Helen Hayes MP: speeches

Speeches

• 1 Jul 2025 · Universal Credit and Personal Independence Payment Bill · Hansard source

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  I welcome the bringing forward of employment support, and I know how effective that support can be, but we have yet to see it bed in. I have further concerns that have not yet been addressed. I am concerned about the impact of the Bill on young people, and care-experienced people in particular. We need further detail on the support that will be provided for 16 to 22-year-olds, particularly with their mental health, to enable them to participate in the workplace. There is one further concern that has not been addressed and on which I want to press the Minister, which is the lack of alignment between the conclusion and implementation of the Timms review and the implementation of raising the threshold for PIP to four points. I believe that the Secretary of State made some movement on that point in her opening speech, but so far, it is not clear that we will avoid a situation in which there will be a category of new claimants—people who become disabled after November 2026 but before the implementation of the Timms review—who will face an increased threshold without any of the mitigations that will come from a revised assessment process and descriptors that are co-designed with disabled people. That would be unfair and unequitable, and I believe that it makes the policy and putting four points in the Bill incoherent. We must have a system that aligns the implementation of the new system with the review process, co-designed with disabled people, that defines it. I believe that the Government must also set out further detail on the impact assessment between today and Third Reading. That the Bill will plunge 150,000 people into poverty is an unacceptable consequence. If the Government are confident that their mitigations and the additional support mean that that will not be the case, it must provide this House with credible evidence so we can believe that. At the moment, we have to base our judgments on the evidence that is in front of us and that says that 150,000 people’s lives will be made worse as a consequence of the Bill. One of the most regrettable aspects of the process is that it has harmed the trust and confidence of disabled people. Full alignment of the Timms review with the introduction of the new system is an essential requirement of beginning to rebuild that trust. I will listen carefully to what the Minister says from the Dispatch Box in closing the debate.

• 24 Jun 2025 · Department for Education · Hansard source

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  I thank all right hon. and hon. Members who have contributed to the debate. The education and children’s social care system across the country has been well represented, and we have heard contributions about the challenges in SEND, further education, schools, rural areas and early years. Right hon. and hon. Members have welcomed the expansion of free school meals and the introduction of free breakfast clubs. I thank the Minister for her response, and join her in paying tribute to all the professionals who work so hard every single day to improve the lives of children and young people across the country. I urge her to work very closely with parents as she brings forward SEND reforms, because at the heart of successful reform of the SEND system is the rebuilding of parents’ trust and confidence. The Education Committee will be robust in its continued scrutiny of the Government. I say gently to the Conservatives that the problems that they are attacking the Government for not solving within a year are the legacy of their 14 years in power. We are talking about trust and confidence in the SEND system; we would build trust and confidence in this place if there was slightly more honest reflection, humility and thoughtfulness on that point. I again thank the Backbench Business Committee for allocating time for this important debate, and I look forward to further scrutinising the work of the Government. Question deferred until tomorrow at Seven o’clock (Standing Order No. 54 (2) ).

• 24 Jun 2025 · Department for Education · Hansard source

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  My hon. Friend makes an important point about the state of the school estate. The final area of challenge is that many universities face a risk of insolvency. At the heart of all the Department’s responsibilities are individual children and young people who need and are entitled to the best possible start in life, secure foundations, a great education and every opportunity to grow into active citizens with successful careers and a good quality of life. The challenges in our education and social care systems can be seen in the outcomes for children and young people, with rising numbers of children not meeting the early learning goals when they start school, growing disadvantage gaps at all stages of education, very poor outcomes for care-experienced young people, rising levels of school absence and far too many children with special educational needs and disabilities not receiving the support that they need to thrive in education. I will speak to the estimates across five key spending areas—SEND, children’s social care, early years, skills, and higher education—drawing on the Education Committee’s ongoing inquiries to ensure that these funds meet the urgent needs of our communities. On special educational needs and disabilities, the main estimate reflects the Government’s recognition of the challenges, with an immediate increase in high needs revenue funding of more than £1 billion. Capital spending for high needs provision sees a 138% uplift, from £310 million to £740 million, to create new school places. During the inquiry, my Committee has heard powerful testimony from families and educators about the crisis in the SEND system, with witnesses calling for significant and far-reaching reform to ensure that funds translate into effective delivery for children. The Institute for Fiscal Studies warns that rising SEND costs could absorb much of the mainstream school budget uplift, and that capital investment, while significant, may not meet growing demand. The forthcoming schools White Paper promised this autumn must set out bold reforms, with resources made available to ensure that they can be implemented successfully. Our inquiry report will set out recommendations to the Government for reform of the SEND system, and I hope that the Government will make time to take full account of our work. I urge the Minister to confirm a timescale for those reforms, informed by our Committee’s evidence. Our children’s social care inquiry has exposed acute funding pressures, with local authorities forced to prioritise crisis interventions over preventive support due to a £1.2 billion cut in early intervention spending since 2012. The spending review introduces a £555 million transformation fund over three years, including £75 million in 2025-26 and £270 million for a new children’s social care prevention grant. That is a vital step towards effective reform. The additional £560 million for children’s homes and foster care placements is also welcome. However, the independent review of children’s social care estimated a need for an additional £2.6 billion of funding over four years. My Committee’s work underscores the urgency of investing in early intervention to reduce the number of children being taken into care and to improve outcomes.

• 24 Jun 2025 · Department for Education · Hansard source

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  I rise to address the House on the Department for Education’s main estimate for 2025-26. I thank the Liaison Committee and the Backbench Business Committee for allocating time for this debate this afternoon; it is an important opportunity to scrutinise the Government’s spending plans, which must deliver for every child, young person and family. Education is the bedrock of opportunity, social mobility and economic growth. The Government inherited a situation in which almost every aspect of the Department for Education’s areas of responsibility faced severe challenges, from the financial pressures on early years providers to the erosion of school budgets and teacher pay, the crisis in the special educational needs and disabilities system, underfunding of further education and skills and a total reset needed in children’s social care.

• 16 Jun 2025 · Windrush Day 2025 · Hansard source

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  Of course, in our two boroughs of Lambeth and Southwark, the contribution of the Windrush generation is extraordinary. It is demonstrated most powerfully in the statue that my hon. Friend mentions. The lives of Windrush passengers, and of others from the Caribbean who followed them to Brixton, were captured by commercial photographer Harry Jacobs, who set up shop on Landor Road, close to Brixton town centre, to provide photographic services so that people could send images to their loved ones. Harry’s photos poignantly captured the hopes, dreams and achievements of people in the process of making a new life: a woman in her nurse’s uniform; families dressed in their Sunday best, showing off their prized possessions; and the first image of a new baby or a new spouse. However, as we remember those stories with affection, our commemorations of Windrush Day must avoid any sentimentality. The contribution of the Windrush pioneers was made in a context of widespread racism, the clearest and ugliest illustration of which was found on signs on the doors of boarding houses—stating “No Irish, no blacks, no dogs”—and which in many situations ran much deeper, often resulting in daily discrimination and humiliation. An egregious example is the appalling and still unaddressed scandal of black children being deemed emotionally subnormal in the 1960s and ’70s and being placed in special schools, where they were denied an education and made to feel inferior.

• 16 Jun 2025 · Windrush Day 2025 · Hansard source

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  I absolutely agree with my hon. Friend. This is a question of trust and a question of basic fairness. There cannot be any excuse for a lack of clarity across compensation schemes dealing with similar structural injustices for which the state is responsible. There is more work to do to ensure that such a scandal can never happen again. This means reflecting on the causes of the Windrush scandal in future policy and legislative decisions. For example, we must make sure that the introduction of e-visas allows no scope for anyone who is legitimately in the UK to be wrongly denied their status because they cannot access a document online. It also means ensuring that we understand our own past. The Government have commissioned Professor Becky Francis to undertake the curriculum and assessment review, and I hope she will be thinking about how subjects such as history and geography can be taught through the prism of an accurate understanding of our past, so that through a prism of migration to our country, whether, like me, people come from a town with a Viking name and a Norman church or whether their family arrived in the UK in more recent times, they can locate their own story in our history and understand that there is no us and them. We are a nation that has always been formed and sustained by people who have come from overseas to make their home on these islands. And it means resourcing properly the organisations that are the custodians of history, including the National Windrush Museum, and the Black Cultural Archives in my constituency. The BCA was established in 1981 by Len Garrison, who had come to the UK from Jamaica as a child in 1954 and became a great educationalist in our city. The BCA has an extensive archive documenting the history of black people in the UK, from the African-Roman emperor stationed at Hadrian’s wall, Septimius Severus, to black Georgians, the Windrush generation and much, much more. It is a national resource that is critical to our understanding as a society and vital for the sense of place and belonging for many black British people. The BCA needs stable core funding from the Government commensurate with its national role to enable it to do the work of outreach and interpretation, and to secure it for the long term. I mention very briefly the important and ambitious campaign led by Patrick Vernon to retrieve the anchor of the Empire Windrush from its current resting place in the Mediterranean sea, so that it can be restored as a memorial and as a tool for the education of younger generations. In preparing for this debate, I have been in touch with many people who have campaigned and continue to campaign for Windrush justice. They have differing views about the role of celebration on Windrush Day. I know there are some who are concerned that celebration undermines the fight for justice and that they cannot celebrate until justice has been done, and I understand that perspective, but there are others who passionately believe that assertively celebrating the Windrush generation and all they have contributed and achieved, giving visibility to the community, is a part of the fight for justice. That celebration sustains their campaigning and it is also important for health and wellbeing. I am looking forward to joining the Brixton Immortals Domino club celebrations on Saturday and the Big Caribbean Lunch on Sunday, organised by Ros Griffiths, both to be held on Windrush Square in my constituency. Finally, I want to consider the wider importance of fully addressing the Windrush scandal and all its implications. As my hon. Friend the Member for Norwich South (Clive Lewis) highlighted, the Windrush scandal happened as a consequence of structural injustices and it happened as a consequence of our history. Windrush must not be compartmentalised, because if we do that we cannot be sure that such a scandal will not be repeated. I mentioned the extraordinary role of members of the Windrush generation and their descendants in our NHS, which continues to this day. Our NHS today, in King’s College hospital in my constituency, is also sustained by nurses from the Philippines and south India, who were asked to come by our hospitals because we needed their skills in our healthcare system. We cannot rest until we are sure that they, or any other group, will not face the horrific injustice of discrimination based on racism and ignorance that is embedded in law and policy. I welcome very much the personal commitment of my hon. Friend the Minister to Windrush justice. I was pleased to attend the Windrush summit last week at the Home Office. It is a credit to the approach my hon. Friend has taken and the work she has done that so many people who have campaigned for Windrush justice felt able to attend an event in the Department that had done them such wrong. I know that many of the attendees would not have thought that possible just a few months ago. I welcome the Minister’s commitment to implementing all the recommendations of Wendy Williams’ lessons learned review and the imminent appointment of a Windrush commissioner. I thank her for all the work she is doing to listen, engage and take meaningful steps to restore trust and confidence. I know that she understands that there is much more still to do, and I look forward to continuing to work with her on behalf of my constituents to secure the depth and breadth of the change we need.

• 11 Jun 2025 · Spending Review 2025 · Hansard source

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  I welcome the focus my right hon. Friend the Chancellor has placed on children and young people in this spending review, with additional investment in children’s social care, schools and skills. These announcements show the Government’s commitment to improving the life chances of every child, and my Committee looks forward to scrutinising the detail in the coming weeks. The Chancellor will know that universities are the life force of many local economies, generating jobs, improving skills and boosting life chances, yet a number of our universities are at the brink of insolvency. The sector has been calling for a transformation fund to help universities reform and secure a sustainable future, so can the Chancellor confirm that she will work with Cabinet colleagues to ensure that no town or city has to face the calamity of a university going bust?

• 9 Jun 2025 · Topical Questions · Hansard source

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  T8. Across London, 90,000 children are living in temporary accommodation, denied the essentials of a stable home, which has terrible consequences for their physical and mental health and education. This is a scandalous inheritance from the previous Conservative Government. When does the Secretary of State believe that we will begin to see those numbers drop substantially?

• 19 May 2025 · Mental Health Bill [Lords] · Hansard source

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  The review of the Mental Health Act 1983 is very welcome. It started its life close to my constituency with the work of Professor Sir Simon Wessely, who drew on the experience of many residents in south-east London, particularly with regard to his work on racial inequalities. As the Minister is talking about the implementation of the Bill, I wonder whether he can reassure my constituents, who want to know that this Bill will do the job of eliminating racial inequality from mental health services, by committing to putting the patient and carer race equality framework on the face of the Bill.

• 20 Mar 2025 · Knife Crime: Children and Young People · Hansard source

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  I thank the hon. Member for Huntingdon (Ben Obese-Jecty) for securing this important debate, and for his thoughtful speech. I join him in paying tribute to Ciaran Thapar, whose work took place in my constituency. It is a privilege to follow my hon. Friend the Member for South Ribble (Mr Foster), who made a moving statement on behalf of his constituents. I grew up near Parbold Hill and Southport, and it grieves me deeply to hear about the appalling violence in both those communities. I rise to speak in this debate on knife crime with great sadness, because today, just after 5 am, a young man lost his life on Coldharbour Lane in my constituency after being stabbed. I visited the scene this morning and stood at the police line as the forensic officers undertook their work. I spoke with community members who were confronted with the shocking aftermath of this violence as they went about their day. I thought about the family, whose day would begin with a knock on the door from police officers, and the utterly devastating news that their loved one would not be coming home ever again. It is hard to feel anything but despair in these circumstances. I know that hon. Members across the House will wish to join me in expressing our sincere condolences to the family and friends of the young man who lost his life. We do not yet know his identity, but we know that there will be people who loved him, and who are suffering the most visceral pain and loss today. I also pay tribute to the emergency services who attended the scene this morning. When this young man’s name is released, it will join the names of others who have lost their life to serious violence and knife and gun crime in my constituency since I was first elected to this place in 2015. They are Jude Gayle, Kyall Parnell, John Ogunjobi, Donnell Rhule, Glendon Spence, Dennis Anderson, Beatrice Stoica, Filipe Oliveira, Chino Johnson, Ronaldo Scott and Keelen Wong. Each one was loved by their family and friends, and each one leaves a community traumatised by their loss and the circumstances of it. When a knife or gun crime is reported in the media, we see the names in the headlines for a few short hours, and maybe again if the case comes to trial. We never hear about the ongoing trauma left behind in the local community, and the sense of loss felt not only by the immediate family but everyone who watched that person grow up and saw them out and about daily, those whose children went to school with them, and those who recognised and knew them. There is a sense of fear among parents that next time, their child might be the victim, and there are the mental health consequences of living with loss, fear and anxiety. The causes of knife crime are complex. We need to take a public health approach to it, as though it were a disease. We should understand its pathology and take steps to prevent it taking hold, stop its spread, and treat the causes and the symptoms. I introduced a private Member’s Bill in the last Parliament to stop the availability of the most horrific weapons on our streets. I have met the lead consultants in the emergency department at King’s College hospital, who described the horrific injuries that are inflicted by machetes and zombie knives—weapons that can cut through bone, and serrated blades that inflict the most complex injuries on internal organs. They spoke about the survivability of many such injuries, compared with wounds inflicted with domestic knives, and described machetes and zombie knives as “weapons of war on our streets”. No one in our communities needs a machete or a zombie knife for any legitimate purpose, but they have been readily available for purchase online for as little as £10. I therefore welcome the Government’s action since July to further restrict their sale. I want further action on domestic knives. In particular, we should look at whether further restrictions can be introduced regarding age verification of those purchasing knives with pointed blades. I also want action further up the chain, to tackle those who exploit and groom our young people into serious violence—the county lines exploiters, the drug dealers and the serious organised criminals who are not spoken about enough in these debates. In my constituency, in part because of the tragedies that we have experienced, we have seen inspiring responses from community organisations working with public services. The embedding of youth workers in hospital emergency departments was pioneered by Redthread at King’s College hospital. They provide options for young people who have been injured, or have seen their friends injured, allowing them to access support to keep themselves safe. I welcome the Government rolling out that intervention in other parts of the country. I am also grateful to the Mayor of London’s violence reduction unit for funding Ecosystem Coldharbour through the My Ends programme. Ecosystem Coldharbour is a coalition of grassroots organisations working with young people and families in the Brixton part of my constituency. It has been working for the last three years and has delivered some really impressive results. It has built up the trust and confidence of young people and families, so that they can access help and support. It provides mentoring and training opportunities, and leads the community response when tragedies occur. It delivers trauma support to families and communities. Our communities feel empowered by that work. It is particularly inspirational to see a group of mothers who have all lost a child to serious violence working together, under the banner “Circle of Life Ignite”, to support each other and prevent further deaths. I am inspired by the way that young leaders have been equipped through that work. I pay tribute to the work of Abdoul Lelo, an extraordinarily impressive young man who has been working with McDonald’s in Brixton to embed a youth service in the restaurant. It takes support and positive opportunities to young people where they are. There are also benefits for the staff, who have often felt unsafe and overwhelmed in their workplace. I also pay tribute to the work of Sergeant Nigel Pearce from central south basic command unit, who has pioneered a different approach to community policing, based on trusting and listening to the community, and responding respectfully and supportively to their needs and experiences. If we had more officers working in this way across the Metropolitan Police, trust and confidence in policing would be much higher. The partnership in my constituency is called Ecosystem because of the belief of the organisations in it that all the solutions to serious violence are in the community—but the community needs help and resources to find them. That is what we have had through the violence reduction unit. My plea to the Minister is that funding for such vital work be put on a long-term footing, so that we can keep on delivering and working to tackle the scourge of serious violence. In fact, as the Minister thinks about the design of the Government’s Young Futures project, I invite her to visit Ecosystem, because we have much good practice to offer for the development of that national programme. The debate today is about young people and knife crime, but to tackle the scourge of knife crime, we must properly understand the nature of the problem and who is affected. Of the victims who have been murdered in my constituency since 2015, only two were under the age of 18. The majority were young men in their 20s, a cohort who grew up at a time when funding for youth services was being stripped away, who may find themselves unable to access employment often due to minor criminal convictions, who often have very poor mental health, who are accessing deeply damaging online content and for whom society can seem like it has very little to offer. There is currently no protocol or good practice for tackling serious violence in that cohort. The only part of the system obliged to try to help is the criminal justice system, if the person in question has committed a crime. Social services have no formal role or responsibility and mental health services are not designed with this cohort in mind, despite the fact that they are so often traumatised by the experiences, what they have witnessed in their communities and what they have seen their friends go through. If we want to end the cycle of violence in our communities, we must turn our attention to that group. They are siblings, cousins and parents to the next generation. The key to prevention must therefore lie in helping them to turn their lives around, making support services more visible in our communities, making it easier to ask for help through services that are designed with their needs in mind and properly resourcing effective rehabilitation. I welcome the Government’s focus on halving knife crime. My communities have suffered far too much from its devastating effects and we continue to suffer today. I urge the Minister to work with us to devise services and interventions based on the experience in our communities, because we utterly reject this violence and we just want to see it stop.

• 17 Mar 2025 · Children’s Wellbeing and Schools Bill · Hansard source

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  I rise to speak in support of new clauses 3 and 4, which both stand in my name. The Education Committee was afforded little time to undertake scrutiny of this important Bill, but we worked hard to do so, refocusing our ongoing inquiry on children’s social care to focus on part 1 of the Bill and holding an additional evidence session to look at part 2. I am grateful to all the witnesses who came to give us their evidence. We have published a report for the Secretary of State setting out recommendations based on the evidence we received. Broadly, the Committee welcomes the scale of the Government’s ambition as expressed in the Bill, which is a key plank of the Government’s opportunity mission to break the link between young people’s background and their future success. We join the Government in wanting to see high and rising standards in our education and care systems to protect vulnerable children and ensure educational opportunity for every child. We welcome the measures in the Bill to strengthen child protection, particularly the provisions to establish multi-agency child protection teams, including education in safeguarding arrangements and a single unique identifier for children, which has the potential to be genuinely transformative for the delivery of many of the services that support children and young people. We support the measures to improve the children’s social care market through regional commissioning and a financial oversight scheme. Action to remove profiteering in the children’s social care sector is long overdue. The Committee welcomes the measures in the Bill that will enable more children to remain within their kinship network or, where a residential placement in kinship care is not possible, in contact with family and friends. The Committee also made some recommendations on ways in which the Bill could be strengthened, based on the evidence we received. The amendments tabled in my name relate directly to our recommendations, and I will now turn to each recommendation that is relevant to part 1 of the Bill. New clause 3 would require the Government to publish and consult on a draft national offer for care leavers within 18 months of the Bill coming into force. A national care offer would set minimum standards for local care offers and ensure greater consistency between local authority areas. A national offer would act as a floor, not a ceiling. It would not be designed to prevent innovation at a local level or to stop additional commitments being made by individual local authorities, but we believe that greater national consistency, driven by Government, would make a big difference. The evidence of the unacceptably poor outcomes for care-experienced young people is shocking. Some 39% of care leavers aged 19 to 21 are not in education, employment or training, compared with 13% of all young people in the same age group. Some 14% of young people with care experience go to university, compared with almost half of their peers, and care leavers are 38% more likely to drop out of university. A third of care leavers become homeless within two years of leaving care, and 25% of homeless people have been in care. Care leavers are hugely over-represented in the criminal justice system. These are young people whose corporate parent has been the state, and these statistics are clear evidence that for many of them, the state is not a very good parent. I welcome the Government’s amendment of the Bill to introduce additional corporate parenting responsibilities, but the Committee heard that there is significant disparity in the support that different local authorities offer to care leavers. We heard about the differences in support with bursaries to pay for university accommodation, access to wi-fi to be able to study and ringfenced apprenticeships for care leavers in local authorities. In a powerful evidence session in which the Committee heard from young adults with recent experience of the care system, one witness told us that “there needs to be a national offer for care leavers. The postcode lottery is profound”. Another pointed to a lack of awareness of the needs of care-experienced people across the wider network of public services. She told us that “when I had gone to the jobcentres they were very ill-prepared. They did not know any support for care leavers. There were certain grants I could have had to get back into education; they did not inform me, in fact, everything that I have done now is from me Googling it…or asking people. That should not be the case.” A national care offer would be the foundation for building better, more consistent support for care leavers everywhere in the country. It would provide the Government with an effective mechanism for holding local authorities to account on the quality of their provision, making it much easier for care-experienced people to understand what support should be there for them and stopping the current disincentive to leave home to go to university because of uncertainty about the support when they get there. I urge the Government to support new clause 3. New clause 4 would require health assessments of children in the care system to include assessment by a mental health practitioner. It would make assessing the mental health of children in care a core part of the health assessment of those children by ensuring that a mental health practitioner is involved. Children in care are significantly more likely to have experienced trauma and abuse than their peers, and they are consequently more likely to experience mental ill health. In 2021, 45% of children in care had a mental health disorder—rising to 72% among those in residential care—compared with 10% of all children aged five to 15. The care-experienced young adults who gave powerful evidence to the Committee spoke strongly about the urgent need for better mental health support and suggested that local authorities are not always fulfilling their obligations to include emotional and mental health in their health assessments of children in care. One of our witnesses told us: “Growing up it was only physical assessments; we did not have mental health check-ins at all…I think if my mental health was taken more seriously from a young age, if I had that person to check-in with me…I would probably be so much better. I would not have mental health problems growing up. I do think that mental health check-ins are equally as important—if not more important—as physical check-ins for children in care.” Another witness said that “looked-after children should get mandatory assessments, as with physical health. Also, if they are referred to CAMHS the waitlists are horrific right now…looked-after children should have fast tracks and there should be more funding for specialist teams.” We heard very movingly from a witness who spoke about the need for more trauma-informed training for foster carers and other professionals working with children in care. She said: “I feel a lot could be explained if they understood the experience of trauma. It will take time. It will not go away at night, and sometimes before it gets better it could get worse. No one talks about that. You will not be okay if you are going into care; there is a reason why you are there, and so it is important that the minute you go into care every child should have a mandatory assessment, physical and mental, and there should be that on-call support for them”. It is the trauma that underlies the decision to take a child into care—the abuse, neglect, bereavement or exploitation—that often has the most profound impact on their lives. Our care system needs to place dealing with that trauma in a child-centred way at its heart. Ensuring that mental health assessments are properly undertaken is an essential requirement of such a system, because mental health must be assessed before treatment and support can be provided. New clause 4 would help to deliver that badly needed refocusing of the system, and I urge the Government to support it. I wish to make two further points. First, I support new clause 14, which stands in the name of my hon. Friend the Member for Mitcham and Morden (Dame Siobhain McDonagh). It would introduce a requirement to notify a child’s school and GP when they are placed in temporary accommodation. As a constituency MP in south-east London, I see the horrific impact of poor-quality, unstable temporary accommodation on children in my constituency every week. Temporary accommodation is harming children, whether through the sleep deprivation of having to get up at 4 am to travel a long distance to their school, the lack of space to do homework, the fear and insecurity of sharing a kitchen and bathroom with strangers, the physical health impacts of living with damp and mould, or the impacts on gross motor development of being in a space that is too small to crawl or play in. The impacts are profound, so it is completely right that there should be a statutory requirement to notify the public services that have the ability to help mitigate such impacts, and which have a responsibility for a child’s health and wellbeing when that child is placed in temporary accommodation. The Government should be taking urgent action to reduce the number of people in temporary accommodation, especially families with children. However, in the short term, the new duty introduced by my hon. Friend’s new clause would make a difference to the support those children receive. Finally, at the same time as we are debating this Bill, the Government are preparing to announce reforms to the welfare system. I wish to emphasise the vital importance of considering the impact on children of any proposed reforms. Children do not get to choose the families into which they are born, but each one is equally deserving of economic security and access to the resources they need to thrive. It is not a justifiable outcome of changes to the welfare system to make life harder for the poorest children, or to increase child poverty by limiting the access to support that their parents receive. The Government must undertake and publish an assessment of the impact of their welfare reforms on children, and must ensure that children do not suffer as a result of any planned reforms.

• 13 Mar 2025 · Mental Health Support: Educational Settings · Hansard source

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  I congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for Redditch (Chris Bloore) on securing this important debate and on his excellent speech. The starting point for thinking about mental health services in educational settings must be an understanding of the foundational nature of good mental health and wellbeing in everything we seek to do in life. Challenges with mental health are corrosive in every aspect of our lives. Depression or anxiety can ruin the happiest of celebrations on the sunniest of days, prevent us from focusing on essential tasks, affect our relationships with friends, family members and colleagues and leave people feeling unable even to get out of bed in the morning. That is true for all of us as adults, and it is equally true for children and young people. Good mental health and wellbeing is essential for accessing and getting the most out of education, yet our children and young people are suffering an epidemic of poor mental health and wellbeing, and it is holding them back. On visits to schools in our constituencies, I am sure all Members will have heard headteachers, senior leaders and teachers in our classrooms talking about the challenges the young people in their classes face with their mental health. That is borne out by the data, too. In 2023, one in five children aged eight to 16 had a probable mental health disorder such as depression or anxiety, while the rates of probable mental health disorder among young people aged 17 to 19 have increased over just five years from a tenth in 2017 to more than a quarter by 2022. In this context, I welcome the Government’s commitment to place a mental health professional in every school across the country. However, I wish to raise some additional points that will be relevant to the effectiveness of that roll-out. The first is clarity on the level of qualification that the mental health professional in every school will be required to have, which I hope the Minister can provide. The second is on their remit: in addition to delivering services to young people, will they be expected to drive a culture across the whole school that is conducive to good mental health and wellbeing? That, as we all know, will involve the buy-in of the most senior school leaders. There are also other areas outside school that are relevant to children’s mental health and wellbeing, including the crisis in our special educational needs and disability system, which is having a profound impact on children’s mental health and wellbeing. My Committee heard this week from children who had been hospitalised and diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder as a consequence not of their additional needs, but of being in schools that are unable to meet their needs. I know that the Minister is aware of the urgent need to reform our SEND system. Mental health professionals in schools will also quickly be overwhelmed if we cannot get to grips with the crisis affecting our children and young people as a consequence of their addiction to smart phones and their access to social media, which we know is making them more anxious, less able to focus, more sleep deprived and more stressed out. I welcome the measures that the Minister announced in response to the Bill of my hon. Friend the Member for Whitehaven and Workington (Josh MacAlister), but I do believe that there is a need to go further with this urgent crisis, which is affecting the mental health and wellbeing of our children. Finally, I wish to touch on the vital issue of CAMHS waiting times. We have GPs to prescribe antibiotics so that infections do not become sepsis, or blood pressure medication to prevent a heart attack or stroke, but when an infection has become a critical illness, or a patient has suffered a heart attack or stroke, we would not think for one second that it was appropriate to send them back to their GP. Yet that is exactly what happens to far too many children and young people who are seriously mentally unwell. It is an unacceptable situation and, as well as looking at mental health and wellbeing support in education settings, we also need to look at how our NHS can deliver much more quickly and effectively for children whose problems are much more serious than that.

• 13 Mar 2025 · Mental Health Support: Educational Settings · Hansard source

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  Among children and young people who suffer the most acute mental health challenges are looked-after children and young people, all of whom will have experienced some kind of adverse childhood experience or trauma resulting in their being taken into the care system. My Committee heard evidence a couple of weeks ago from children and young people who talked about the lack of adequate assessment of their mental health when they are taken into care and when they move placements. They called for a strengthening of the regulations around that so that their mental health and wellbeing are properly taken into account. I have tabled an amendment to the Children’s Wellbeing and Schools Bill, which we will discuss early next week. Will the Minister give a commitment to look at that and see whether we can make the support better for children who are looked after?

• 7 Mar 2025 · Protection of Children (Digital Safety and Data Protection) Bill · Hansard source

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  If the hon. Gentleman will bear with me for a moment, I will come to some of the points that I think he wanted to emphasise. In the end, in both those cases—seatbelts and smoking—legislation had the effect of changing behaviour and changing societal norms, and in both cases, decades on from the introduction of legislation, it is hard to imagine that the regulation was ever controversial. Last year, the Select Committee recommended action across Departments to protect children from addiction, online harms and the mental health impacts of excessive use of smartphones. It supported a ban on mobile phones in schools and recommended a formal monitoring mechanism for a ban introduced through guidance, potentially leading to a ban in legislation. It recommended guidance for parents, whom it found to be lacking in confidence when it came to knowing exactly how to tackle this issue affecting children and young people, and recommended that the guidance should include—particularly for parents of babies and very young children—an emphasis on the importance of face-to-face interactions with their children, and guidance on the impact of screen use by parents while caring for very young children. That is an aspect that we do not debate enough in this place. The Select Committee supported an increase to 16 as the age of digital consent and recommended, among other developments, the promotion of a children’s class of phone that can be used for parental contact and for GPS locations, but not for internet access. I share the worry expressed by many Members that the Government are not acting with the urgency that is required in the face of the evidence they already have. The Bill will deliver, even in the form in which it has been presented today, some positive interventions that will make a difference, but I fear that the Government are doing too little too slowly. Parents want strong legislation, schools want strong legislation, and strong legislation will help to change societal norms in the way that is needed to protect children and young people and to stop the harms. The Education Committee will take a close interest in what happens from now on—the impact of the measures that the Government are introducing—but I urge the Government to get on quickly with the review and the guidance to which they will commit themselves today, and to go further and establish, with urgency and speed, a framework in law that can help parents, schools and professionals working with children to deal with a challenge that we all need to get to grips with.

• 27 Jan 2025 · Speech and Language Therapy · Hansard source

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  It is a pleasure to see you in the Chair, Mr Vickers. I thank the Petitions Committee for securing this important debate and my hon. Friend the Member for Lichfield (Dave Robertson) for introducing it; I associate myself with his words on Holocaust Memorial Day. I also congratulate Mikey on starting the petition and on his impactful campaign. Speech and language therapy is a vital service that supports children and adults with the development of speech and assists those who have difficulties in eating, drinking or swallowing. As Chair of the Education Committee, I will focus my remarks on access to speech and language therapy for children and young people. Speech and language are vital building blocks of communication. Children who face barriers to developing speech and language early in life, for a wide range of reasons, can face significant difficulties. Poor communication skills reduce participation in education and can lead to frustration and challenging behaviour or withdrawal and school avoidance. For children whose needs relate to a difficulty in eating, drinking or swallowing, good and timely speech and language therapy can make the difference between being able to attend school or nursery safely or not. I know the difference that speech and language therapy makes in my own family. When my oldest daughter started to learn to speak, it became apparent that she was really struggling to say particular sounds and that her inability to differentiate between sounds, because of her difficulty in pronouncing some of them, was having a consequential impact on her ability to read. We were able to seek advice from an open access speech and language therapy clinic at our local health centre, which provided a wealth of advice and some helpful exercises that we could support our daughter to do at home. The clinic was available to us whenever we needed it, and my daughter was able very quickly to overcome the challenges that she faced. I am pleased to report that she is now a 19-year-old who is nothing but forthright in her ability to communicate with everybody. Open-access services such as the clinic that we were able to access are now extremely hard to find. There is a shortage of speech and language therapists. Children who need speech and language support face long waiting lists in many parts of the country. That is a huge problem, because accessing timely support has a significant bearing on the impact that a speech and language difficulty can have in the long term. Issues that can be quickly addressed in very young children, for example, can become much more challenging to overcome with the passage of time. Early intervention saves money and delivers better educational outcomes. Speech and language therapy sits at the junction of several parts of the public sector. Needs are often identified in nurseries or schools; local authorities have a statutory responsibility for special educational needs and disability support; speech and language therapy is an allied health profession commissioned often by the NHS, but sometimes by local authorities and schools directly, and is often based in community settings. This complexity and the lack of a clear single pathway of commissioning services are among the contributory factors to the current shortage and the geographical disparities in the availability of speech and language services. I welcome the Government’s recognition of the importance of speech and language development in children and the commitment from the Department for Education to roll out the evidence-based NELI—Nuffield Early Language Intervention—programme in reception classes across the country. Expanding the availability of targeted support to help people who have speech and language difficulties to catch up will undoubtedly make a difference, but we know that the earlier a speech and language difficulty is identified, the better, not least because sometimes a speech difficulty is the first indication of wider special educational needs. The earlier a problem is identified, the easier it can be to address it. The Government recognise this, but there is currently no clear plan to expand the availability of speech and language therapy in early years and community settings. The early years sector is diverse and disparate. There is a need for clarity on expectations, commissioning pathways and professional development to ensure that very young children can access speech and language therapy as soon as a need is identified. The fact that it is not compulsory for children to be in a formal setting until the age of five underlines the importance of community-based support in children’s centres, family hubs and health centres, so that parents and carers can access support readily when they need it. Adjusting the workforce challenges within speech and language therapy will also require intervention from the Government to make more training places available and to encourage those who have left the profession to return. I hope that the Government will produce a workforce plan for all the professions related to SEND support, so that professional expertise and support will be there for children and families who need it. More widely, we have a SEND system that is failing children and their families across the country, with far too many children unable to access SEND support in school, waiting far too long for an EHCP and often finding that, when they get an EHCP, it cannot be fully delivered. Since the Minister for Care is responding to this debate today, I take the opportunity to highlight that when I speak with parents, teachers, local authority officers and others who are responsible for delivering SEND support, they very often say that, “within the EHCP, the H is too often absent”. They struggle to get the NHS to the table and there is very weak accountability in the levers that can force it to do so. I ask the Minister to look in detail at the issue, and to work with his colleagues in the Department for Education to ensure better collaboration between Health and Social Care and Education, in the best interests of children with special educational needs and disabilities. Finally, I take the opportunity to plug the Education Committee’s recently launched inquiry on special educational needs and disabilities. As a Committee, we recognise the vital role of speech and language therapy within the wider network of services that contribute to effective SEND support. Our call for evidence on SEND is open until 6 February. I encourage all right hon. and hon. Members who have an interest in SEND services or challenges within their constituencies to encourage their constituents to submit evidence to our inquiry, including those who have experience of speech and language therapy, so that we can hear the widest possible range of evidence and make recommendations to the Government that can deliver a transformation in SEND services across the country.

• 8 Jan 2025 · Children’s Wellbeing and Schools Bill · Hansard source

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  Our education system and the wider network of services that support children and families offer unparalleled opportunities to make a critical difference to the life chances of the next generation. If Governments get the policy framework right, they can support every child to thrive in their education, close the disadvantage gap and lay the foundations for good mental health and wellbeing, which will set a child up for life. However, the situation that this Government inherited in July was overall very far from that. There are, of course, many schools, teachers and other professionals who work with children and young people who are doing an exceptional job and achieving good results. As we consider this important legislation, I want to pay tribute to everyone who works to give our children and young people the best possible start in life—a great education, support where they need it and access to opportunities—and those who do the very difficult work of keeping the most vulnerable children safe. The challenges in our system are not down to them; they are the consequence of layer upon layer of policy decisions taken since 2010 that have made the context in which they work immeasurably harder. I shall mention just a few of those policy decisions. The decision to cut the funding for early help and support for families, resulting in the closure of 1,300 Sure Start centres, stripped away vital support that can prevent families from reaching a crisis. While funding for early help and support has reduced, expenditure on child protection and on children in the care system in crisis situations that can often be prevented has gone up. The decision to make academy schools directly accountable to the Secretary of State and responsible for their own admissions policies, and to make free schools the main delivery method for new schools, has left local authorities, which retain the statutory duty for providing a school place for every child who needs one and for SEND provision, without the tools and levers to deliver them, creating an unaccountable and unmanageable wild west of admissions in many areas. The neglect of the SEND system has allowed it to reach breaking point, and children are routinely let down; the capacity of schools to meet their needs has been eroded, and there is a lack of accountability for the role of health services. Local authorities are being pushed to the edge of effective bankruptcy; school attendance has been falling at a completely unacceptable rate; and our children and young people have the worst mental health and wellbeing in Europe. Where we should have a system of many parts all working together in the best interests of children and families, we have a broken system where some parts are missing entirely and others are buckling under the pressure. Far too many children—particularly those with SEND—are being let down. In too many cases, either children are not protected from harm as they should be, or the outcomes of the attempts of the system to protect them are shamefully poor. We need only to look at the shocking over-representation of care-experienced people who are homeless or in the criminal justice system to know that our systems are failing. We need only to reflect on the names of the children who have been tragically killed at the hands of those who should have protected and nurtured them—Star Hobson, Arthur Labinjo-Hughes and Sara Sharif, among others—to know that child protection urgently needs to be strengthened. I welcome the Bill, which begins the work of stitching back together a support system for children and families and places children once again at the heart of Government policy. Measures such as the creation of a single child identifier and a register of children not in school, restoring the ability of local authorities to deliver new school places and intervene on admissions, tackling profiteering by providers of children’s homes, delivering free breakfast clubs, reducing costs of uniforms and many other measures in the Bill will make a big difference to children and their families. The Education Committee is taking a close interest in this legislation, which is relevant to our ongoing inquiries on children’s social care, SEND and many other aspects of our work, and there are a number of areas on which I would like to press Ministers today. The measures to improve children’s social care are welcome, but it is well established that local authorities face huge cost pressures, which means that the system does not function as well as it should. Local authorities that are currently trapped in a cycle of spot-purchasing residential places for looked-after children from expensive out-of-area providers will need support and funding to make the transition to more positive ways of working, even if those new ways of working can bring down costs in the longer term. What investments will the Government make in children’s social care to ensure that the changes in the Bill can be fully delivered with the maximum impact? The £30 million of funding for breakfast clubs provided in the autumn Budget will extend the existing breakfast club scheme from around 2,700 schools to around 3,450 schools, but there are more than 16,700 state-funded primary schools in the UK. Can I therefore press the Government on the need to set out the costs and funding for delivering this policy in every primary school, and for a clear timescale for doing so? Parents of children with SEND often find it hardest to find childcare for their children. Many have expressed concern at a clause in the Bill that will allow for exemptions from the requirement to provide breakfast clubs for disabled children. Some disabled children will also be able to access a breakfast club only if they have home-to-school transport to arrive at school earlier. Will Ministers confirm that the Bill will ensure equal access to breakfast clubs for children with SEND in mainstream and specialist settings, with support where needed to enable children to attend them? Breakfast clubs ensure that no child has to start the school day hungry, which will be transformative. However, school lunches also really matter, as the most effective way to ensure access to a nutritious hot meal for the most disadvantaged children. Will Ministers therefore consider whether auto-enrolment of children already eligible for free school meals can be incorporated into the Bill? As a minimum, we should ensure that all children who are currently eligible receive a free school lunch.

• 10 Dec 2024 · Lobular Breast Cancer · Hansard source

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  I thank the hon. Lady very much for that intervention and for sharing her personal story. I pay tribute to Dr Michaelis for her research and campaigning on lobular cancer. I hope that all Members have received their Dr Susan Michaelis rose this week, named in her honour, and will plant it as a reminder of the urgency of her work. There are so many other stories. Katie Swinburne was 47 when she was diagnosed with invasive lobular cancer in her left breast, leading to a double mastectomy, radiotherapy and 10 years of targeted chemotherapy. She writes: “It is very hard to accept that none of my treatment is specific to lobular breast cancer and no one can tell me if it is working or has been effective…I find myself living in fear of recurrence. I deserved to have an early diagnosis. I did not get this. I deserve a specific treatment; I do not have this. I have three young children; they deserve to have a mum. I deserve effective follow up; I do not get this. I need you to change this for me, my husband, my family, all the women with a lobular diagnosis and all the women who will be diagnosed in the future.” Emma Hunwick writes: “I was a happy, healthy and relatively fit 49-year-old professional woman when I noticed a tiny pull in my right nipple. No lump, no other obvious external changes. An annual medical and referral just 12 days later resulted in a clear mammogram and a clear second 3D mammogram. An ultrasound then reported an area of 2 cm of concern. I rapidly went from ‘caught early’ to borderline stage 2 breast cancer. After my mastectomy I was informed that I was in fact stage 3c invasive lobular breast cancer…I am now at high risk with predicted survival outcomes at 10 and 15 years of approximately 45% and 30% respectively...I need to know that the vital scientific research into lobular breast cancer is being done now. Not next year or in 10 years but starting now, so that I might survive longer and continue to work with less worry about whether the standard monitoring tests that missed my first cancer, will miss a recurrence.” Kirstin Spencer’s story is also typical. Diagnosed in 2018, she and had a double mastectomy, but was warned that, especially in the first two years afterwards, the disease could recur in areas such as the scar tissue, chest wall and surrounding skin. She was told that vigilance and well-managed medical follow-up were everything. Within a year of her diagnosis, she developed red-flag symptoms that were repeatedly dismissed by her breast specialist. She was refused follow-up treatment and sent for psychological counselling. By the time that a new GP listened to her concerns, substantial recurrence was confirmed, with extensive metastatic disease. My mother-in-law Cressida’s story is very different from Heather’s, and we are all so grateful to the doctors who treated her and for the subsequent 22 years of health that she has had and continues to enjoy. Cressida did not have any grandchildren when she was diagnosed, but a prompt diagnosis meant that she has been able to be closely involved in the lives of eight subsequent grandchildren, as a much-loved granny. But Cressida’s outcome was about luck rather than design, so much so that it was only very recently, when reviewing her medical notes, that she found out that the type of cancer she had was lobular. Breast cancer survival rates are directly impacted by the stage of diagnosis. Late diagnosis, which is all too common for lobular breast cancer, leads to far worse outcomes. To improve this situation, we need much better awareness of the full range of breast cancer symptoms, including the very small skin changes that are typical of lobular cancer. Not all cancers cause lumps. A clear mammogram does not provide absolute reassurance, because lobular cancer typically does not show on a mammogram. We need lobular-specific research and treatments. Staff at Manchester Breast Centre have stated that they are able to do the research to understand the complete pathology of lobular breast cancer—research that has never been done—to pave the way for bespoke treatments to be developed. This will take five years and cost £20 million—moonshot funding that will be recouped many times over in the tax revenue paid by women like Heather, who would be able to continue working, and in the NHS costs that will be saved. Hundreds of MPs in the last Parliament and this one have listened to the stories of constituents affected by lobular breast cancer and pledged their support for the Lobular Moon Shot Project. Lobular cancer is the sixth most common cancer in women. It is more common than ovarian, brain, central nervous system, non-Hodgkin lymphoma, pancreatic and kidney cancers. I know that the Minister cares deeply about women’s health equality and I put it to her that lobular cancer is a women’s health equality issue.

• 18 Nov 2024 · Children’s Social Care · Hansard source

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  I welcome the action that the Government have announced today to improve children’s social care. The Secretary of State will know that families from the poorest neighbourhoods are 14 times more likely to be referred to children’s social care than those from the richest areas, and that there is a growing body of evidence linking child poverty to the rise in children entering the care system. How will she ensure that the upcoming child poverty strategy delivers more stability and safety for children and ensures that fewer families enter the kind of crises that result in their children being removed from their care?

• 6 Nov 2024 · Budget Resolutions · Hansard source

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  I congratulate all hon. Members who have made their maiden speeches today. The economic inheritance from the last 14 years could hardly have been any worse. Conservative Governments have serially undermined our public services: they stripped them of funding, made it harder to deliver and demoralised dedicated public servants. The impact of their political choices could not have been clearer. In multiple crises, which spanned from our NHS and social care to local authority services, schools, prisons, policing and criminal justice, housing and universities, instead of reinvesting to rebuild, they promised billions of pounds of entirely unfunded tax cuts in a desperate bid to cling on to power. They have been the vandals of our public services and our economy, and they have left this new Labour Government with a colossal and daunting task to restore and rebuild. I welcome the Budget, which seeks to fix the foundations and begin the restoration that is needed. I regret that the actions of the previous Government mean that the road to recovery is so long. The additional £1 billion in the Budget for SEND is as welcome as it is essential. The crisis in the SEND system is the biggest current challenge in the education system, with far-reaching consequences for children and families who are being let down, schools that cannot meet the needs of their pupils, and local authorities that are being driven to the edge of bankruptcy by the costs. I urge the Government to ensure that SEND remains at the forefront of discussions in the comprehensive spending review, because £1 billion, while welcome, is only a third of the current in-year deficit in the SEND budget. The statutory override, which protects local authority general fund accounts from SEND deficits, is due to come to an end in March 2026, and local authorities will soon need certainty about what will happen after that date. Without a clear plan, more local authorities will be issuing section 114 notices—that is not something that the Government can allow to happen. As a constituency MP, I want to use my remaining time to raise two other issues arising from the Budget. The additional funding for the NHS is desperately needed. The allocation for individual areas and health trusts has not yet been made. I want to make a particular plea for capital funding for King’s College hospital. King’s is currently facing severe financial challenges, which it is working hard to address, but that is made harder by a lack of funding for the essential equipment that staff need to increase productivity and deliver the services that patients need. Finally, while the additional injection of £100 million for social housing in London and changes to the regulations on right to buy are welcome, the crisis in London is so deep that the Government must turn their attention to the local housing allowance, which must keep pace with rents in London to avoid even more families being forced into temporary accommodation, with knock-on consequences for local authority budgets. The Budget seeks to fix the foundations and undo the damage that the Conservatives have done. There is much more to do, but the Budget is a very welcome first step on the road. I am pleased to vote for it today.

• 9 Sept 2024 · Children in Care: Educational Outcomes · Hansard source

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  14. What steps she is taking to help improve educational outcomes for (a) children in social care and (b) other care-experienced young people.