Gregory Stafford MP: speeches

Speeches

• 15 Jul 2026 · Iran · Hansard source

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  I only intervene on the hon. Gentleman because he said “finally”, so I assume that he is coming to the end of his speech. [ Interruption. ] Apparently not. Perhaps he is about to come on to this, but I have not heard him yet condemn Iran for its actions, both against its own people and across the region. He talks about destabilisation and war. Iran is the catalyst and the instigator of the destabilisation not just in Iran, but in Israel, Yemen and further afield. Will he not condemn Iran for all that it is doing?

• 15 Jul 2026 · Iran · Hansard source

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  The hon. Gentleman has very clearly put on the record his own condemnation of Iran. I join him in his comments about the way that Tehran treats its own people, but Iran’s malign influence on civilian populations goes way beyond its own people. It funds terrorist organisations such as Hamas, Hezbollah and the Houthis, causing devastation and destruction to civilian populations across the region and beyond. Will he also condemn Iran for that?

• 15 Jul 2026 · Iran · Hansard source

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  Before I start on the main topic of Iran, I put on record my condolences to the family and friends of Ann Widdecombe. The only time I met her was when I was a late teenager at the Oxford Union—like me, she was a former treasurer of the Oxford Union. My right hon. Friend the Member for Wetherby and Easingwold (Sir Alec Shelbrooke) mentioned the Oxford Union when he referenced the King and country debate. The other formative debate that the Oxford Union has every year is the no-confidence debate, which always happens in September or October, at the start of the academic year. In the past academic year, which we are now coming to the end of, the Oxford Union voted overwhelmingly to say that it did not have confidence in His Majesty’s Government. However, I am not naive enough to believe that Labour Members were following that debate carefully and that that is the reason they have ousted the current Prime Minister. It is interesting, however, that the reason we are here debating Iran is not because Iran is a serious issue—although, of course, it is. It is because neither the outgoing Prime Minister nor the incoming Prime Minister, nor Labour Members want there to be scrutiny of the new Prime Minister. Labour was so frightened of whatever it was it thought its new Prime Minister was going to say at the Dispatch Box that it has given him cover for six weeks until he has time to think about it. We know from his own campaign manager that the right hon. Member for Makerfield (Andy Burnham) has been plotting this coup for over a year. One would have thought that in that time he could have come up with a few answers, ideas or ways forward, but he will not speak to this House or to journalists, and presumably he does not even speak to Labour Back Benchers. Hopefully, in September he will come before this House and we can scrutinise him. As the Leader of the Opposition said at Prime Minister’s Question Time, the problem is not whichever Prime Minister is leading the Labour party; it is fundamentally the Labour party itself. If this Labour party has allowed their incoming Prime Minister to evade scrutiny, all Labour Members should be ashamed.

• 14 Jul 2026 · NHS Workforce: Sickness Absence · Hansard source

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  As the Health Secretary is a numbers man, perhaps he will be interested in these figures. Research from Policy Exchange shows that sickness absence in the NHS costs £6 billion and removes 8 million clinician days from the frontline. What will the Secretary of State do to get staff back to work, to get patients treated, and to get this ridiculous level of staff absence down?

• 14 Jul 2026 · NHS Workforce: Sickness Absence · Hansard source

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  4. What steps he is taking to reduce sickness absence in the NHS workforce.

• 14 Jul 2026 · Business of the House · Hansard source

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  Shocking!

• 14 Jul 2026 · Business of the House · Hansard source

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  I apologise.

• 9 Jul 2026 · Health Bill (Fifteenth sitting) · Hansard source

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  I rise briefly to speak on this as well. I should note for the record that I am the vice-chair of the all-party parliamentary group on special educational needs and disabilities. The hon. Member for Winchester, on behalf of the hon. Member for Oxford West and Abingdon, made the case very strongly. I am a member of the Health and Social Care Committee, and we took evidence as he described. The lack of a statutory obligation in the current EHCP process is a fundamental problem. We need to ensure that the health elements are put on the same footing as the social care ones. As I am sure is the case in every hon. and right. hon Member’s constituency inbox, the number of children who are receiving or require support with special educational needs and disabilities, and the frustrations with the process both locally and nationally, are rightly something that we, as parliamentarians and policymakers, need to get a grip on.

• 9 Jul 2026 · Health Bill (Fifteenth sitting) · Hansard source

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  I certainly agree with the hon. Gentleman’s penultimate point: we need to support home-grown clinical academics and the life sciences industry in this country. As he has drawn me down that line, I declare that my wife works in the life sciences industry in the UK. I entirely agree with him on that point. However, if he is saying that a corollary is that we should not do pharmaceutical trade deals with other countries, I do not agree, because UK patients need the best medicines no matter where they come from. If that was not what he was saying and I am putting words into his mouth, I apologise, but that is how it sounded to me. I agree that we should support the home-grown, but obviously we need access to medicines from around the world. That brings me to my concerns about new clause 76. I understand why the hon. Member for Winchester supports it, but the way it is written means that, for the lifetime of the Act, any trade deal with America would have to follow those strictures. Although I accept that he does not like the current deal or the incumbent in the White House, it seems odd that we are singling out in statute, and putting a stricture on, one country over every other. I still probably would not have voted for it, but the new clause might have been more acceptable had it referred to any trade deal with any country, or even a group of countries—I know he is a big fan of one particular group of countries. That might have made it difficult. It would be dangerous essentially for the Bill to put a stricture on a trade deal with one specific country—especially one that is probably our strongest ally. I think that sits very badly.

• 9 Jul 2026 · Health Bill (Fifteenth sitting) · Hansard source

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  Yes, I agree entirely with the hon. Gentleman. It would be a very slippery slope to write that into legislation. I understand the motivation—as I often do—behind Liberal Democrat new clause 76, but I do not think its drafting is appropriate in this context, and I cannot support it.

• 9 Jul 2026 · Health Bill (Fifteenth sitting) · Hansard source

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  It is a pleasure to serve under your chairship, Ms Lewell. Like the shadow Minister, I will be relatively brief. [Interruption.] It was not clear whether that was a sound of appreciation or disappointment from the Minister. I will assume that she receives everything I say with the same noise and grace. Yesterday, the Secretary of State appeared before the Health and Social Care Committee—on which my hon. Friend the Member for Isle of Wight East and I sit—and was questioned at some length by the Chair, the hon. Member for Oxford West and Abingdon (Layla Moran), about the UK-US trade deal. It was striking that the Secretary of State appeared unable to answer the basic question of whether an impact assessment could be presented to the Committee—under whatever terms of secrecy or confidentiality the Department wanted to place on it—to allow us to assess the costs, as the hon. Member for Winchester outlined, and, one would hope, the benefits. The Secretary of State was very clear that there were benefits, but he was unable to outline what they were. He cited commercial confidentiality, which I do understand; there will be commercially confidential elements to the deal. What was really striking, however, was that even though the Select Committee was very happy to receive the information under whatever strictures he wanted to put on it, so that we could scrutinise it, it was not given. That is serious cause for concern. I understand what the hon. Member for North Shropshire seeks to achieve through new clauses 15 and 76, but there are some problems in their drafting. There will be commercially confidential elements to the deal, so laying it before the House essentially completely unredacted, as new clause 15 would require, might pose real problems. Likewise, I assume that the intention of new clause 76 is to focus specifically on the UK-US trade deal as currently formulated.

• 9 Jul 2026 · Topical Questions · Hansard source

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  The beautiful River Wey runs through my constituency, but storm overflows from the Farnham sewage treatment works are increasingly polluting the river, affecting my residents and businesses and those further afield, including the Peper Harow Park fly fishers in the constituency of my right hon. Friend the Member for Godalming and Ash (Sir Jeremy Hunt). What discussions is the Minister having with Thames Water about stopping the discharges from the Farnham sewage works?

• 9 Jul 2026 · Health Bill (Fourteenth sitting) · Hansard source

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  Is that not part of the problem with the wording of the new clause? It is not clear, from the new clause, what is NHS data and what is the patient’s data, and who owns which bit of it. The problem with the drafting of the new clause is that it appears to cover every single piece of data held by the NHS, whether it directly relates to a patient or not. Additionally, if the Government were to collect any other sort of data, even if on an aggregate basis, it would come under this. That would be totally unworkable and put an enormous burden of bureaucracy on the health service.

• 9 Jul 2026 · Health Bill (Fourteenth sitting) · Hansard source

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  It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship again, Dr Huq. New clause 6 raises an important question on how we govern health data, which one of the greatest assets of the NHS. The development of the single patient record platform and database, and the wider use of the linked NHS data, present enormous opportunities. When used responsibly, healthcare data can support much more personalised care, improve NHS planning, accelerate medical research, enable earlier diagnoses and help develop new medicines and treatments. It can also improve efficiency and strengthen the evidence base for healthcare decisions. However, those benefits can be realised only if the public have the confidence that their data will be used safely, ethically and transparently. Public trust must be the foundation of any successful health data policy. NHS health data is currently overseen by NHS England, following the merger of NHS Digital into that organisation. With the Government proceeding with the abolition of NHS England and the transfer of its functions elsewhere, it is right that we consider future governance arrangements. In principle, I agree that an independent body may be needed to ensure and maintain the security, integrity and responsible stewardship of NHS data. There is definitely scope for an independent body to oversee the management and regulation of the public’s health data. That proposal places patient privacy at its heart, and would strengthen safeguards against misuse, give patients greater control over how their information is used, and provide meaningful mechanisms to opt out of certain forms of data sharing. It also promotes the use of anonymisation and trusted research environments, allowing valuable research to take place while reducing the risk of inappropriate disclosure. We have discussed inappropriate disclosure by a malign actor, or even inadvertent disclosure, during debate on other clauses. The Liberal Democrat new clause also seeks to address a concern that has attracted significant public attention: where commercial organisations derive substantial value from NHS data, the NHS itself should share in that benefit. Although we did not support a number of Liberal Democrat proposals because of the inadvertent implications of their drafting, I still have sympathy with the overall thrust of what they were trying to achieve. There is a strong argument that the value generated from the data contributed by NHS patients should help to support future patient care and research. Transparency is another important feature. Publishing data-sharing agreements, increasing openness around decision making and consulting the public on significant new data initiatives would help to strengthen public confidence. The proposed trust would bring those principles together by overseeing data use, monitoring compliance with governance standards, ensuring transparency and, where necessary, suspending access for organisations that misuse their data. Of course, any new governance framework must avoid creating unnecessary bureaucracy or delaying important research. To reassure the Committee that the framework would not create a block or dampener, or insert inertia into the system, will the hon. Member for North Shropshire tell us what evidence she found when drafting the new clause? If we are going to do something like this, the oversight should be proportionate, and it should complement, rather than duplicate or frustrate, any existing regulatory responsibilities. Ultimately, the new clause has potential benefits. It would establish a clear social contract for NHS health data, which would hopefully protect privacy, support research and innovation, maintain public trust and ensure that patients and the NHS share in the benefits arising from the responsible use of a very valuable national asset. In terms of what it could be used for, that data is probably second to none in the world, but I am concerned about adding extra bureaucracy and inertia to the system, when we want a vibrant life-sciences industry that is able to use the data for the benefit of British citizens and patients. What does the hon. Member for North Shropshire think would happen in that case?

• 9 Jul 2026 · Health Bill (Fourteenth sitting) · Hansard source

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  My hon. Friend is absolutely right. The public do not want to hear about the last 14 years or the rhetoric around them.

• 9 Jul 2026 · Health Bill (Fourteenth sitting) · Hansard source

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  It is very important that we consider these new clauses and amendments carefully, not least because, as my hon. Friend has just outlined, the hon. Member for Worthing West, who tabled them, has considerable expertise, being a public health consultant herself. I have the pleasure of sitting with the hon. Member on the Health and Social Care Committee and she brings her expertise to every single sitting. I am sure that the Minister has welcomed her questioning when she has appeared before that Committee. It is really clear that, if we are going to make a success of the Bill, public health in all its guises needs to be at the forefront of our thinking about how we achieve better patient outcomes, better health and, more specifically, the Government’s stated aims in the 10-year plan to, first, shift care closer to home and, secondly, focus more on prevention rather than treatment. I am sure that across the House we agree with that ambition and therefore I can totally understand why the hon. Member for Worthing West has tabled these new clauses. I suspect that the new clauses are also a reaction to something that we have already discussed in this Committee, which is the dislocation and now the separation of local authorities from ICBs, with the removal of their statutory functions on those boards, to be given to strategic mayoral authorities. Some of those strategic mayoral authorities exist but, as we have discussed at some length in the Committee, many of them do not exist and might never exist. I can see why the hon. Member for Worthing West is trying to ensure that the vital work of directors of public health in local authorities for their population areas is somehow safeguarded and included in the Bill. That being said, I have some reservations about how these new clauses are currently drafted. My hon. Friend the Member for Sleaford and North Hykeham has already outlined many of them. Although strengthening public health leadership is an essential objective, new clause 24 defines the statutory role and legal status of directors of public health in this context without providing sufficient clarity about accountability or governance, or about how these new powers would interact with existing NHS and local authority structures. Potentially, there is a risk of creating overlapping responsibilities, blurred lines of accountability and additional bureaucracy at a time when integrated working should be simplified rather than made more complex. Obviously, the hon. Member for Worthing West is not here to answer my questions. I ask the Minister this: if these new clauses are not pressed to a vote, or if they are but are not accepted by this Committee, how can she reassure me and the hon. Member for Worthing West that public health will still be at the forefront of the Bill, and that the removal of local authorities from ICBs will not have the impact that I think the hon. Member, who tabled these new clauses, is concerned about?

• 9 Jul 2026 · Health Bill (Fourteenth sitting) · Hansard source

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  I look forward to the new Prime Minister coming in and, I hope, providing a position where the hon. Member is able to achieve some of that. [Interruption.] I note for Hansard that that received acclamation across the Committee Room. Getting back to the Bill, as you have suggested I do, Dr Huq—I take your suggestions very seriously—the social care element is extraordinarily important. It is important to ensure that people do not enter the secondary care system if at all possible, especially through attending A&E. When I worked on the Getting It Right First Time programme, our accident and emergency reports put forward some interesting methods that could potentially help with that. Some of that has been implemented and some has not, but I recommend all hon. Members look at that report, because it contains a number of interesting proposals. This is not only about stopping people entering the system, but about ensuring that people come out of the system in a timely manner, freeing up the capacity we have just talked about. In my constituency, Haslemere hospital had 16 step-down inpatient rehabilitation beds. Unfortunately, last year, that service was “temporarily paused”—that is how it was described, but it has been over a year now, so it has essentially stopped. That service is not happening in my constituency, which is down to the fact that it was a GP-run service and the trust could no longer get a GP who was willing to run that service. Haslemere hospital and the Royal Surrey NHS Foundation Trust that runs the hospital have some really fantastic ideas, very much in keeping with the Government’s push towards neighbourhood health, and I fully support those proposals, but it is a shame that we have had 16 beds sitting empty for more than a year, which could have been used for rehabilitation. We as a body politic should be looking at how we can improve and expand our step-down/step-up capacity, so that people do not have to go into acute settings. I turn briefly to the specifics of new clause 12. I am concerned about subsections (3) and (4), which talk about a tribunal system. I do not quite understand how that would work. The way it is set out almost gives it an adversarial, inquiry-type, case-by-case element. It would include patients, bereaved or affected families, and frontline NHS staff. I can see how that kind of body might work if one was investigating a failure around a single patient or at a single trust, but I would be grateful if the hon. Member for North Shropshire could expand on how she sees the national report coming forward and then a group of people being selected to interrogate it. It is also not clear what would be the consequences of the interrogation, or otherwise, once it has happened.

• 9 Jul 2026 · Health Bill (Fourteenth sitting) · Hansard source

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  I am, too.

• 9 Jul 2026 · Health Bill (Fourteenth sitting) · Hansard source

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  I am grateful to the hon. Member; she makes an interesting point. She talks about irony, and I respond in the same manner as that which she intervened on me with a gentle response, which is to ask why, if everything was going so swimmingly well, she and the rest of her colleagues got rid of the Prime Minister?

• 9 Jul 2026 · Health Bill (Fourteenth sitting) · Hansard source

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  I do not mean this as a cheeky point, but is it not the case that clearly, as with everything, the Liberal Democrats think that the European Union can do no wrong? They do not see the same problems of data that they have expressed in other clauses because they want to rejoin the European Union. Therefore, they conceive that it can have no possible harm to British subjects.

• 9 Jul 2026 · Health Bill (Fourteenth sitting) · Hansard source

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  I will do that. As I have already said, no party has necessarily covered itself in glory with this issue. It might have taken us four years to dump it; it took the Chancellor of the Exchequer less than two weeks.

• 9 Jul 2026 · Health Bill (Fourteenth sitting) · Hansard source

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  I rise to support a lot of what my right hon. Friend the Member for Melton and Syston said. Across the Committee, I think we all agree that corridor care and care in other inappropriate settings should have no place in the NHS. No patient should be assessed, treated or left waiting in a corridor, in a cupboard or anywhere else because there is nowhere for them to go. We owe it to patients and our constituents to be honest about the scale of the problem and be serious about ending it. That starts with measuring it properly, because if we do not collect the data, publish the evidence and track progress, inappropriate care settings risk becoming normalised. In May, nearly 3,000 patients were in corridor care, which was a 2.5% increase from the same time last year. In the same month, 50,000 patients waited in A&E for more than 12 hours, which was a 17% increase from the same period last year. The Government continually miss their target on the 12-hour wait. I am not making a political point; this is a serious problem, and successive Governments are still struggling to ensure that it does not happen. We all know from our casework and our inboxes, and some of us know through personal experience or from loved ones, that too many patients are experiencing unacceptably long waits in A&E after a decision has been taken to admit them. That is bad for patients, bad for staff and bad for the wider functioning of our hospitals. New clause 56 in the name of the hon. Member for North Shropshire acknowledges that the causes of delays extend far beyond the emergency department itself, and I will touch on that in a moment. Challenges in social care, discharge processes, step-down provision and workforce capacity all contribute to bottlenecks that leave patients waiting longer than they should. Although there might be legitimate questions about the precise mechanisms proposed in the new clause, I do not think there is any disagreement among the Committee about the principle that patients deserve timely access to a hospital bed and that excessive admission delays should not be accepted as the norm. That is why I fully support new clause 84 in the name of my hon. Friend the Member for Sleaford and North Hykeham. Publishing data on avoidable deaths associated with waits of more than 12 hours would help to ensure that we, as a Parliament and as policymakers, remain focused on outcomes for patients, not just performance indicators. I am particularly persuaded by the proposal to publish that information at ICB level, notwithstanding the concerns raised by my right hon. Friend the Member for Melton and Syston, which I agree with entirely. It would at least give some allowance for those making decisions to look at the local variation and ensure that it is identified, however less local that will become. Hopefully, good practice will be able to be shared between different areas, and the areas that face the greatest challenges will be able to receive both appropriate scrutiny and appropriate support. Of course, collecting and publishing data will not by itself reduce waiting times, but we cannot effectively tackle a problem that we do not properly measure. Sunlight is often the best disinfectant in these cases, and greater transparency can be a powerful driver of improvement. At the heart, new clause 84 recognises the simple truth that every statistic represents a person, a family and a life, and if avoidable deaths are occurring as a consequence of prolonged A&E waits, we should have the courage to measure them, publish them and learn from them. That is why I support the new clause. As has been touched on in other speeches, and as I mentioned earlier, the issue of corridor care does not sit in isolation. In fact, it is not a cause of the problem; it is the symptom of many other problems within our health and social care network.

• 9 Jul 2026 · Health Bill (Fourteenth sitting) · Hansard source

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  I respect immensely the hon. Gentleman’s experience. He described being a young doctor, but he is still a very young doctor/politician now. Of course, capacity is an essential part of this. He is a clinician, so I will not lecture him on this, but my suggestion would be that it is not about just capacity within hospitals. The Government’s shift is to try to get people out of hospitals and into community settings as much as possible, so it is capacity within the whole system that needs to be looked at. Going back and putting loads more beds into hospitals would not somehow solve this problem or create a healthcare system that is aligned with what the Government want, which is hopefully treating more people at home. On his general point, I accept that the more capacity there in the system as a whole, the more likely we are to solve some of the problem. That neatly moves me on to my next point, which is about the whole-system approach to this. As hon. Members have mentioned, we have a potential problem with ambulances waiting in carparks, and unfortunately, trusts gamify the system when targets are put in place—they do not admit people through the door because it will hit their targets. As my right hon. Friend the Member for Melton and Syston mentioned, that has a knock-on effect for the people sitting in the ambulances and those who are potentially not receiving an ambulance because the capacity is not there. Likewise, at the other end of the system—though I suppose it is both ends of the system—social care needs to improve significantly. I am deeply disappointed that the Government have pushed another social care review that is probably not going to report until 2028, which is kicking the can down the road. I think it is essential that we get social care correct.

• 9 Jul 2026 · Health Bill (Fourteenth sitting) · Hansard source

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  I will give way to the hon. Lady after I finish my sentence, if I may. The public want to know what the solutions are. I think we could look back through history at successive Governments since prehistory and say, “They got some things right, and they got some things wrong.” What the public want to know now is what the current Government will do. On the point about social care, I was not a member of the last Government, but I stood on an election manifesto commitment, as the Labour party certainly did and I think most political parties did, that essentially said that the Dilnot review had decided how we were going to deal with social care, and we were going to get on with it. It strikes me as very strange that the last Secretary of State, the right hon. Member for Ilford North (Wes Streeting), decided to have another review; he has said himself in interviews since he resigned that it looks like the stalling on social care means that we will not get any movement on it before another general election. I do not think the public should put up with that.

• 7 Jul 2026 · Topical Questions · Hansard source

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  T6. During the election, the Government promised to cut bills by £300; in fact, they have gone up by £300. With that level of financial acumen, the Secretary of State will fit right in, in his new job at the Treasury, but my constituents and local businesses want their bills cut now, not at some nebulous point in the future. When he gets to the Treasury, will he remove the taxes on our energy industry, to ensure that bills actually come down?