Helen Morgan MP: speeches

Speeches

• 10 Sept 2026 · Vascular Sector Reform · Hansard source

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  It is a pleasure to serve under your chairship, Dr Huq. I welcome the Minister and the shadow Minister, the hon. Member for Solihull West and Shirley (Dr Shastri-Hurst), to their places. Most of all, I thank the hon. Member for Strangford (Jim Shannon) for securing this important debate. He outlined the issues comprehensively in his opening speech, as we would expect. According to the Circulation Foundation, vascular disease is as common as cancer and heart disease, accounting for 40% of deaths in the UK. That represents a huge disease burden on individuals and the NHS, yet we rarely discuss it in Parliament. It is a leading cause of preventable disability, with associated complications being worsened by the fragmented care available to patients. Living with vascular disease means living with chronic pain, reduced mobility and often an isolating loss of independence. Many patients are left with a sense of powerlessness, which has a huge impact on their mental health and wellbeing. Sadly, we are all too familiar with the issues in the vascular sector: inconsistent standards and access to care; the dreaded postcode lottery in services; pathways and referral routes that disproportionately impact deprived communities; and under-investment in prevention. It seems to be yet another area of the NHS where, as we have been arguing this week on the Health Bill, too much time and money is spent responding to failure rather than improving the quality of services for patients and preventing and delaying deterioration in the first place. We must do better for people with vascular disease and for their families. Having dealt with the harrowing case of a constituent, I know that a lack of care and the medical risks and implications of vascular disease can spiral out of control, leading, in the worst cases, to the premature death of a family member. It is incredibly upsetting when that happens. I cannot begin to imagine how devastating that experience must be. A report from the all-party parliamentary group on vascular and venous disease highlighted the avoidable harm that gaps in vascular care can cause to patients. It confirmed that gaps in vascular care are resulting in avoidable harm, highlighting: “Delayed diagnosis, inconsistent referral pathways and variable access to specialist care” for people with peripheral artery disease, venous disease and diabetes-related foot complications. It said that those problems are resulting in “thousands of avoidable lower-limb amputations each year.” Discussions with the primary care network in my North Shropshire constituency have revealed that our county has one of the highest rates of lower-limb amputations because of these gaps in care. I cannot imagine the trauma caused to those who have lost a limb, knowing that it might have been avoided. It is time we aspired to ensuring a consistent level of care across the country. I have been contacted by companies in the pharmaceutical sector that have highlighted the disconnect between acknowledgment and action. PAD is named as a “neglected” CVD risk factor, but it lacks the priority status, funding mechanisms and performance standards given to other conditions. They have also highlighted that the need for new surgical and interventional techniques is acknowledged but not operationalised with delivery timelines or resource allocation, and that there are no metrics for PAD. The absence of PAD standards or metrics in the main performance monitoring tables means that progress cannot be tracked and local ICBs cannot be held to account if they are falling behind. The modern service framework is obviously a welcome step forward, but the Government should also take a look at the all-party parliamentary group’s calls for a national foot attack pathway, a community foot protection service, national maximum waiting times for patients, the reform of commissioning to reward outcomes and the acceleration of proven innovation, which must be rolled out more widely. Beyond that, the care that the NHS provides at its front door must be strengthened so that symptoms are caught and treated early. The APPG’s report highlights how prevention-led, community-first care is needed to transform the vascular sector, diagnose conditions earlier and relieve pressure on acute services. Liberal Democrats want everyone with vascular disease to have a named GP to ensure continuity of care, which has been shown to improve outcomes and quality of life for those with long-term conditions. Fixing the back door of the NHS is just as crucial for us. We have long been pressing for better social care, including free personal care and more support for family carers. Obviously, we welcome the steps that the Prime Minister took over the summer recess to ensure movement on the social care issue. Our proposed package would make it easier for people with long-term conditions and disabilities to access flexible working. It would support those suffering from vascular disease to access the world of work wherever possible, and hopefully transform their mental health and independence, too. Given the prevalence and severity of these conditions, I urge the Government to develop a strategy to transform the vascular sector to give patients the timely support and treatment they need. I look forward to hearing what steps the Minister will be taking to address this issue.

• 7 Sept 2026 · Health Bill · Hansard source

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  Crumbling estates are a big part of the problem across the whole NHS and in maternity, and my hon. Friend is right to highlight the state of his own local hospital and advocate for its quick remediation. Amendment 10, which I am sure my hon. Friend the Member for Winchester (Dr Chambers) will outline in more detail, would reintroduce the mental health investment standard. That is a crucial investment to avoid failures further down the line if interventions are not made for patients early on. Nowhere is the cost of failure more obvious than in maternity—a devastating scandal which, despite many recent reviews, still deserves far more attention. Our amendments to make our maternity services finally safe for mothers and babies will therefore be the main focus of my remarks today. I thank the Minister for her constructive engagement with me on new clause 1, and the commitment that she made at the Dispatch Box today to table relevant amendments when the Bill reaches the other place, and to put that maternity commissioner in place. I am grateful to her for the discussions we have had, and the constructive approach she has taken both with me and with the many campaigners on the issue beyond this place. In the light of that, I will not be pushing new clause 1 to a vote. I have seen up close the human costs of failures in our maternity system. Four years ago the Ockenden review found that over 200 babies and nine mothers in my community had died needlessly in Shrewsbury and Telford due to failures in maternity care. That has been devastating for my community, and we have heard since then that the situation was not isolated. There have been terrible stories from families around the country, most recently following the review into services in Nottingham. New clause 6 would introduce a scheme to ensure that every maternity unit in the country is rated “good” or “outstanding” by the Care Quality Commission. That new clause is essential if we are to meaningfully address the crisis in our maternity services and show families that lessons have been learned not just locally but nationally. The Liberal Democrat maternity rescue package would require an estimated £600 million a year to bring safety in maternity units up to standard, investing in safe staffing and listening to mothers. The Government already spend £1.3 billion a year—more than double the cost of the package—on maternity negligence payments, so introducing that reset is a no-brainer. Rather than spending a fortune compensating for failure and heartbreak, the NHS should be getting it right in the first place. Recently we have seen the consequences of safety failures, with lack of staffing causing North Devon’s maternity unit to close, forcing women to take a 50 mile trip if they go into labour. My hon. Friend the Member for North Devon (Ian Roome), whose constituency has been hit hard by that news, has tabled new clause 66 to guarantee safe staffing levels and access to a maternity unit within 45 minutes. While on women’s health, I also want to highlight new clauses 11 and 12. Earlier this year I wrote to the Equality and Human Rights Commission to highlight the stark inequality in research and investment in women’s health, with a huge gap in investment, governance and reporting mechanisms between women’s and men’s health strategies. The new clauses would set up an inquiry into women’s health outcomes, and ensure that average waiting times for women’s health conditions do not exceed the average waiting times for wider elective treatments. The crisis in our maternity care is a national shame and reveals a systemic neglect of the safety of women and their babies over many years. However, that is indicative of even wider concerns for patient safety, which I urge the Secretary of State to address in the Bill, and which we will discuss in more detail tomorrow. If the Government are serious about using the Bill to improve our NHS, they must invest time and money in the front and back doors of the NHS rather than structural reorganisations. The safety of staff and patients must be at the centre of those changes, and I urge the Minister to consider the amendments tabled by me and my Liberal Democrat colleagues, which would improve the Bill to achieve just that.

• 2 Sept 2026 · Rural Upper-tier Local Authorities · Hansard source

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  The hon. Gentleman makes a good point. I would need to see the detail of that proposal and what it would mean. Shropshire is already a unitary authority and is essentially at the bottom of the list for a devolution plan, so that seems too far off. There seems to be no prospect of stabilising the financial situation until there is a firm plan to ensure that the powers needed to turn the area around, and the resources to go with them, are firmly in place. We urgently need clarity on that. The hardship and austerity in rural areas has come about largely as a result of the removal of remoteness as a factor when calculating what it costs for a rural authority to deliver services across a vast area. The County Councils Network estimates that that has removed £300 million from its members’ budgets—an amount that the Government expect to be made up by increased council tax. Shropshire council has been squeezed at both ends—first by years of Conservative maladministration, and then by Labour cutting its funding, despite the obvious need —and it is far from alone. Rather than tackling the problem head on, the Government have underfunded rural councils, which has perpetuated rural deprivation. That is particularly acute where people lack access to services, and it is hidden, unlike urban deprivation. While door-knocking in my constituency, I met a delightful elderly gentleman living in a small cottage, and I was astonished to also meet his grandson, who was apparently living in his shed in the garden because he was unable to find anywhere else to live. Such cases go unnoticed in homelessness statistics, because families and communities find their own solutions to wrap around those individuals, but no one thinks a shed is appropriate accommodation for that young man. He should not have been allowed to fall through the net. A lack of funds for local transport perpetuates isolation and leads to a vicious cycle, stunting economic growth and creating further challenges for the council’s provision of services such as social care. When members of the Casey commission came to Shropshire to talk about the challenges of delivering social care in a rural area, they were astonished by the notion that carers must have a car because there is no transport in the evening or on a Sunday. Yesterday, the Prime Minister spoke of the importance of local transport and publicly provided services. We all agree with him, but Shropshire’s bus allocation has been cut despite the fact that it has lost more bus miles than anywhere else. Revenue funding is due to drop £175,000 in 2027-28. The Secretary of State for Transport, in an answer to me about step-free access at Whitchurch station, implied that the funds will be spent where the people are, not where the need is. She said: “When we are investing in the accessibility of stations in the future, we need to get maximum benefit for the travelling public.” —[ Official Report , 16 July 2026; Vol. 789, c. 1059.] Previously, that has meant that the funds go to the most densely populated areas, not to those where there are no real alternative forms of transport. The patchy public transport network across North Shropshire means that it is almost impossible for most residents to manage without a car, and that brings further associated costs. Those who cannot access a car, whether they are young or old, become isolated and unable to access opportunities, education and services. Similar patterns of deprivation are reinforced through Government funding for education in rural areas, even though they often already struggle with teacher recruitment and retention. Schools in North Shropshire received an average of £6,460 a head last year, compared with a national average of about £7,910, but outcomes at GCSE and key stage 4 are consistently lower than the national average, and indeed the west midlands average. How can the Government justify lower funding when the outcomes are already lower? Surely every child deserves the opportunities provided by a properly funded education. That applies to capital spending in education too. One shocking example in my constituency is a primary school in one of the most rural parishes that still has outside toilets, in their original Victorian red-brick building. A lady told me during my summer tour this year that her granddaughter was too afraid to use the toilets because they are full of spiders and had an accident at school as a result. That is unacceptable. That is the kind of thing that people remember when they are 50 if it happened to them when they were seven at school. Young people in rural areas are having their horizons limited as a direct result of Government policy. That needs to change, urgently. In what way are the Government tackling inequality if rural and coastal areas are persistently underfunded, despite their worse outcomes? My constituents rightly perceive an entirely broken system in which every year they pay more and receive less. That is obviously unfair and is opening the door wide to populists and extremists who exploit the situation with divisive messages to divide our community and simple but unworkable solutions. The new Prime Minister has given us all hope by promising growth in every postcode. He will fail in rural areas if he does not address the obvious unfairness that Government policy combined with the pressures of ever-increasing demand for social care are delivering. Proper devolution will help rural councils tailor public services to the areas that they serve, but there must be acknowledgement of the need for a fair allocation of resources to go with those theoretical powers. I hope the Minister can provide details in his response.

• 2 Sept 2026 · Rural Upper-tier Local Authorities · Hansard source

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  I thank all hon. Members who have come along and made excellent speeches—particularly team south-west, who have turned out in force. They all highlighted the difficulties in delivering services in sparsely populated areas with vast distances to travel. They spoke about the impact on highways funding, the importance of generating economic growth, the cost of delivering SEND, and the proxy creation of district councils through the re-empowering of town and parish councils to deliver things that the unitary council can no longer afford to deliver because they are not a statutory requirement. They were really good speeches. I am very disappointed that the Minister wound up with a speech that kind of told us that everything is actually fine. On the day that the local government finance settlement was announced, I sat on the Opposition Benches, along with all my colleagues, without a clue about what my local authority had been awarded because it was not findable, we had not been told and it could not be googled, yet everyone on the Labour Benches appeared to know what their settlement was and congratulated the Minister on its delivery. That is symptomatic of a pattern of this Government. They tell rural areas, “Everything is fine. It looks pretty. Go away and stop worrying, and actually, we are going to focus on urban areas.” We all recognise that urban areas need investment and are not thriving as they should be—this is not about pitting one area against another—but rural areas need fair funding and devolution. In a council that has stripped back every single employee that it can, there is no capacity to generate economic growth or transform the underlying financial structure of the council, because nobody has the time in the day to do it. They need that devolution funding to rethink how they deliver services in a sustainable way for the future. I hope the Minister will take those points on board. Question put and agreed to . Resolved, That this House has considered Government support for rural upper tier local authorities.

• 2 Sept 2026 · Rural Upper-tier Local Authorities · Hansard source

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  I beg to move, That this House has considered Government support for rural upper tier local authorities. I am a vice-president of the Local Government Association, and I am extremely worried about the widening gap in opportunity, social mobility and economic growth between rural and urban areas. Rural areas are being held back and the futures of rural children are being limited by public services that are underfunded and overstretched, lamentably slow digital connectivity, the lack of public transport, and urban-centric perceptions based on misunderstandings about the nature of rural life. The last local government finance settlement laid bare that neglect in financial terms. It was a stark admission from this Government that their plan is to strip funding from rural areas to improve services in urban ones. The Rural Services Network has calculated that urban councils will receive 32% more funding per head than rural councils next year. Meanwhile, rural residents pay on average 17% more council tax per head than urban residents, out of lower than average wages, to plug the gap, yet the cost of delivery means that they receive a poorer public service. For Shropshire council, the funding situation is particularly grave, following 16 years of catastrophic management by Shropshire’s Conservatives. When the Lib Dem administration took over in May 2025, Shropshire was in the most difficult financial position of any council in England. The recent Chartered Institute of Public Finance and Accountancy report on the huge challenge in Shropshire reveals the details of the Conservatives’ poor management: unrealistic budgets and constant overspends that burned through all the remaining reserves; an obsession with unaffordable vanity projects, such as the purchase of Shrewsbury’s shopping centres and millions spent on an unaffordable road; a sloppy workforce restructure in 2024-25, which drove out the talented managers needed to transform the financial situation; and the “legacy impact” of five years of consecutive council tax freezes. All that was left as a parting gift for the new administration to pick up. The report describes the direction of the council under its recently appointed new chief executive and four-to-five-year improvement plan as a “positive step”, and a peer review by the LGA praised the “significant strides” made so far, but the financial position remains perilous and the challenge to restructure the council is huge. Eighty per cent of Shropshire council’s budget is spent on social care, an issue on which the Liberal Democrats have long called for urgent action. The cost of delivering social care in a rural area with the demographics of North Shropshire, where 25% of the population is aged over 65, means that the pressure is only set to rise. Adult social care spending has already been rising by about 5.8% a year, more than could have been generated by council tax increases, because people are living longer, needs are becoming more complex, and workforce costs are rising, with care providers consequently charging more. Demand for education, health and care plans has risen even faster. Shropshire now has 3,016 active EHCPs, a 21% increase in one year compared with national growth of 11%. The number of school-aged children with EHCPs has increased by 78% since before the pandemic. That puts more pressure on specialist education, school transport and family support. Last year, the council put up council tax by 8.99%. Although that brought in a massive £21 million a year, it covered only about a third of the extra cost from demand and inflation alone. Amid that financial turmoil, the Government have cut funding per head in Shropshire. It is projected to fall well below 90% of 2024 funding by 2028, while the national average is set to rise to around 118%. The exceptional financial support provided to balance the books bears interest and must be paid back; it worsens prospects for the future, and for a considerable time. Under the Government’s new devolution plans, there is a risk that the gap between mayoral and non-mayoral authorities could increase further. During the Prime Minister’s statement yesterday, I asked him about the importance of power and resourcing being made available to all authorities, not just those that have formed a combined authority or have a mayor. His answer was in some ways encouraging, but in other ways it bothered me. He said that when Shropshire council could “stand on its own two feet” —[ Official Report , 1 September 2026; Vol. 790, c. 49.] it would be able to access devolution, but the Government’s own three-year financial settlement is forcing austerity on rural areas, making the achievement of self-sufficiency far less likely.

• 1 Sept 2026 · Direction of Government · Hansard source

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  I welcome the Prime Minister to his place and I welcome his commitment to put power back into the heart of communities through a devolution programme, but in places such as Shropshire, where there is no immediate plan for a combined authority or a mayoral authority to be put in place, people are really worried that we will be left behind. Will the Prime Minister elaborate on his earlier comments and explain when authorities such as Shropshire will get those devolved powers—and, crucially, the resources to go with them—so that they can start turning around the lives of people in places such as North Shropshire?

• 16 Jul 2026 · Health Bill (Seventeenth sitting) · Hansard source

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  It is really important not to blame people who have seen convincing information online or have been given convincing information by people who ought to know better—including at political party conferences. We need to battle the source of that information and ensure that accurate, factual information is available and communicated to everyone in an accessible way by people they trust. That is key to all this. As I have said before, ostracising or ridiculing people who have been given information in a very convincing way is not the way to resolve this problem. We need to tackle it in an understanding way by communicating the facts sympathetically and accessibly. It is important to note that concerns about vaccinations are not exclusive to a single group of voters. There is significant vaccine hesitancy across some ethnic minority communities and in hard-to-reach places across the country. We must do more to support doctors, nurses and the NHS to fight fiction with facts, or the long-term health of the country will suffer. That is what new clause 77 seeks to do. There is some great local work being done, but there needs to be a joined-up strategy to combat all aspects of disinformation, because a nice social media video telling people to get their jab will not beat it. Now that Reform UK has a greater presence in our local government, NHS leaders will have to handle more and more difficult conversations with anti-vax and conspiracy theorist councillors, and they deserve support to engage with those people effectively and constructively. The proposed strategy would provide just that. It would have to consider “support for medical professionals to build trust and engage with persons who are anti-vaccine…investment in public messaging to combat medical disinformation, including engagement with trusted online influencers…outreach campaigns focused on communities that are sceptical about vaccinations…introducing criminal liability for those, including online influencers and politicians, who profit from medical disinformation, and…a new verification requirement for any social media account claiming to be a medical professional.” We must do more systematically to protect the NHS and our nation’s health from the growing threats of medical misinformation. We urge the Government to give this issue the focus it needs, and we hope that they consider this new clause one way to do that.

• 16 Jul 2026 · Health Bill (Seventeenth sitting) · Hansard source

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  I absolutely agree. My mother and grandmother both had polio, which nobody would expect to experience in this day and age. That same grandmother’s sister died of diphtheria, and her father had smallpox. That was all just over 100 years ago, so it was not too long ago that people were experiencing what we now consider to be antiquated and unthinkable diseases. The vaccination programmes that have been brought in over the past century have undoubtedly been game-changing for public health, not least for people growing up with working-class backgrounds, as my family would have been. That is why it is so important to deal with the disinformation that allows unscientific and dangerous anti-vax views to be communicated convincingly to the wider community.

• 15 Jul 2026 · Engagements · Hansard source

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  Q8. After 16 years of Conservative Administration, Shropshire council’s finances were left in a disastrous state. After a Local Government Association peer review praised the Lib Dem administration for making significant strides since last May, that difficult financial situation remains. The right hon. Member for Makerfield (Andy Burnham) has promised Manchesterism for the rest of the country, but will the Prime Minister join me in urging him to remember that the rest of the country does not all look like Manchester and rural areas need a fair deal too?

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

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  New clause 56 speaks about the importance of creating capacity across the system, including social care, and about having regard to the outcome of Baroness Casey’s commission on social care to deal with the issue of capacity and flow through the hospital. We have discussed at length in Committee other amendments that would deal with the front door, in terms of GP access and trying to ensure that people are treated at first in the community, rather than ending up in A&E as a last resort. I wonder if the right hon. Gentleman would just acknowledge those points.

• 7 Jul 2026 · Health Bill (Twelfth sitting) · Hansard source

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  The amendment was tabled by my hon. Friend the Member for Wells and Mendip Hills (Tessa Munt) on behalf of the approximately 1.2 million people in England who live with myalgic encephalomyelitis, because five years after the introduction of National Institute for Health and Care Excellence guideline NG206, little has changed. Service provision according to NG206 remains patchy and poor, with many patients having traumatic experiences. The amendment would require a period to be set in which integrated care boards and other health bodies must comply with the guideline, and the Secretary of State must publish an annual statement on compliance with NG206 across the NHS in England. The introduction of the guideline after sustained campaigning represented a major reform after years in which ME was treated as a psychiatric condition and patients were pushed to follow graduated exercise therapy. Often, GET had disastrous consequences, precipitating serious deteriorations that patients never recovered from. Credit is due to the hon. Member for Washington and Gateshead South (Mrs Hodgson), the current Minister for Public Health and Prevention, for her determination when in opposition to bring about the change. In a written answer published last week, the Minister for Public Health and Prevention confirmed that all ICBs have a statutory obligation to ensure sufficient care provision for their population, but the experience of those with ME is that that obligation is far from being fulfilled. In some ICBs, no services for ME are commissioned; in others, the provider has a history of providing services that reflect not NG206, but the old and condemned approach of GET. Some services are provided out of psychiatry departments, which is a huge red flag for those with ME, and information on the quality of services is patchy. Results from a big survey of more than 5,000 people with ME or long covid in late 2025 painted a bleak picture: more than half said that they had been disbelieved by an NHS healthcare official, one in three had been made to feel that their ME was their own fault, and almost two in five had had an encounter with a clinician that was traumatic or traumatising. Five years after its introduction, NG206 is far from being complied with, and so members of the ME community—approximately 1.2 million people, as I said—are desperately asking that something be done to address the situation. The amendment represents a route that offers hope for many long-neglected and mistreated people. I do not intend to press the amendment to a vote, but I hope that the Minister will be able to reassure us about improving the consistency of provision for people with ME. Moving to the clause generally, we broadly support the intention, but think that more safeguards need to be built into the principle, given the powers that are being handed to the Secretary of State. The clause makes provision for the period for compliance with a NICE recommendation, but gives no detail of how that will work in practice or how often the Secretary of State will change the standard three-month rule that NICE requires. No ceiling is put on the compliance period, no criteria govern when the period may be extended, and there is no duty to consult or set out reasoning. What will the process be when the Secretary of State intervenes in the period of time for compliance with a NICE recommendation? We thought that there would be some mix of evidence requirements, consultation, statement of reasons, impact assessment and some kind of parliamentary scrutiny. The Secretary of State should at least have to set out their reasoning why the new power has been used. The value of the current requirement is almost entirely due to the compliance period being short and fixed. The three-month rule gives a positive NICE recommendation practical force. A power to lengthen or vary that period without constraint weakens the requirement in substance while leaving it formally intact. The right is not removed but its timing is made discretionary. For a patient awaiting treatment, that does not amount to the same thing. A variation power is not new. Since the introduction of the budget impact test in 2017, NHS England has been able to apply to NICE to extend the funding period for medicines with a budget impact above a defined threshold, but, importantly, that period is criteria-based, triggered by a defined financial threshold, subject to a defined process and time-limited in effect. We are not overtly opposed to the power in principle, but more safeguards should be built into the criteria for its application. I would be grateful for some guidance from the Minister on that.

• 7 Jul 2026 · Health Bill (Thirteenth sitting) · Hansard source

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  I am very grateful to serve under your chairship, Ms Lewell. My hon. Friend the Member for Winchester has made some general points about Healthwatch and the importance of an independent patient voice; I will not reiterate them, because he made them very well, but I want to speak specifically about local healthwatches and the benefits that they bring. I find it quite difficult to hear in this room, so I hope the hon. Member for Lichfield will correct me if I have misunderstood the gist of his speech, but I was frankly astonished by the suggestion that if local managers had heard about the problems at Mid Staffs or at Shrewsbury and Telford hospital NHS trust, the concerns raised in those extremely serious scandals would have been addressed. The reality is that the management of both providers knew exactly about the concerns in those trusts, and they did not address them. That is why we have Healthwatch. The hon. Member for Lichfield may be aware that my parents live in Stone, which was in the Mid Staffordshire constituency at the time. My mum was a clerk to Staffordshire county council, and I recollect very strongly that the health scrutiny committee at that council questioned the trust about its appalling mortality rate and was constantly reassured that there was nothing to see here. It absolutely failed to mark its own homework. The suggestion that my constituents Kayleigh and Colin Griffiths, who fought for the Ockenden report on Shrewsbury and Telford, did not first try the local services is, I think, missing the point. With the Ockenden report on Nottinghamshire a couple of weeks ago, we also saw that the hospital trust commissioned several reports into its own maternity services, which found that it was failing. Instead of acting on them, it brushed them under the carpet and commissioned another. The suggestion that providers are capable in the current culture of dealing with those issues does not, I am afraid, hold true in the way it should across every trust.

• 7 Jul 2026 · Health Bill (Thirteenth sitting) · Hansard source

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  The hon. Lady raises a good point. I do not want to revisit an earlier part of the debate, but it is certainly relevant that where there is not a local authority representative on the ICB and there is not a mayor in place, and the ICB’s area is not coterminous with the local authority boundary, that adds another element to the issue of the separation out of Healthwatch. Does the Minister agree that the independent and locally rooted Healthwatch cannot be replaced by processes that sit within the NHS system? Will she please reconsider the change? There is concern on all sides of the House, given the value that Healthwatch brings to the service.