David Mundell MP: speeches

Speeches

• 4 Feb 2026 · Postal Services: Rural Areas · Hansard source

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  It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mr Stringer. I am grateful to my hon. Friend the Member for South Shropshire (Stuart Anderson), and to the hon. Member for Corby and East Northamptonshire (Lee Barron) for a useful tip; perhaps if I had put my grandson Theo’s birthday card in a parcel, it might not—even though posted first class from Moffat to Troon—have taken three weeks to arrive. Fortunately he is only two, so he has not held it against me, but my constituents have had similar experiences. First, we have to pay tribute to our posties, because what is happening is not their fault. It is the direction that is coming from above that is at fault, and the obsession with parcels. Royal Mail is meant to deliver mail, not just parcels. It is not a parcel delivery company. I hope the Minister can reinforce that message. In my constituency, Royal Mail has taken many steps to make it less attractive for people to post mail, particularly, as the hon. Member for North Shropshire (Helen Morgan) mentioned, the surreptitious introduction of early collection times. If someone wants to post a first-class letter, in many parts of my constituency they have to do it before 9 am, otherwise they have to travel an inordinate distance. In rural communities in particular, people still often suffer from poor broadband and mobile reception, and are generally older. That is the group of the population for whom the Royal Mail and its services is most important. I pay particular tribute to Barry Knock, the chair of the Quothquan and Thankerton community council in the Clydesdale part of my constituency, who has constantly held Royal Mail to account for its failures. As we have already heard, if someone is off or sick, the mail is not delivered. The Minister is an experienced campaigner, and he knows that it is quite different sending somebody out into a modern housing estate to deliver something than sending them into a vast rural area. We need people who know those localities to do that job. I want the Minister to take away a specific issue: we are heading into elections for the Scottish Parliament and other elections, and a large number of people in these rural communities have a postal vote. I want the Minister to be able to tell me that he is satisfied that Royal Mail has the capacity to deliver the postal votes and return them to the election officers, because that is a very significant issue. Those deliveries did not go well, certainly in my constituency, during the 2024 general election. When Members raise issues with Royal Mail, they just get excuses; hopefully the Minister can put a rocket up the company.

• 11 Dec 2025 · St Andrew’s Day and Scottish Affairs · Hansard source

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  I do. What the hon. Lady points to is the shuffling of figures that we have just seen, so that the best figures are presented, but those 86,000 people I mentioned who have been on waiting lists for more than a year are erased from the debate. It is all about smoke and mirrors. Analysis of this astonishing increase in waiting times by the Royal College of Emergency Medicine found that it has likely contributed to more than 1,000 needless deaths, despite the best efforts of frontline staff who have been failed by the SNP’s inaction. And what of the strain on those hard-working NHS workers? Last year, data revealed that NHS frontline staff were forced to cover understaffed shifts on 348,675 occasions. That is hundreds of thousands of times when there were simply not enough staff on hospital wards and in other care settings to meet Scotland’s healthcare needs. A recent report by the Royal College of Nursing Scotland warned that over the year to May 2025, “at no point has NHS Scotland employed the number of nursing staff needed to deliver safe and effective care.” The warning signs have been there for years, but the Scottish Government have failed to act on workforce planning, and it is patients and health service workers who are paying the price of that failure. Of course, the healthcare crisis in Scotland is not restricted to our hospitals. Anyone who represents a rural constituency like mine will be acutely aware of the often severe pressure on GP services, where face-to-face appointments can be difficult to obtain, and that is to say nothing of the near impossible job of getting registered with an NHS dentist. In Dumfries and Galloway, which has one of the worst rates of NHS dental registration, more than 40% of residents are not registered with a dentist. That is not because they do not want to be, but because practices are not taking on new patients, and thousands of existing patients have been deregistered.

• 11 Dec 2025 · St Andrew’s Day and Scottish Affairs · Hansard source

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  I am afraid we are back to the old record, Madam Deputy Speaker. We have heard it so many times. It does not wear thin; it must be digital now, so that it can be reproduced in just the same words that I have heard for the last 20-odd years. What the hon. Gentleman says does not relate to the experience of my constituents in Dumfries and Galloway when getting a dentist. They hold the Scottish Government accountable for whether or not they have a dentist, and for the promises that the Scottish Government have made in that regard. SNP Ministers say that the situation with dentists is “challenging”, but that is no substitute for the action we need to solve Scotland’s dental deserts, like Dumfries and Galloway. And what of Scotland’s social care system—the very services meant to protect the vulnerable, the elderly, and those in need? Unions and public service watchdogs have repeatedly condemned persistent delays in discharging patients. Those delays clog up hospitals and deny timely care to people who should be at home or in community care. Staffing is chronically inadequate, care homes are overstretched, home care services are chaotic, and families often wait weeks—sometimes months—to get support for loved ones. Long-standing plans to deliver a national care service collapsed this year, having consumed tens of millions of pounds of taxpayers’ money, but without delivering a single additional hour of social care to those who need it. It is the record of the SNP Government summed up: make bold promises of reform; spend millions of pounds; blame everybody else, but especially Westminster, when it all falls apart. For years, the SNP has made bold promises—promises of better health care, stronger social care, more GPs, more nurses, reduced waiting lists and an improved social care framework, but the facts speak for themselves. GP and dentist numbers remain too low, and constituents like mine struggle to get appointments. Too many newly qualified young medical professionals leave Scotland, even as vacancies are unfilled. More than £2 billion has been spent on agency and bank nurses, and midwives, over the past five years because of a lack of proper workforce planning. One in nine of Scotland’s population is currently on an NHS waiting list in Scotland, and despite the hard work of NHS staff working in the most challenging of circumstances, public satisfaction with the NHS in Scotland has plummeted to the lowest level since devolution. Once we strip away all the self-congratulatory boasting of Scottish Government Ministers, this is the reality of the NHS in Scotland after two decades of SNP rule: an older person waiting weeks for home care; a mother with a child waiting years for mental-health support; a nurse driven to burnout; a cancer patient left on a waiting list so long that even Scotland’s First Minister says it is “not acceptable”.

• 11 Dec 2025 · St Andrew’s Day and Scottish Affairs · Hansard source

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  I agree with the hon. Lady, but there also needs to be fundamental acknowledgment that there has not been the workforce planning that was required and that is the responsibility of the Scottish Government, not people in England or Wales or somewhere else. These responsibilities lie with the Scottish Government, and they should be held accountable for the way they have exercised them. Given the list of deficiencies that I have set out in relation to the Scottish Government on a whole range of issues, most particularly the NHS, let us demand better from Scotland’s Government on behalf of all of Scotland.

• 2 Sept 2025 · The Battle of Britain · Hansard source

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  The Dumfriesshire town of Moffat, which I have the privilege of representing and of living in, has a close association with a number of famous people. But few of our notable local sons or daughters had such a profound influence on the future of the United Kingdom as Hugh Dowding, who was born on 24 April 1882 and whose leadership of RAF Fighter Command during the battle of Britain was decisive, as we heard from my right hon. Friend the Member for Chingford and Woodford Green (Sir Iain Duncan Smith), in defending the nation from both air attack and invasion by Hitler’s Nazi armies. It was during those summer and early autumn months of 1940 that the struggle for what was literally the survival of our nation was fought and ultimately decided. Central to that fight were the character, leadership and effective tactics of Air Vice-Marshal Hugh Dowding. The later Lord Dowding was not a flamboyant man. He was pragmatic, and a believer in meticulous planning. Having served during world war one and thereafter joined the RAF, he made his mark during the 1930s as a member of the Air Council for Supply and Research, as a firm believer that research and development was essential. He argued for adequate funding for research, knowing that the days of the biplane were numbered, and pushed for development of faster, advanced fighter aircraft. This initiative is largely credited with the development of the legendary Hurricane and Spitfire aircraft, which were ordered into production in 1934, and which would go on to play such an iconic and pivotal role in the Battle of Britain. Dowding showed enormous interest in emerging technology connected to the detection of enemy aircraft, and threw his support behind radio direction finding equipment, which again was central to victory in the skies over Britain in 1940. The foresight and determination to match emerging advanced aircraft and technologies with new, effective tactics led to the creation of what would become known as the Dowding system, which the hon. Member for Tewkesbury referenced in his opening remarks. That was an innovative air defence network, which integrated radar stations, ground observers and a centralised command structure. For the first time in history, an air force could see incoming attacks, track them in real time, and direct interception with precision. The new system meant that Britain, with its smaller number of aircraft, could resist the numerically far superior Luftwaffe, leaving German pilots often astonished at how swiftly RAF pilots appeared, seemingly out of nowhere, to disrupt their formations. However, Dowding’s enthusiasm for new equipment, technologies and tactics was matched by an equally important human quality: his commitment to the principle that preserving trained men was as vital as preserving machines. He rotated squadrons to rest them; made full use, as we have heard, of pilots from across the Commonwealth, occupied Europe and even the United States; and was deeply moved by the sacrifice of his young airmen. Behind what was undoubtedly a reserved demeanour, he was deeply concerned for the wellbeing of his pilots and all his men, even speaking in later years of feeling their presence after death.

• 2 Sept 2025 · The Battle of Britain · Hansard source

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  My right hon. Friend will be pleased to know that this Saturday, at his birthplace in Moffat, a bust of the then Lord Dowding will be unveiled alongside a replica Spitfire, and that his former home has been turned into sheltered housing accommodation for RAF personnel, known as Dowding House.

• 2 Sept 2025 · The Battle of Britain · Hansard source

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  I absolutely agree with my right hon. Friend. Dowding was someone who valued the trained individual and who really stood up for his men. From a number of excellent contributions we have heard Churchill’s assessment of the battle of Britain, in which he paid tribute to the courage of the RAF fighter pilots whose defence of our skies delivered both victory and the survival of our country. However, it is perhaps the more unvarnished estimation of an opposing protagonist that pays the most compelling tribute to Dowding. Following the battle of Britain, Field Marshal Gerd von Rundstedt commanded German forces in the west and had been involved in planning the invasion of Britain which was ultimately cancelled after the battle of Britain. During interrogation by the allies, the Field Marshal was asked at what point during the course of the war he had seen the tide turning against Germany—was it Stalingrad, Leningrad or El Alamein? “Oh no,” replied von Rundstedt, “it was the Battle of Britain.” That was the first time he realised that the Nazis were not invincible. That shattering of progress towards what was seemingly an inevitable Nazi victory was down to the courage of the young pilots who fought and died in the skies over Britain in 1940, and their memory must always be honoured; but the vital contribution made by the son of a schoolmaster from Moffat should also be remembered. The quiet determination of Hugh Dowding, which gave those pilots the tools, the system and the strategy to succeed, was central to winning the battle of Britain and ensuring the survival of a nation and the freedom and liberty we enjoy today.