton present the Bill. Dame Caroline Dinenage accordingly presented the Bill. Bill read the first time; to be read a Second time on Friday 12 September, and to be printed (Bill 284 ). Business of the House (Today) Ordered, That, at today’s sitting, business in the name of the Leader of the Opposition shall be treated as being taken on an allotted day provided under paragraph (2) of Standing Order No. 14 (Arrangement of public business); such business may be entered upon at any hour and may be proceeded with, though opposed, for up to six hours after the start of proceedings on the Motion for this Order; proceedings shall then lapse if not previously disposed of; and Standing Order No. 41A (Deferred divisions) shall not apply. —( Lucy Powell .)