Emily Darlington MP: speeches

Speeches

• 8 Jun 2026 · Water Companies · Hansard source

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  I will raise with the Minister something that I have already raised with her in a letter about the impact of Anglian Water, another failing water company. There was no water on the hottest day of the year for families in Woburn Sands and the Brickhills. That is a disgrace. Around the same time, there was a lack of water pressure, and the fire and rescue service in Milton Keynes had to bring in water to fight a fire. Does the Minister agree that each and every one of these companies has a story of failure, and it is time we held them to account? I urge her to resist calls to allow failing water companies to determine how many homes can be built in this country. Instead, we should make them do the job that they are there for, which is to give water to each and every one of us.

• 13 May 2026 · Debate on the Address · Hansard source

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  First, I pay tribute to the King for coming to the other place and making a speech. He addressed us not with the wit and humour with which he addressed the Americans, but with the seriousness that was needed today. I also thank my hon. Friend the Member for Bradford West (Naz Shah) for her impassioned speech and perseverance. She is admired and respected by anybody who has suffered any kind of hardship and abuse, and she shows how far one can go. She boasted that Bradford was the youngest city, but I would like to point out that Milton Keynes is the newest city. We had a speech from my hon. Friend the Member for—where was he from again? Oh yes, my hon. Friend the Member for Harlow (Chris Vince); I should remember that, as he mentioned it 35 times—I counted. He made claims about his new town, and my hon. Friend the Member for Stevenage (Kevin Bonavia) claimed that he represented the first new town, but I remind everyone that Milton Keynes is the most successful new town. I will not go through every Bill, but I will pick out some that will make a difference to people in my constituency. The European partnership Bill is so important. As we all know, and as the public in Milton Keynes know, especially if they are running a small or medium-sized business, the Brexit campaign was not clear on how leaving would impact people—that is me using parliamentary language. The biggest thing that we could do to support small and medium-sized businesses in the UK is ensure that they had full access to all European customers, and to the whole trading area, and work with their European counterparts and trade partners to build growth here. We have already heard from Members about some of the impacts of Brexit. If the Conservative party is serious about growing the economy and supporting small businesses, as it says it is, I am sure that we can count on the Opposition’s full support in getting closer to Europe to make that happen. On the clean water Bill, Milton Keynes has both a river and a canal; some Members may remember that the previous MP decided to demonstrate how clean the river was—or was not—by taking his shirt off in a photoshoot. The water is not clean—

• 13 May 2026 · Debate on the Address · Hansard source

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  The clean water Bill is about taking on vested interests. It is about not just cleaning up the waterways but taking on those water companies that have absolutely taken us for mugs. I would remind any Member who still puts a picture of Margaret Thatcher up on their office wall that the reason we are in this position with water companies is because of her legacy. We want to end leasehold for good. That is hugely important in a city such as Milton Keynes, where many people own their property. We are that new town—that promise that someone can move in and own a flat or property—but we must go further and ensure an end to leasehold, because those who buy freehold houses should not continue to pay a service charge, many years into the future. This is a huge problem in Glebe Farm, where six different developers are charging six different service charges to freeholders. That must end. We also need the social housing renewal Bill. Social housing was part of my cabinet portfolio when I was the Labour deputy leader of Milton Keynes city council. We were able to build new council homes to high, green standards, with air source heat pumps and solar panels, further bringing down energy bills for our council tenants. We also had a social housing decarbonisation fund that supported over 2,000 tenants in bringing down their bills through insulation and new windows.

• 13 Apr 2026 · Statutory Menstrual Leave · Hansard source

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  It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mr Mundell. I declare an interest: I have adenomyosis. It took more than 30 years for it to be diagnosed. The average diagnosis time is nine years and four months. For ethnically diverse communities, it is over 11 years. My story is not unusual. From the age of 14, I repeatedly went to the GP saying, “This isn’t normal.” That is like the 47% of sufferers who visited their GP more than 10 times before a diagnosis, while 70% visited more than five times. We all know what they were told: “You’re making a fuss about nothing”, “It’s normal”, and as we just heard from my hon. Friend the Member for Sherwood Forest (Michelle Welsh), “All you need is a hot water bottle and some painkillers.” Like so many other young women—80% of them—I was put on the contraceptive pill before any further investigation, and well before I was sexually active. This continued for many years. I once convinced a doctor that the pain was so bad that I should have some kind of exploratory surgery, so they did exploratory surgery looking for endometriosis. They did not look for adenomyosis. After that, I really was told that I was making it up, because they could not find anything. When I gave birth to my first child, I was in labour for 30 hours. A midwife at the other end of the phone kept saying to my husband, “If she’s able to nap, she’s clearly not having contractions.” I could nap during contractions because I had spent more than 30 years having to sleep with adenomyosis. I learned to have a very high pain tolerance. That baby was delivered in A&E because we got to the hospital so late. Even after being able to describe the pain of my periods being worse than the pain of contractions, not least because they were continuous and did not go away and come back like contractions, I was told that I was exaggerating and that it could not possibly be that bad. They told me that there was nothing they could do other than keep me on the contraceptive pill, which seemed to do nothing. It was not until I got to the other end with my reproductive health, when I had to go for several scans for menopause ahead of getting treatment for perimenopause, that the scanner said to me, “Oh, you have adenomyosis. That must be really painful,” as an offhand comment. I was bowled over. I said, “What is that? I’ve never even heard of it.” I had heard of endometriosis, but I had no idea what adenomyosis was. She said, “Oh, it’s similar, but it’s growing in your muscle lining.” I could not believe it; I was shocked that from the beginning to the end of my reproductive years—all those years of pain—I never once got a proper diagnosis. How did that impact my working career? I used to wish my period would start on a weekend, so that I would not have to miss work—I can see some nodding heads. I used to organise my work tasks around my expected period: I would do all the work that took concentration on days I knew would be good days, so that on the bad days I did not have to be productive. I missed about a day of work a month, which used to terrify me at the beginning of my career. I did not feel that I could talk to my bosses about it—I did not have the words to do so—and I had doubts from those doctors telling me that it was not as bad as I thought. I also want to share April’s story. She is only 24 and she has been going through this for the past 10 years. Her periods were so painful that she vomited. It is like that for many of us: doctors would say, “Take a paracetamol,” and I would say, “That’s great, but I can’t keep it down. I will literally vomit it back up.” April had a Mirena intrauterine device fitted for her symptoms, but she wanted to get it removed. I was shocked by this story: she was told that the strings of her IUD had been cut too short to remove without surgery. When April asked why that was the case she was told: “We cut the strings short for our younger patients, because we don’t want their boyfriends to find sex with them uncomfortable.” April had to undergo surgery under general anaesthesia to remove her IUD. She says that, at every stage, “A decision about my own body—my contraception, my ability to access the removal of my IUD—was shaped around the comfort of a hypothetical male partner.” She was single at the time. That is what we are all put through. At no point were any of us told that painful periods are not normal—I am not talking about discomfort; I am talking about pain—even though we know that to be the case. Each and every one of us should know that from the start. This relates to the fact that women’s health information is being shadow-banned online. Over the past year, 95% of women’s health educators were targeted for shadow-banning. That means that people who are trying to get this kind of health information out there are having their posts either blocked or downgraded because of their content. I do not mean to be rude, but that does not seem to happen to posts about erectile dysfunction. Educators are told by big tech that it has been quietly restricting or hiding women’s health content that contains educational terms like “periods”, “menopause”, “vagina” and “endometriosis” under the guise of safety or because those terms are too sexualised. How are we supposed to create an environment in which not only we as women but our bosses, colleagues and partners, who might be male, all understand that painful periods are not normal, and that the pain is real? We are seeing improvements in these areas, and I know that we are all looking forward to the women’s health strategy, which many of us have had long conversations about with the Ministers involved. We hope that it will bring about further real progress, but right now, I have a 15-year-old daughter who has all the same symptoms that I had, with all the same pain. I have told her all my tricks, including the use of irritable bowel syndrome medication to reduce some of the cramping—if people in the Public Gallery do not know about that one, it works really well—but our GP says that she is too young to start having such discussions. She is doing her mock GCSE exams this week. I wish her the best of luck, because she has studied really hard, but she is terrified that she will get her period this week and it will mess up those mock GCSEs. I have given just a few examples; I know that women in the Public Gallery could give many more. We hear the same story over and over, and it all stems from this fallacy that periods are meant to be painful. Painful periods are not normal and we need to repeat that to every woman we know, including every female team member we know and every GP or consultant we know, to make real change happen.

• 23 Mar 2026 · Puberty Blockers Clinical Trial · Hansard source

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  Exactly, and that is completely inappropriate. A leader of a political party shouted “Traitor” at me when I said we should watch our language around this issue. I do not know who they think I am a traitor to, but I am certainly not one to the human race. The hon. Member for Canterbury (Rosie Duffield) has said she has received death threats; I get death threats too. This is not unique to the hon. Member. The MHRA should not be in an environment where it has any fear of any legal action; it should only look at the science. Many in the community feel that the trial has now become too political for anybody to touch and that we have forgotten about those children who, quite frankly, if we do not do anything for them, we are doing harm.

• 2 Mar 2026 · Representation of the People Bill · Hansard source

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  The most personal form of power each of us has is the power to choose. When we mark our ballot, we exercise something profound and meaningful: our power to decide freely what kind of future we want, and that choice belongs to each of us. But today it is clear that our power to freely decide our future is under attack, not because our vote has been taken away or because of voter fraud, but because the environment in which we make up our minds is being deliberately distorted. Hostile states—especially Russia—are investing in digital tools designed to confuse, divide and destabilise us. At the same time, big tech has built systems that reward the strongest reaction: rage over fact, speed over accuracy and repetition over reflection. One seeks to weaken us, the other profits from whatever captures our attention, and together they distort the spaces in which many of us now make up our minds. We have come together to put forward amendments that would help the Representation of the People Bill to continue to maintain democracy as we expect it to. We already accept the election rules that require us to regulate spending, prohibit impersonation and enforce transparency. We choose to do that because our democracy is too important to leave unguarded, and the digital space where so many of our choices are now formed should be no different. If our duty is to protect people’s power to choose, these five things must follow. First, we must identify the crime. At the moment, lots of laws apply, but if it is not specific, it is hard for law enforcement to act. We must codify that the existing laws will apply to these digital behaviours, with a recognition that these are serious offences with serious consequences. Secondly, we must shine a light. If a video is artificially generated to impersonate a candidate, voters have the right to know. The hon. Member for Mid Norfolk (George Freeman) has described his own experience in this regard. We need much higher levels of disclosure and labelling of where information comes from, so that people can better understand what they are seeing. That is why we need more regulation and transparency around political advertising, with all paid digital advertising being kept publicly available in a library so that it is open for all to see. Thirdly, we must demand that major platforms play their proper role in society. These platforms shape what millions of people see during an election and they must be accountable. These amendments would enable Ofcom to demand action from these platforms, unless they want to face major consequences, by making electoral offences a priority offence under the law. With our success in forcing Grok to take action on notification, we know that we can act to protect people. No platform is too big or too powerful.

• 3 Feb 2026 · Cyber Security and Resilience (Network and Information Systems) Bill (Second sitting) · Hansard source

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  Q I note your interest in how the Bill will affect smaller businesses. There is not much detail in the Bill, but how do you think the code of practice could create an environment that lifts everyone’s security up without prescribing too great a burden? Richard Starnes: You just stepped on one of my soapbox issues. I would like to see the code of practice become part of the annual Companies House registrations for every registered company. To me, this is an attestation that, “We understand cyber-security, we’ve had it put in front of us, and we have to address it in some way.” One of the biggest problems, which Andy talked about earlier, is that we have all these wonderful things that the Government are doing with regard to cyber-security, down to the micro-level companies, but there are 5.5 million companies in the United Kingdom that are not enterprise-level companies, and the vast majority of them have 25 employees or fewer. How do we get to these people and say, “This is important. You need to look at this”? This is a societal issue. The code of practice and having it registered through Companies House are the way to do that. We need to start small and move big. Only 3% of businesses are involved in Cyber Essentials, which is just that: the essentials. It is the baseline, so we need to start there.

• 3 Feb 2026 · Cyber Security and Resilience (Network and Information Systems) Bill (First sitting) · Hansard source

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  Q I want to go back to basics and get a bit of insight from you. What cyber risks are businesses currently facing, and how do you feel the Bill addresses those risks? David Cook: The original NIS regulations came out of a directive from 2016, so this is 10 years old now, and the world changes quickly, especially when it comes to technology. Not only is this supply chain vulnerability systemic, but it causes a significant risk to UK and global businesses. Ransomware groups, threat actors or cyber-criminals—however you want to badge that—are looking for a one-to-many model. Rather than going after each organisation piecemeal, if they can find a route through one organisation that leads to millions, they will always follow it. At the moment, they are out of scope. The reality is that those organisations, which are global in nature, often do not pay due regard to UK law because they are acting all over the world and we are one of many jurisdictions. They are the threat vector that is allowing an attack into an organisation, but it then sits with the organisations that are attacked to deal with the fallout. Often, although they do not get away scot-free, they are outside legislative scrutiny and can carry on operating as they did before. That causes a vulnerability. The one-to-many attack route is a vulnerability, and at the moment the law is lacking in how it is equipped to deal with the fallout. Jen Ellis: In terms of what the landscape looks like, our dialogue often has a huge focus on cyber-crime and we look a lot at data protection and that kind of thing. Last year, we saw the impact of disruptive attacks, but in the past few years we have also heard a lot more about state-sponsored attacks. I do not know how familiar everyone in the room is with Volt Typhoon and Salt Typhoon; they were widespread nation-state attacks that were uncovered in the US. We are not immune to such attacks; we could just as easily fall victim to them. We should take the discovery of Volt Typhoon as a massive wake-up call to the fact that although we are aware of the challenge, we are not moving fast enough to address it. Volt Typhoon particularly targeted US critical infrastructure, with a view to being able to massively disrupt it at scale should a reason to do so arise. We cannot have that level of disruption across our society; the impacts would be catastrophic. Part of what NIS is doing and what the CSRB is looking to do is to take NIS and update it to make sure that it is covering the relevant things, but I also hope that we will see a new level of urgency and an understanding that the risks are very prevalent and are coming from different sources with all sorts of different motivations. There is huge complexity, which David has spoken to, around the supply chain. We really need to see the critical infrastructure and the core service providers becoming hugely more vigilant and taking their role as providers of a critical service very seriously when it comes to security. They need to think about what they are doing to be part of the solution and to harden and protect the UK against outside interference. David Cook: By way of example, NIS1 talks about reporting to the regulator if there is a significant impact. What we are seeing with some of the attacks that Jen has spoken about is pre-positioning, whereby a criminal or a threat actor sits on the network and the environment and waits for the day when they are going to push the big red button and cause an attack. That is outside NIS1: if that sort of issue were identified, it would not be reportable to the regulator. The regulator would therefore not have any visibility of it. NIS2 and the Bill talk about something being identified that is caused by or is capable of causing severe operational disruption. It widens the ambit of visibility and allows the UK state, as well as regulators, to understand what is going in the environment more broadly, because if there are trends—if a number of organisations report to a regulator that they have found that pre-positioning—they know that a malicious actor is planning something. The footprints are there.

• 3 Feb 2026 · Cyber Security and Resilience (Network and Information Systems) Bill (First sitting) · Hansard source

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  Q A huge thank you to the panel. Many of my colleagues have already asked the question, so I appreciate you talking about the futureproofing in quantum, the international regulatory environment and the use of standards alongside regulation to drive up quality. You all have a huge amount of UK clients, and I want to ask you about how good cyber culture gets embedded, and what the role of the Bill is within that. To pick up on Ben’s point around the security by design within his own firm, do you think that is well understood among your colleagues in the UK? How do we get the balance right between what is in the regulation and what should be done through a standards model, working with the British Standards Institution and others? Dr Ian Levy: The previous set of witnesses talked about board responsibility around cyber-security. In my experience, whether a board is engaged or not is a proxy indicator for whether they are looking at risk management properly, and you cannot change corporate culture through regulation—not quickly. There is something to be done around incentives to ensure that companies are really looking at their responsibilities across cyber-security. As the previous panellists have said, this is not just a technical thing. One of the things that is difficult to reconcile in my head—and always has been—is trying to levy national security requirements on companies that are not set up to do that. In this case I am not talking about Amazon Web Services, because AWS invests hugely in security. We have a default design principle around ensuring that the services are secure and private by design. But something to consider for the Bill is not accidentally putting national security requirements on those entities that cannot possibly meet them. When I was in government, in the past we accidentally required tiny entities, which could not possibly do so, to defend themselves against the Russians in cyber-space. If you translate that to any other domain—for example, saying that a 10-person company should defend itself against Russian missiles—it is insane, yet we do it in cyber-space. Part of the flow-down requirements that we see for contracting, when there is a Bill like this one, ends up putting those national security requirements on inappropriate entities. I really think we need to be careful how we manage that. Matt Houlihan: Can I make two very quick points?

• 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?