Emily Darlington MP: speeches

Speeches

• 17 Dec 2025 · Local Government Finance · Hansard source

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  As a former deputy leader of Milton Keynes city council, I welcome this announcement. As a reminder, Milton Keynes city council faced £200 million-worth of cuts—55% of our grant—while Buckinghamshire and Northamptonshire were protected and got bail-outs. This settlement is, for once, going to give us the funding we need to protect Britain’s fastest-growing city, so I thank the Minister. Will she meet us to talk about some of the things we can do to encourage councils to build homes at the same rate as Milton Keynes?

• 17 Dec 2025 · Puberty Suppressants Trial · Hansard source

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  I appreciate the science-based approach taken by the Secretary of State. We use puberty blockers for many different conditions, so will the trial look at the data that has been amassed from the use of puberty blockers for other conditions? I wish to state on the record that puberty blockers are reversible. The evidence shows that when people stop taking them, they stop working—that is the science behind them. Finally, young people in my constituency are more likely to age out of gender services than to get their first appointment, so what are we doing to shorten the waiting time, not just for puberty blockers but for the whole range of services provided to trans children by the NHS?

• 16 Dec 2025 · Electoral Resilience · Hansard source

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  I welcome the Secretary of State’s comments on social media, and I hope we can meet the Under-Secretary of State for Housing, Communities and Local Government, my hon. Friend the Member for Chester North and Neston (Samantha Dixon), who is responsible for elections, ahead of the publication of the elections Bill to see what we can do about those protections. The Secretary of State has announced a very good review. Will the money that is coming into this country, particularly related to changing our politics on abortion rights, trans rights and other areas, be within scope of the review?

• 16 Dec 2025 · Transgender People: Provision of Healthcare · Hansard source

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  My hon. Friend is making a powerful speech and bringing the debate back to people, which is where it needs to be. I want to highlight a case in my constituency of a young transgender person who spent two years on the under-18s waiting list for an initial appointment. They have now aged out of that waiting list and potentially have a six-year wait, meaning that when they are able to speak to a doctor or a health professional it will have been eight years. Their parents approached me to tell me how much that is damaging their young one.

• 16 Dec 2025 · Africa: New Approach · Hansard source

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  Although I do not disagree with any of the principles set out in the strategy, I am disappointed by its level of ambition and detail. It does not reflect what we did when we were last in government with the Commission for Africa, which was an all-encompassing report looking at how we work together at the university level as well as on skills, trade, women and girls—all those issues—and build democracy. Unfortunately, it also does not address the real risk from Russia and China’s role in Africa. We have 21 Commonwealth countries in Africa, and they are telling us that they desperately need us as a partner so that we can bring the stability and prosperity to the continent that we all want to see.

• 15 Dec 2025 · Online Safety Act 2023: Repeal · Hansard source

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  I appreciate what the Minister says—that these powers are in legislation—yet the process is still the social media platforms marking their own homework. We are in a vicious circle: Ofcom will not take action unless it has a complaint based on evidence, but the evidence is not achievable because the algorithm is not made available for scrutiny. How should Ofcom use those powers more clearly ahead of the elections to ensure that such abuse to our democracy does not occur?

• 15 Dec 2025 · Online Safety Act 2023: Repeal · Hansard source

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  My hon. Friend raises two really important points. First, if we try to create legislation to address what companies do today, it will be out of date by the time that it passes through the two Houses. What we do must be done on the basis of principles, and I think a very good starting principle is that what is illegal offline should be illegal online. That is a pretty clear principle. Offline legislation has been robustly challenged over hundreds of years and got us to where we are with our freedom of speech, freedom of expression and freedom to congregate. All those things have been robustly tested by both Houses.

• 15 Dec 2025 · Online Safety Act 2023: Repeal · Hansard source

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  I wanted to raise with the Minister that the Science, Innovation and Technology Committee will be undertaking an inquiry in the new year on brain development, addictive use and how that impacts various key points in children’s development. The Minister says that he will look at all evidence. Will he look at the evidence produced by that inquiry to ensure that its information and advice goes to parents across this country?

• 15 Dec 2025 · Online Safety Act 2023: Repeal · Hansard source

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  I completely agree and I am going to come to that. I recently met the NSPCC, the Internet Watch Foundation and the police forces that deal with this issue, and they told me that there are easy technological fixes when someone uploads something to a site with end-to-end encryption. For those who do not know, we use such sites all the time—our WhatsApp groups, and Facebook Messenger, are end-to-end encryption sites. We are not talking about scary sites that we have not heard of, or Telegram, which we hear might be a bit iffy; these are sites that we all use every single day. Those organisations told me that, before someone uploads something and it becomes encrypted, their image or message is screened. It is screened for bugs to ensure that they are not sharing viruses, but equally it could be screened for child sexual abuse images. That would stop children even sharing these images in the first place, and it would stop the images’ collection and sharing with other paedophiles. My hon. Friend the Member for Rugby (John Slinger) is absolutely right: 63% of British parents want the Government to go further and faster, and 50% feel that our implementation has been too slow. That is not surprising; it took seven years to get this piece of legislation through, and the reality is that, by that time, half of it was out of date, because technology moves faster than Parliament.

• 15 Dec 2025 · Online Safety Act 2023: Repeal · Hansard source

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  I agree; my hon. Friend makes a very important point about the slander that happens online, the lack of basis in reality and the lack of ability to address it. If somebody posts something about someone else that is untrue, platforms will not take it down; they will say, “It doesn’t breach our terms and conditions.” Somebody could post that I am actually purple and have pink eyes. I would say, “I don’t want you to say that,” and the platform would say, “But there’s nothing offensive about it.” I would say, “But it’s not me.” The thing is that this is happening in much more offensive ways. My hon. Friend the Member for Oldham West, Chadderton and Royton (Jim McMahon) made the point that what happens online is then repeated offline. We have even seen deaths when children try to replicate the challenges that they see being set online. With AI-generated material, those challenges often are not real. It is the equivalent of somebody trying to repeat magic tricks and dying as a result, which is quite worrying. The Online Safety Act is not perfect; it needs to go further. The petitioner has made a really important point. The lack of proper definition around small but non-harmful sites versus small but harmful sites is very unclear, and it is really important that the Act provides some clarity on that. We do not have enough protections for democracy. The Science, Innovation and Technology Committee, which I am a member of, produced a really important report on misinformation and how it led to the riots two summers ago. Misinformation was used as a rallying cry to create unrest across our country of a sort that we had not seen in a very long time. The response from the social media companies was variable; it went from kind of “meh” to really awful. The platforms say, “We don’t police our content. We’re just a platform.” That is naive in the extreme. Quite frankly, they are happy to make money off us, so they should also know that they have to protect us—their customers—just as any other company does, as my hon. Friend the Member for Oldham West, Chadderton and Royton said. The radicalisation that is happening online is actually shifting the Overton window; we are seeing a more divided country. There is a fantastic book called “Man Up”—it is very academic, but it shows the rise of misogyny leading to the rise of every other form of extremism and how that links back to the online world. If this was all about Islam, this House would be outraged, but because it starts with misogyny, it goes down with a fizzle, and too often people in this House say, “This is all about free speech.” We know that misogyny is the first step on a ladder of radicalisation that leads people to violence—whether into violence against women or further into antisemitism, anti-Islam, anti-anybody who is not the same colour, or anti-anybody who is perceived not to be English from Norman times. The algorithms provoke violent and shocking content, but they also shadow-ban really important content, such as information on women’s health. Platforms are happy to shadow-ban terms such as “endometriosis” and “tampon”—and God forbid that a tampon commercial should feature red liquid, rather than blue liquid. That content gets shadow-banned and is regularly taken down and taken out of the algorithms, yet the platforms say they can do nothing about people threatening to rape and harm. That is not true; they can, and they choose not to. The public agree that algorithms must be part of the solution; 78% of British parents want to see action on algorithms. My hon. Friends are right that the Online Safety Act and Ofcom could do that, yet they have not done so—they have yet to create transparency in algorithms, which was the Select Committee’s No. 1 recommendation. [Sir John Hayes in the Chair ] Finally, I want to talk about a few other areas in which we need to move very quickly: deepfakes and AI nudifying apps. We have already seen an example of how deepfakes are being used in British democracy: a deepfake was made of the hon. Member for Mid Norfolk (George Freeman) saying that he is moving from the Conservatives to Reform. It is a very convincing three-minute video. Facebook still refuses to take it down because it does not breach its terms. This should be a warning to us all about how individuals, state actors and non-state actors can impact our local democracy by creating deepfakes of any one of us that we cannot get taken down.

• 15 Dec 2025 · Online Safety Act 2023: Repeal · Hansard source

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  I completely agree. As parents, we all want to be able to have those conversations, but because of the way the algorithms work, we do not see what they see. We say, “Yes, you can download this game, because it has a 4+ rating.” Who knows what a 4+ rating actually means? It has nothing to with the BBFC ratings that we all grew up with and understand really well. Somebody else has decided what is all right and made up the 4+ rating. For example, Roblox looks as if it is child-ready, but many people might not understand that it is a platform on which anyone can develop a game. Those games can involve grooming children and sexual violence; they are not all about the silly dances that children do in the schoolyard. That platform is inhabited equally by children as it is by adults.

• 15 Dec 2025 · Online Safety Act 2023: Repeal · Hansard source

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  I absolutely agree with my hon. Friend. They seek to promote chaos and the destruction of British values, and we need to fight that and protect those values. The AI nudifying apps, which did not even exist when the Online Safety Act came in, need a very fast response. We know that deepfakes and AI nudifying apps are being used overwhelmingly against classmates and colleagues. Think about how it destroys a 13-year-old girl to have a fake nude photo of her passed around. The abuse that we politicians and many others receive from fake and anonymous accounts needs to be addressed. Seventy-one per cent of British people consider this to be a problem, and we need to take action. AI chatbots are another thing that was not foreseen in the development of the Online Safety Act, and therefore it is far behind on them, too. The Online Safety Act is in no way perfect, but it is a good step forward. We must learn the lessons of its implementation to go further and faster, and listen to British parents across the country who want the Government’s help to protect our children online—and we as a Government must also protect our democracy online.

• 15 Dec 2025 · Online Safety Act 2023: Repeal · Hansard source

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  It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mr Pritchard. I want to add some actual data to our debate today. We are inundated, often online or in our inboxes, with messages about repealing the Online Safety Act. These are well-funded campaigns. There is also a lot of material online coming from very particular sources, not necessarily within the UK. Actually, 70% of people in the UK support the Online Safety Act and a similar number support age verification. Much of that has to do with what our children are seeing online. Almost 80% of people aged 18 to 21 have seen sexual violence before age 18. That is a huge number of people whose initial sexual experiences or viewing of sex involves violence. What does the Online Safety Act do? It puts porn back on the top shelf—it does not get rid of it. We are all of an age to remember when porn was on the top of the magazine rack in the corner shop. Now it is being fed to our children in their feeds. The issue is also the type and nature of porn that people are seeing online: 80% of online porn has some kind of strangulation in it. That has real-world consequences, as we have seen from the latest data on women’s health in terms of strokes. Strangulation is now the second leading cause of strokes among women in the UK. That is shocking, and it is why we needed the Online Safety Act to intervene on what was being fed to us. In Milton Keynes, 30% of young people have been approached by strangers since the implementation of the Online Safety Act. They are most frequently approached on Roblox. We do not automatically identify gaming platforms as places where people are approached by strangers, but we know from police investigations that they approach young children on Roblox and move them to end-to-end encryption sites where they can ask them to share images. In 2024, there were 7,263 online grooming offences—remember that those will just be the ones that are not in end-to-end encryption sites. There were 291,273 reports of child sexual abuse material identified last year—again, remember, that is not the material being shared on end-to-end encryption sites, because we have no idea what is actually being shared on those. Some 90% of that material is self-generated—that is, groomers asking children to take pornographic pictures of themselves and share them. Once a picture is shared with a groomer, it goes into networks and can get shared anywhere in the UK or the world. The UK is the biggest consumer of child sexual abuse images. The police reckon that 850,000 people in the UK are consuming child sexual abuse images.

• 10 Dec 2025 · AI Safety · Hansard source

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  Will the Minister give way?

• 10 Dec 2025 · AI Safety · Hansard source

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  It is a pleasure to serve under your chairship, Ms Butler. I thank the hon. Member for Dewsbury and Batley (Iqbal Mohamed) for securing this important debate. It would be remiss of me, as the MP for Milton Keynes Central, not to acknowledge the opportunities of AI. One in three jobs in Milton Keynes is in tech, often in the edge technologies or edge AIs that are driving the economic growth we want. However, we will not see take-up across businesses unless we have the safest AI, so we must listen to the British Standards Institution, which is located in Milton Keynes and is working on standards for some of these things. Nevertheless, I have many concerns. The Molly Rose Foundation has raised many issues around AI chatbots, not all of which are included in current legislation. It has documented how Alexa instructed a 10-year-old to touch a live electrical wire, and how Snapchat’s My AI told a 13-year-old how to lose their virginity to a 31-year-old—luckily, it was an adult posing as a 13-year-old. We have seen other examples involving suicide, and Hitler having the answers to climate change, and research has found that many children are unable to realise that chatbots are not human. AI algorithms also shadow ban women and women’s health, as others have mentioned. The tech is there to make AI safe, but there is little incentive for companies to do so at the moment. The Online Safety Act goes some way, but not far enough. Our priorities must be to tackle the creativity and copyright issues; deepfakes and the damage they do, in particular, to young girls and women; and the misinformation and disinformation that is being spread and amplified by algorithms because it keeps people online longer, making companies money. We must also protect democracy, children, minorities and women. How do we do that? I hope the Minister is listening. For me, it is about regulation and standards—standards are just as important as regulation—and transparency. The Science, Innovation and Technology Committee has called for transparency on AI algorithms and AI chatbots, but we have yet to see real transparency. We must also have more diversity in tech—I welcome the Secretary of State’s initiatives on that—and, finally, given the world we are in, we must have a clear strategy for the part that sovereignty in AI plays in our security and our economic future.

• 26 Nov 2025 · Engagements · Hansard source

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  Yesterday was the UN International Day for the Elimination of Violence Against Women, known as White Ribbon Day in Milton Keynes and many other places. I wonder whether the Prime Minister will join me in congratulating you, Mr Speaker, on your commitment to make this House the first national White Ribbon Parliament in the world. Will he join you, me and many Members across this House in making the White Ribbon promise to never use, excuse or remain silent about men’s violence against women?

• 25 Nov 2025 · Violence against Women and Girls: London · Hansard source

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  It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mr Stringer. I pay tribute to my hon. Friend the Member for Poplar and Limehouse (Apsana Begum) for securing this important debate and making such a great contribution, drawing on her personal experiences before widening it out to London, the country and the world. This issue does not have borders and is not limited to a single socioeconomic class, religion or area of the country. I congratulate the Minister on the success of her domestic abuse protection orders, which hit 1,000 this week, in keeping survivors protected while they are at their most vulnerable. I thank Treasury Ministers for their financial inclusion strategy, which is starting to address economic abuse, and Ministry of Justice Ministers for tackling the ongoing abuse in family courts. We are all looking forward to the VAWG strategy: its publication and its ambition to halve violence against women and girls. That is a goal we can all get behind. Although it is the UN’s International Day for the Elimination of Violence Against Women, we in Milton Keynes call it White Ribbon Day. I will focus on why that is and on prevention. Milton Keynes is the first White Ribbon city. White Ribbon is very close to my heart because it was started by men in Canada after the shooting at an École Polytechnique. A man went in and shot women engineering students because he had not got a place at engineering school. Like many of us here today, those men in Canada were sick and tired of the rhetoric that women were somehow at fault—maybe they should have locked the door of the classroom; maybe they should have behaved differently. They recognised that the problem was started by men and needed to be solved by men. What does it mean for Milton Keynes to be a White Ribbon city? It means that more than 160 companies, organisations and charities have become White Ribbon accredited: from the YMCA to the MK Dons; from big corporations to small, niche ones; from voluntary groups to the city council; and from the police to the fire service. Thousands of individuals have also signed up, together making the pledge to never commit, excuse or remain silent about male violence against women. We all know that this is not all men; the difficulty is that too often the majority of men, who would never consider committing or excusing such abuse, remain silent. The issue is about empowering them to be active bystanders and to know how to comfortably walk into a situation that does not feel right and call out their friends’ behaviours in pubs, changing rooms and other places. Alternatively, it is about empowering them to talk to a co-worker who used to be a fantastic, performing female colleague, but who has all of a sudden gone quiet: to know that there is a reason why and what to do with the answers. We need to do this not only in Milton Keynes, but right across the country. MPs from across the House have signed up to White Ribbon. I thank Mr Speaker and the Madam Deputy Speakers for their commitment to making us the first White Ribbon Parliament in the world, setting an example for the country. I know they are progressing on that as quickly as they can. Parliament is a workplace, not a lifestyle. We have seen incidents right across this Estate that, unfortunately, do not bring it pride. The catering staff, the MPs and everyone else who works on the Estate need to feel safe, as do the visitors who have meetings and tours here. Members of Parliament must be held to the highest standards because we are setting the example against the misogyny promoted online. I conclude by talking about the Online Safety Act 2023. There is a huge campaign against the Act, but it is making real progress. It does need to make further progress in some areas—not just releasing guidance on how platforms can help protect women, but also making it mandatory, doing work on deepfakes, addressing the 850,000 consumers of child sexual abuse imagery and tackling the grooming of children on gaming platforms and on end-to-end encrypted sites. We can and must do more, and this is the moment. We have the Government commitment, we have personal ministerial commitments in different Departments and we have the cross-party commitment. We have the commitment and demand from voluntary groups, mums and dads, and our sisters and daughters. Today is the day we make that change.

• 24 Nov 2025 · HMP Downview: Female Prisoners · Hansard source

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  Does the Minister think it is really important to understand the context? We have just talked about how many women are in prison because of the abuse that they have suffered, but many trans women are also put in those vulnerable positions, and they are even more likely than cis women to be victims of crime. Does the Minister agree that it would be useful for us to use the facts? Could she explain exactly what the position is at HMP Downview? Having some clarity on that, rather than just reiterating rumours that are being written about in newspapers, is probably a better way to deal with quite a sensitive issue, given that people can be both perpetrators of crime and victims of it.

• 24 Nov 2025 · HMP Downview: Female Prisoners · Hansard source

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

• 18 Nov 2025 · China Espionage: Government Security Response · Hansard source

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  First, I thank the Minister for the strength of his message about our efforts to stop the transnational repression of our constituents, including the Hongkongers in Milton Keynes. Can we continue to have a dialogue about how my constituents continue to feel unsafe in the UK? I want to raise an issue that goes alongside the Speaker’s Conference, which is how we protect and defend our democracy in the online world, particularly from foreign state actors and their proxies and non-state actors who use the online environment to destabilise our democracy. Will the Minister meet me to talk about the amendments that I am preparing for the elections Bill to ensure that we protect ourselves from online threats just as much as we do from offline threats?

• 17 Nov 2025 · Social Media Posts: Penalties for Offences · Hansard source

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  It is a pleasure to serve under your chairship, Sir Roger. The first duty of Government is to keep their citizens safe. We do that with the police and our court system; and, although they are not perfect, we could not do it without them. The online space is an integral part of our modern lives, and we need to treat it as such, because what happens online does not stay online. Online safety naysayers want us to think that regulating the online space is a conspiracy to end freedom of speech. Some, such as the hon. Member for Clacton (Nigel Farage), try to make that case, while his online followers send women and members of minorities death and rape threats when they speak freely, and that includes Members of this House—like many women MPs, I receive at least one a week. Rather than taking away free speech and democracy, we are ensuring that everybody has a voice, so that people, including the alleged victims of Andrew and Tristan Tate, can one day have an online profile again, without getting their home addresses splashed all over the internet and being doxed, as young people like to call it. Democracy should be about ideas and debates, yet the online environment that some Members of this House want is one where people can make deepfakes, misleading the electorate; where they can threaten women with rape, to shut up those they do not agree with; and where they can make £300,000 by making 128 Facebook pages, spreading racist and AI-generated misinformation, which is then amplified by members of the Reform party—monetising hate, as the piece in The Times exposed this morning. Without an extension of our election laws to online spaces, single platforms or platform owners with specific political or financial agendas can continue to spread lies and misinformation, even going so far as to incite violence in another country. That is not democracy; that is not free speech. It is up to this Government to ward against it and ensure that our laws and sentencing are appropriate. As I said, the first duty of any Government is to keep their citizens safe. In real life, a 12-year-old cannot go to the cinema to see a film if it is rated 15, and pornography is put on the top shelf at the newsagents, out of reach. Kids cannot buy a video game that is adult-only rated without identification. Online, however, our kids can find any kind of graphic or sexual content, of any level of extremity, as easily as they can text their friends. The Online Safety Act is there to protect everyone. It is there to put porn back on the top shelf and out of reach of kids. It works to prevent 10-year-olds from finding graphic depictions of violence, being encouraged to become violent themselves or being groomed by strangers. Those who want to scrap the Act and the sentencing that goes along with it actually put at risk our free speech—the free speech of those who are intimidated every day for trying to express their views online—and, even more so, they put at risk our democracy. Let us bring back common sense and protect this country.

• 17 Nov 2025 · Social Media Posts: Penalties for Offences · Hansard source

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  Does the shadow Minister recognise that when his Government were letting out rapists and violent criminals, they put in place no protections whatsoever, whereas this Government have brought in protection orders and domestic violence orders to ensure that victims are protected in these cases? Does he also recognise that the prison crisis was caused under his Government?

• 17 Nov 2025 · Social Media Posts: Penalties for Offences · Hansard source

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  Thank you for mansplaining.

• 17 Nov 2025 · Social Media Posts: Penalties for Offences · Hansard source

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  I wonder why.

• 11 Nov 2025 · Violence against Women and Girls · Hansard source

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  I thank the Minister and the Ministry of Justice ministerial team for repealing the £318 charge for the person at risk of violence order a couple of weeks ago—that will make a huge difference. However, I want to raise the strategy and the fact that online abuse is on the rise. Does she agree that any party that says it wants to repeal the Online Safety Act 2023 is not a party that cares about tackling violence against women and girls?