Danny Beales MP: speeches

Speeches

• 10 Sept 2026 · Business of the House · Hansard source

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  I would say you have saved the best to last, Madam Deputy Speaker, but you can be the judge of that. My predecessor, when he was in this place, famously campaigned for a new fish and chip shop in Uxbridge. Now that he is the leader of the Conservative council, he seems to be closing the fish and chip shop that does exist in Hillingdon, along with the florist, the pharmacy, the hairdresser and the local convenience store. Local shops, whose landlord is the council, are facing a 100% rent increase, backdated for several years, all while repairs have not been done, sometimes for up to nine years. Does the Leader of the House agree that local businesses are the lifeblood of our communities and should be supported by councils? Can we have time for a debate in this place on the importance of local high streets?

• 10 Sept 2026 · Social Housing Bill [Lords] · Hansard source

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  As someone for whom a council house was a lifeline out of the cycle of homelessness, I strongly welcome this Bill and the Government’s actions outlined in it. I was homeless not because of someone born abroad, but because of decades of Government inaction, the mass sell-off of council homes without them being replaced, and the housing crisis that has developed in this country over decades. The comments made today by the Conservative party and by its spokesperson, the hon. Member for Orpington (Gareth Bacon), were absolutely shameful—people in temporary accommodation in my constituency will not be served better by the actions the Conservatives are proposing. They will be served better by the measures in this Bill. I strongly welcome the Government’s action to support victims of domestic violence. Many of us will have seen victims having to leave their accommodation instead of the perpetrators and the awful situations that result. I strongly welcome the measures on that in the Bill. As I said to the Minister earlier, I hope for action on rent arrears. Only about one fifth of local authorities specifically exclude the rent arrears provisions for victims of domestic violence. I welcome the guidance, but I encourage the Minister to outline the timeline for that guidance and how its effectiveness will be assessed. I support the measures to review shared ownership. I have been contacted by Fiona and David and so many other constituents who were sold a dream that turned into a nightmare. They have a percentage of ownership, but all the responsibility when things go wrong. I encourage the Government to make that review comprehensive and thorough. Finally, we have heard from a number of other Members about the trap of furniture poverty. I heard from Shannon, who was a victim of domestic abuse. She said: “At times, I considered returning to the abusive relationship so my daughter would have a bed to sleep in.” We have to end furniture poverty. It is not a luxury to have a bed or white goods; they are essential, and not having them traps people in a debt cycle and pushes them towards rent arrears and future homelessness. I encourage the Minister to meet me and other colleagues who are interested in ending furniture poverty to explore how the Bill could genuinely do that.

• 9 Sept 2026 · Civil Aviation (Consumer Protection and Regulatory Reform) Bill [Lords] · Hansard source

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  I wholeheartedly agree, and this Bill is a fantastic opportunity to address some of the issues that have lingered for too long in the sector. Boosting enforcement powers at the Civil Aviation Authority would enable faster enforcement when those rights are not applied. That is also welcome. Members have rightly mentioned the need for a much tighter definition of “extraordinary events”, and the need to ensure that it is properly applied. It cannot be a catch-all opt-out for airlines, allowing them to get around the requirements. I strongly welcome the removal of the cap on baggage, specialist equipment and wheelchairs. In the Health and Social Care Committee, and in other debates, we talk a lot about the challenge of getting specialist adaptive equipment. It can take a long time to get bespoke equipment. It is incredibly damaging and destructive if it is lost or damaged when a person travels, and they are not able to reclaim the full cost, so I strongly welcome that provision. I encourage the Minister to ensure that when the cap is removed and the provision is applied, there are no unintended consequences—that airlines do not become unwilling to allow such equipment to be stowed and boarded, and do not refuse to fly individuals because of the insurance risk around their equipment. I hope that we will ensure that there are no unintended consequences of applying the right policy. I strongly support the provisions around modernising our airspace. We have to modernise outdated routes, now that we have modern flights, and now that technology is emerging that has a much lesser noise impact. There are options and flexibilities that remove the significant impact on heavily trafficked flight paths. How we do this is just as important as if we do it; it must be done with proper assessment and consultation of residents. It cannot be right to have just a few heavily trafficked routes, leading to the piling up and circling of flights and an unnecessary additional burden on communities. I support the comments made about the value of the Bill looking at abusive travellers and their impact on staff, both at the airport and cabin-side. Air workers face unacceptable amounts of abuse in all forms, physical and verbal, and it is increasing. The stats from a recent Unite survey of just 300 workers in Scottish airports showed that 90% had experienced verbal abuse on a regular basis, 75% had experienced intimidation and aggression, and almost a third had experienced some form of physical assault. We are becoming a bit numb to the abuse and regular intimidation that public sector workers and those in customer-facing roles experience; it happens to hospital, rail and shop workers. We have to take action; we have done, for shop workers. I hope that we can explore the issue and use clause 13, which gives a power to create offences to properly deal with airline and airport abuse. Crucially—Unite the union is right about this—this has to apply not just to abuse in the cabin; it has to apply to the whole journey, from entering the airport to sitting on the plane. Any abuse and intimidation has to be dealt with properly. We need a comprehensive system that ensures that when a person is banned from one airline, that carries across the whole airport system; the ban cannot put the staff at other providers at risk. Finally, I turn to drop-off charges, which have been much discussed. We had a significantly busy Westminster Hall debate on this, which the Minister attended and responded to. This is an issue of great concern to my constituents. Charges have gone up significantly at Heathrow and at the other airports we have heard of today. Frustratingly for people locally, airports do not disclose what the revenue is used for. It is not clear whether it goes towards improving the situation, or is invested in community transport so that people can avoid having to drive to the airport. There are no direct public transport routes to Heathrow for staff and airport visitors from the north or Ruislip parts of my borough. It is incredibly difficult, particularly for evening and night workers, to get there on public transport. I hope that the provisions added to the Bill will increase the transparency of information about drop-off charges, ensuring that they are adequately advertised, there are easy ways to pay them, and they are fairly implemented, and will ensure that the revenue they generate genuinely goes towards improving community transport. As has been said, the charges mean that people do not drive to the airport, but instead drive to the area around the drop-off zone. Local councils are made to pick up the enforcement costs relating to that parking, and to the illegal commercial car parks opened without permission. Through the review, I hope that we can properly address those issues, which are of significant concern to many of my constituents and my communities. Overall, I strongly welcome the provisions of the Bill, and I hope that it makes swift progress through this place.

• 7 Sept 2026 · Health Bill · Hansard source

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  There is much to support in the Bill, and I support its ambition to enable many of the provisions of the welcome 10-year plan for the NHS. The plan is the right one; the three shifts are correct, and we have to fundamentally reform the health system if we are to meet the modern health and care challenges that we all see in our constituencies. To some extent those challenges are not new, and neither are these ambitions—we have seen similar initiatives before—but the systems, the structures, the bureaucracy and the siloed budgets push against change in the health sector. They have been a hinderance, reinforcing silos and making the same investment choices. They have prevented digitalisation, kept care in acute settings and stopped joined-up working. This Bill could and should be a key lever in overcoming those challenges, which we need to do if we are to achieve those ambitions. I very much support the digital single patient record, which is a key ambition in the shift from analogue to digital health. We have all heard from patients who have to tell their story over and over again at every single health appointment—between care and health, between community and secondary care—so a genuine single patient record has the potential to be transformational. We have, however, heard from pharmacies and community mental health services that if this is to work, they have to have a seat at the table. While this Bill enables the architecture, I hope that the delivery will ensure that the whole of the health and care system is part of the decision-making process when the single patient record is designed. That is crucial. Turning to the abolition of NHS England, the idea of streamlining bureaucracy at the centre is a good one, and delivering power—including decision-making power—budgets and resources locally is also admirable. Success, however, will mean the right decisions being taken at the right scale.

• 3 Sept 2026 · Vaccination Rates: England · Hansard source

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  I agree. Those issues are clearly intertwined and cannot be separated. Every contact should count. Shared digital records should identify, at the next GP appointment, pharmacy check-in, health visit or hospital appointment, where vaccines are missing. The system should be enabled, encouraged and paid to act, but this is currently not the case. The hesitancy argument focuses on the growing prevalence of misinformation around vaccines and falling trust in vaccines and health institutions more broadly. Polling shows that these are not the most important factors numerically, but for the 15% of parents who have concerns, they matter. Evidence from the University of Manchester shows that this is especially important for certain population groups. As my hon. Friend the Member for Thurrock (Jen Craft) just said, the barriers are multifaceted: poor trust and poor access go hand in hand, because the best way to build trust is through regular contact with known, trusted professionals. To maximise vaccine coverage, we need a system that can reliably identify and locate every child or patient missing their vaccination, repeatedly invite them for appointments and make attending appointments as easy as possible, with clear lines of responsibility when targets are missed. To do that effectively, the vaccination system needs adequate resourcing, accurate data and explicit accountability for meeting targets. Currently, we have none of that. The Government have been acting. We are piloting health visits and community pharmacy delivery, although roll-out has been slow and it is unclear when national roll-out will be possible. Parents are now given access to their child’s records through the NHS app, work is under way to improve the consent process for vaccinating children in school. More is being done, and all of that is positive, but the Select Committee is not convinced that that will be enough to restore our vaccination levels to WHO standards, and neither are officials, who are unable to say whether and when levels will be restored. Moving forward, what do we need? We need resourcing. Data I have obtained through parliamentary questions shows that in 2023-24 NHS England spent 0.51% of its total budget, or £852 million, on vaccination, down from 0.65%, or £989 million, in 2022-23. The very year the strategy released, funding was cut. We also need to be honest about what improvement will cost. Vaccinating the last 10% or 15% of any population is not the same task as vaccinating the first 80%, because of deprivation, language barriers and housing instability. All families affected by those factors need more contact with clinicians, and GPs simply do not have the resources to do the necessary outreach. We need to fund not just new medicines and drugs, but their roll-out. We should be using lifetime parental consent to increase uptake of school-age vaccinations, and developing efficient, convenient and ongoing catch-up opportunities in schools, shopping centres, nurseries and family hubs. The school-age immunisation service should be operating a check-and-offer approach at every contact. For the last 15%, we should be willing to fund what actually works: explicit payments to GPs for outreach programmes for underserved communities, including funding for multiple contact attempts, data cleaning, and non-responder tracking, with incentives linked to real outcomes. We should be training healthcare professionals and community groups to have difficult conversations with confidence and making far better use of our community pharmacy network, which is rooted in local areas. We also need clear accountability; the buck has to stop somewhere locally and nationally, with clear vaccination leads at both levels. Since the Lansley reforms in 2012 and the subsequent austerity cuts, lines of accountability have become blurred. From April 2027, integrated care boards will have greater responsibility for commissioning vaccination programmes locally, but who is overseeing the national strategy? That remains unclear. Who will require corrective action when that is deemed to be necessary? That is not clear. The removal of national targets was clearly a step backward for the system. Health officials and clinicians tell us that it is not always clear who is responsible when vaccination rates fall at delivery level in a given neighbourhood. We need a new national action plan that sets out concrete steps that will be taken to return coverage to our WHO targets. We do not have all the systems in place to tell us reliably who has and has not been vaccinated. Data challenges run right through the system. Vaccines given in maternity settings, community pharmacy settings or school often fail to make their way back to the child’s GP surgery because the systems do not talk to each other. How can we expect call-and-recall strategies to work if clinicians do not reliably know which children need to be called? Lastly, on hesitancy, we need to tackle misinformation, regulate it online and hold the peddlers of harmful and potentially deadly misinformation to account. Social media companies must step up their game in bringing down anti-vax information and providing clear, evidence-based health information instead. I know much of this is not easy, but that is why it requires genuine commitment and prioritisation. I thank the Minister for listening; will she outline whether the Government accept that the situation is unacceptable and that urgent action is needed, and whether a clear timeline for meeting the WHO targets can and should be agreed by the NHS? If we are to set a timeline, will a clear action plan be outlined to set us on the path back to 95% of all children being vaccinated, so that we can all see a welcome and vital return of our measles elimination status? We must ensure that every child is safe, that people of all ages get the vaccines they need, and that the UK is once again a global leader in vaccinations.