Helen Morgan MP: speeches

Speeches

• 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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  The hon. Gentleman is making an important and fundamental point: everything costs more when it is spread out. For example, bin collections cost a huge amount more for unitary authorities. Home-to-school transport is not just for children with SEND but for children who cannot catch the bus to school because there is no bus. Everything costs a vastly significant amount more than when people just live down the road. Does the hon. Gentleman agree that it is really important that that is reflected in Government funding formulae, because it is crippling our councils?

• 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.

• 8 Jul 2026 · NHS Corridor Care · Hansard source

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  I thank the hon. Member for Tooting (Dr Allin-Khan) for her excellent opening speech—it was what we expected, given her unparalleled experience and knowledge in this area. As we have heard over and over again, our A&E departments are at breaking point and ambulance services have been overwhelmed. The corridor care data, which was finally released last month, confirmed the extent of this crisis, well after the end of what we would consider to be the winter peak. Corridor care is no longer a phenomenon confined to the winter months; it is a year-round crisis. I have no doubt that the recent heatwaves will have put unbearable pressure on services yet again. The scale of corridor care has a huge impact on patients. Some 36% of visitors to hospitals have seen care delivered in a corridor. A freedom of information request by the Liberal Democrats revealed that the average hospital trust now sees nearly 3,000 patients wait more than 24 hours in A&E each year. Corridor care is also extremely detrimental to staff. A 2025 Royal College of Physicians survey found that 78% of doctors had provided care in a temporary space. In testimonies collected by the Royal College of Nursing, nursing staff described patients deteriorating unnoticed and suffering avoidable harm. They expressed their anxiety and demoralisation at the level of care they were able to give and being unable to guarantee patient safety, because corridors are unsafe for patients and unsafe for staff, too. Staff are losing hope, and corridor care has become so normalised that one hospital advertised for a dedicated corridor care nurse. Another, as we have heard, even created a makeshift ward in an on-site Costa Coffee. The Government owe it to patients and staff to make fixing this crisis an urgent priority. Even the release of corridor care data was a shambles, arriving late after months of the former Secretary of State, the right hon. Member for Ilford North (Wes Streeting), paying lip service to transparency and delaying its publication. Concerns have already been raised over loopholes in the Government’s definition of corridor care, which anecdotal evidence suggests has encouraged trusts to hide the true extent of the crisis, with treatment being pushed back into ambulances to avoid incidents being labelled as corridor care. University Hospitals Coventry and Warwickshire NHS trust had no patients being treated in corridors, while ambulance crews were providing care in its car parks, according to a recent West Midlands ambulance service board paper. Increasing ambulance handover times will not tackle the indignity of corridor care, but will only compound it and prevent the release of those ambulances to people with potentially life-threatening conditions. The corridor care data, which is the best we have got, revealed that May alone saw a shocking 90,000 incidents of corridor care. The Royal College of Emergency Medicine’s recent report estimated that long waits caused at least 15,860 excess deaths in England in 2025. All of the evidence is there. The royal colleges have been sounding the alarm for years. Data and reports demonstrate the huge scale of this scandal. Countless individual stories remind us of the personal tragedies behind the numbers. One of my constituents, a carer for three adult sons, called after a truly awful experience last year. His eldest son had collapsed on the stairs in the middle of the night. After calling 999 and being told no ambulance was available for some time, my constituent drove his son to A&E himself with some difficulty, and only once his son had regained consciousness. They waited in A&E for 28 hours to then be put in a holding area for one and a half days before being transferred to a ward. Each of these numbers and cases involves a person. Madam Deputy Speaker, it could be your child, an elderly relative or a vulnerable friend—each experiencing no privacy, no dignity and suffering poor outcomes. I look forward to hearing the Government’s plan to resolve this crisis. The Liberal Democrats have an action plan to fix corridor care. We believe that hospital capacity is a key issue, and that cannot be fixed without fixing social care. One of the biggest factors behind lack of capacity is the lack of social care. Baroness Casey’s final report is not due until 2028, and I hope that the Minister will be able to announce that the Secretary of State will bring that forward, so that we can solve the social care crisis. Without those beds, people are either held outside in ambulances or on corridors outside wards. We would invest £1.5 billion to provide 6,000 more beds across the system. Those would be provided through new staffed hospital beds and investment in safety-net social care beds, proper step-down care packages and more support for carers and hospices, so that thousands more patients can leave hospital. To solve corridor care, we have to fix the front door and the back door, and invest in primary care as well as social care. That would include boosting recruitment and retention to provide 8,000 more GPs to reduce pressure on hospitals and save the NHS time and money in the first place. We would also place a duty on the Secretary of State to prevent 12-hour waits in A&E and ensure that they do not continue to happen year in, year out. The Liberal Democrats have a plan to bring back the dignity and safety that patients deserve, and the working conditions that NHS staff deserve too. I hope that the Government will listen to our plan, and I look forward to hearing from the Minister.