Iqbal Mohamed MP: speeches

Speeches

• 7 Sept 2026 · Economic Growth · Hansard source

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  Dewsbury and Batley is the capital of furniture, bed and upholstery manufacturing in the UK, but after Brexit it lost a lot of its export business. What are the Government going to do to support furniture, upholstery and supply chain manufacturers in Dewsbury and Batley as part of their investment in the north?

• 4 Sept 2026 · Infants, Parents and Carers Bill · Hansard source

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  I wholeheartedly agree with the hon. Lady. It is important for parents, mothers and families to know that Government policy is free from commercial influence, not just in this space but in all the spaces that impact our citizens. As an engineer and a regulatory compliance expert in the pharmaceutical industry, I believe that the marketing of breast milk and the formulation of breast milk need to be better regulated. The Medicines and Healthcare products Regulatory Agency should have responsibility to regulate the nutritional content of substitute breast milk and the marketing claims of substitute breast milk producers. That is an important measure that the Government could introduce to ensure the consistent quality and nutritiousness of substitute breast milk. As the Member for Dewsbury and Batley, I will focus my contribution on health inequality. In my constituency, we are proud of our diverse communities, but we cannot ignore the fact that outcomes for mothers and babies are not experienced equally. A recent Healthwatch report highlights the reality facing many children and families across West Yorkshire. Families repeatedly identified poverty, poor housing, long waiting times, barriers to healthcare access and the cost of staying healthy as factors that profoundly affect young children’s health and wellbeing. Poverty and its attendant effects mean that families struggle to maintain healthy living environments for their children through no fault of their own, whether because of mouldy housing or the lack of a nutritious diet. Health outcomes depend on income and place. The result is that infant mortality rates in Yorkshire and Humber are 5.1 per 1,000 live births, against a national average of 3.9 per 1,000 live births. This is a postcode lottery and we must do all we can to eradicate it. Yet those inequalities are also compounded by ethnic disparities. Nationally, babies of black ethnicity continue to be more than twice as likely to be stillborn as babies of white ethnicity. In 2026, that is a scandal and precisely why legislation focused on the early years matters. The research conducted and the reports published over decades have not led to a meaningful positive intervention to reduce infant mortality for ethnic minorities and black families. The Bill is a real opportunity to address that inequality. We know, too, that children from ethnic minority backgrounds in deprived communities often face additional barriers in accessing healthcare and support. The Healthwatch report I previously cited found that cultural and language barriers can make it harder for some families to navigate services, while stigma around receiving support in some communities can prevent parents from getting help when they most urgently need it. Those statistics and findings should remind us that improving services is not simply an administrative exercise; it is fundamentally a matter of fairness. That is why I believe one of the strengths of the Bill is its potential to shine a light on where support is working and where it is falling short. The annual report to be presented to Parliament on the state of services, outcomes and changes to outcomes since the previous year is extremely important, but it must be a catalyst to continuing to address the inequalities that remain at the end of each year. As the Bill progresses, I hope it will focus not only on the availability of services, but on whether outcomes are actually improving for children from disadvantaged and ethnic minority backgrounds. When support is available early, far greater cost to children, public services and society can be avoided later. Before I conclude, I would like to take this opportunity to celebrate the 150th anniversary of Dewsbury and District hospital and recognise not only the institution but the generations of dedicated staff who have served our communities with skill, compassion, dedication and commitment. I pay tribute and extend my deepest gratitude to the doctors, nurses, midwives, porters, healthcare assistants, cleaners, administrators, technicians, volunteers and countless others who have cared for patients through times of joy, crisis and profound change. I want to end by recognising the incredible work of health visitors, midwives and family support workers, and all health professionals across West Yorkshire and the whole country. They often provide the early intervention that transforms the course of a child’s life. Just a few months ago in my constituency I visited the reopened Brontë Birth Centre at Dewsbury hospital, which was closed for two years because of staff shortages. It is doing absolutely fantastic work and the facility is world class. I pay tribute to the Government who helped to implement and fund the facility, and to the staff who run it day to day.

• 1 Sept 2026 · Direction of Government · Hansard source

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  I wish the new Prime Minister the very best, and welcome his commitment to a better kind of politics. Nationally, 4.4 million people are now in council tax debt, 1.2 million more than in the previous year, and last year 1.7 million instructions were made for bailiffs. Bailiff use comes at a significant human and economic cost, so will the Prime Minister look at this issue? Will he, for instance, consider revoking regulation 45 of the Council Tax (Administration and Enforcement) Regulations 1992, which allows councils to call in bailiffs, and introducing a new duty of care that puts harm reduction at the heart of council tax collection and helps to write off unfair debt?

• 9 Jul 2026 · Israeli Settlements: Trade Ban · Hansard source

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  Will the hon. Member give way?

• 9 Jul 2026 · Israeli Settlements: Trade Ban · Hansard source

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  I thank my Yorkshire colleague the hon. Member for Sheffield Central (Abtisam Mohamed) for securing this debate, and for introducing it with the passion and power she did. Every single pound that goes from Britain to Israel is in one way or another helping Israel perpetuate its illegal occupation and apartheid system against the Palestinian people. Just this week, Haaretz reported that Israeli nationalist crime in the west bank is up by 560% since 2019, according to official police data. We know that the vast majority of the crimes by these terrorist settlers go unreported and unpunished, so if the percentage increase is officially 500-plus, it will actually be in the thousands given the crimes that will have gone unreported. These settlements are illegal colonies. For years, Ministers have stood at the Dispatch Box and rightly described these “settlements” as illegal under international law—this Government have done so more times than I can count—yet the condemnation rings hollow. If settlements are illegal, why are we still treating their products as legitimate? Every shipment from a settlement carries a human cost in the displacement, deprivation of income and death that it constitutes. It is the economic bedrock of a system of apartheid. Up to 110,000 Palestinian families rely on the olive harvest as their source of income. For generations, olive trees have sustained communities economically and culturally. There has been settler violence for many decades, but during last year’s harvest it reached unprecedented levels, all against the backdrop of a genocide in Gaza. A Palestinian farmer named Jamal Daraghmeh was beaten alongside his sons as Israeli settlers tried to harvest olives from the land his family had cultivated for generations. That is how settlements expand: families are terrorised, livelihoods are destroyed and communities are driven from their land, creating the single greatest obstacle to Palestinian economic development and self-determination. These injustices are accelerating before our eyes. As we have heard, since the genocide in Gaza began, settlement expansion has surged, with 165 new settlement outposts established. That is an average of 47 every year, up from just over five between 1996 and 2022. The consequences are also measured in the number of lives taken. According to B’Tselem, Israeli forces or civilians have killed 4,000 Palestinians since 2000. In the past year and a half, 70 Palestinian children have been murdered in the west bank, at an average of almost one every week. Just last week, Smotrich celebrated what he called the “revolution” in settlement expansion. That a sanctioned Minister is publicly boasting about accelerating annexation while settlements continue to grow unabated shows that this Government’s approach is having zero meaningful impact.

• 9 Jul 2026 · Israeli Settlements: Trade Ban · Hansard source

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  I thank my hon. Friend for his intervention. As a barrister, he knows, as do many across the House who are not in that profession, that it is incumbent—an obligation—on the UK Government to take any and all practical steps to prevent and stop a genocide happening anywhere to any people, and that includes the Palestinians. To conclude, history will not remember how many times this Government have condemned illegal settlements. It will remember that Britain, for decades, has chosen to keep trading with Israel and the settlements anyway. Condemnation without consequence is nothing less than complicity. Israeli settlers, aided and abetted by the IDF and the Israeli Government, have taken away the rights of the Palestinians to live. Instead of sanctioning the settlers, successive British Governments have actively facilitated and allowed goods and services from the settlements to be sold in the UK. Why do the British Government despise Palestinian life so much?

• 9 Jul 2026 · Israeli Settlements: Trade Ban · Hansard source

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  Does the hon. Gentleman agree that this issue is not just about products coming from settlements to the UK, but companies in the UK trading in goods and services in the settlements? Airbnb, Booking.com and Expedia are all selling tourism services in the occupied territories.

• 8 Jul 2026 · Societal Impact of AI: Government Policy · Hansard source

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  Will the hon. Member explain how this will work, then? Human beings at work pay national insurance, income tax and pension contributions, and then they can support their families. AI agents and AI-powered robots do not pay any of that—there are no tax receipts for the Government—so how will Government fund public services in that scenario?

• 8 Jul 2026 · Societal Impact of AI: Government Policy · Hansard source

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  Responsible AI, done right, could be the saviour of humanity. Irresponsible AI, done wrong, could lead to the destruction of humanity. There is, to my knowledge, no effective, self-regulated industry anywhere in the world that puts consumers and the planet before profit and shareholders. I thank the hon. Member for Poole (Neil Duncan-Jordan) for securing this important debate. As he and many Members have highlighted, a handful of companies run by men answerable to no electorate and standing before no constituents are making decisions right now that will shape healthcare, education, employment, childhood and the economy more than most Acts of this Parliament ever will. I will focus on topics that have not been covered and speak about safety and economic risks. I have spent 20-plus years in the pharmaceutical regulatory industry, and we can learn much from it. We regulate medicines before they reach a single patient. We do not wait for harm; instead, we test, we license and we monitor. That is the entire logic of the GxP framework that underpins pharmaceutical safety in this country, yet AI is being deployed in our hospitals, schools, courts and welfare system with no comparable safety regime at all, not because the risk is smaller but because the oversight is simply not there. I put the following demands to the Government. First, where GxP protects patients from medicine, we need GAIP—good AI practice—regulation to protect patients from algorithms. Any AI system used in healthcare must meet a statutory standard before it touches a single patient record or clinical decision. The AI Security Institute already evaluates frontier models for biological, chemical and cyber risk, but only if the AI companies allow it to. That is progress, but progress in security assessments is not the same as regulating delivery in the healthcare industry. This Government brought Palantir into the heart of our NHS; in doing so, they handed a US surveillance contractor that is complicit in genocide the keys to patient data that belongs to the British public, not to a share price on Wall Street. I ask the Minister to guarantee the British public that their NHS data will never be given to or allowed to be stolen by Palantir or any other private company. Secondly, the Government must mandate independent statutory testing for AI before its release, and a yellow card scheme that would be a national register where safety incidents, near misses and harms caused by AI were reported, tracked and acted on exactly as we do for adverse drug reactions. It must not be the manufacturer marking its own homework and hoping that nobody checks; self-certification does not work and must end. Thirdly, every AI system developed in this country must have a kill switch that is triggered automatically the moment a system takes unauthorised action and that any human being can trigger manually at any time without obstruction or AI override. This danger is not only about safety but about who pays the bill as AI unfolds. More than 300,000 private-hire drivers in this country face displacement by robotaxis. I ask the Minister how the Government will fund public services going forward. There are dangers, but there are opportunities from AI. We must try to access them as much as possible, but we must address the societal, economic and safety consequences that AI poses.