Iqbal Mohamed MP: speeches 2025

Speeches

• 17 Dec 2025 · Puberty Suppressants Trial · Hansard source

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  I thank the Secretary of State for his response to the urgent question. One thing we should all agree on is that the human rights of all, including trans people, must be protected and delivered by the Government and supported by us all. The reason we are here today is to discuss the risks and potential adverse consequences of the proposed pathways trial. The trial compares the timing of treatment initiation, rather than using a placebo. There is no arm that provides psychotherapy as a treatment option without puberty blockers, and there is no arm to assess children who do not receive any of those options. Will the Secretary of State consider ensuring that all the various arms and channels are tested as part of this trial to get a complete picture, rather than a partial picture, which may be misleading?

• 15 Dec 2025 · Online Safety Act 2023: Repeal · Hansard source

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  The hon. Member is making an extremely passionate and informed speech. While the unintended consequences of the Online Safety Act on the small forums and specialist groups that he highlights are critical, does he agree that a balance needs to be struck, whereby under-age children are protected from harmful content on whatever forum or website they are exposed to?

• 15 Dec 2025 · Online Safety Act 2023: Repeal · Hansard source

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  It is a pleasure to speak with you in the Chair, Mr Pritchard. I thank the hon. Member for Sunderland Central (Lewis Atkinson) for his powerful and eloquent introduction to this important debate. The scale of this petition should make us reflect: over half a million people have called for the repeal of the Online Safety Act, not because online safety is unpopular, but because they believe that the legislation does not yet strike the right balance. Let me be clear: the Online Safety Act exists for a reason. I stand in strong support of its intent, aims and objectives, and I am not in favour of its repeal. For too long, online platforms have failed to protect users, particularly children, from serious harm. The statistics are sobering: nearly one in five children aged 10 to 15 have exchanged messages with someone they have never met; over 9,000 reported child sexual abuse offences in 2022-23 involved an online element; and, in recent years, we have seen tragic cases where exposure to harmful online content has contributed to devastating outcomes. Repealing the Act would leave us with very little meaningful protection, so it remains central for regulating online spaces in the UK. We must accept that necessary truth, although it is a hard pill to swallow. Supporting the Act, however, does not mean ignoring the parts that need important improvements. One of the most significant concerns is age restriction. Age-gating can and should play a role in protecting children from genuinely harmful content, but it is increasingly clear that the boundaries of age restrictions are not defined well. There is growing evidence that lawful political content, including news and commentary on conflicts such as Gaza, Ukraine and Sudan, is being placed behind age gates. Teenagers aged 16 and 17 are finding themselves blocked from accessing political information and current affairs, sometimes more strictly than in film and television content regulated by the British Board of Film Classification. That should give us pause, particularly when the House is considering extending the vote to 16-year-olds. If we believe that young people should be active participants in our democracy, we cannot also allow systems that restrict their access to political debate by default, just because these are difficult and sensitive topics. What is or is not age-restricted needs to be far clearer, more consistent and more proportionate. The second area where clarity is urgently needed is generative AI. As we are having this debate, the Home Secretary is making a statement on violence against women and girls, which she has rightly described as a “national emergency”. The Government’s five-year national strategy acknowledges the growing threat posed by intimate deepfakes, with one survey by the National Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children showing that three in five people fear becoming a victim. With current laws proving too difficult to apply in complex and rapidly evolving cases, what specific legislative proposals are the Government hoping to develop to address deepfake abuse? When this legislation was drafted and passed, the pace of AI development was very different. Today, AI tools and chatbots are embedded across social media, search engines and messaging platforms, with people relying on ChatGPT, Gemini and Copilot as search engines and virtual assistants embedded into almost every online service we use. They can generate harmful and misleading content within seconds, including advice related to self-harm, eating disorders, substance misuse and suicide assistance. Only last week, I led a debate in Westminster Hall on the need for stronger AI regulation. That debate reinforced a growing concern that many AI-driven services currently sit at the edges of the Online Safety Act. Although Ofcom has acknowledged that gap and issued guidance, guidance alone is not enough. We need clarity on how generative AI is regulated and whether further legislative action is required to keep pace with the technology. The message of this petition is not a rejection of online safety; it is a call for a system that protects children while safeguarding freedom of expression, political engagement and public trust. The challenge before us is not to repeal, but to refine by strengthening definitions, clarifying age restrictions and ensuring that the Online Safety Act evolves alongside emerging technologies. If we get that right, we can protect users online without undermining the democratic values we try to defend.

• 10 Dec 2025 · Kashmir: Self-determination · Hansard source

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  Will the hon. Gentleman give way on that point?

• 10 Dec 2025 · Kashmir: Self-determination · Hansard source

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  I thank the hon. Member for Bradford East (Imran Hussain) for securing this debate. For some, Kashmir is seen as a geopolitical flashpoint, but for thousands of people in my constituency and across the UK, it is something far more personal and intimate. It is a place where their parents were born, the place where their children’s grandparents still live and the place they call home, even from thousands of miles away. My office has heard from many families who were gripped by fear as the recent violence escalated. One article described the situation bluntly: “We were not able to step outside of our homes because of the intensity of firing from both sides. We could only hear loud bangs from inside.” Others shared the heartbreak of losing relatives in the clashes, and several wrote to me terrified because their elderly parents were visiting during the violence and became stranded, unable to return safely. These are not distant political events; they are lived experiences for people I represent. The human rights violations that we have heard about from Members on both sides of the Chamber do not exist in isolation. The root causes go back decades to the 1947 partition and the unresolved question of Kashmir’s political status, with incursions and human rights abuses from both the Indian side and the Pakistani side—a legacy of imperial decision making that continues to shape instability today. The violence is escalating, and the reports that India intends to impose Israel-style policies in Kashmir—demographic engineering, land dispossession and silencing of activists—only deepen the urgency. The right to self-determination is not optional. It is enshrined in UN Security Council resolutions 47 and 51. For 77 years, this promise has been denied. As a permanent member of the Security Council and a nation that champions democracy and human rights, the UK must act. I urge the Government to lead on human rights, and demand and facilitate independent investigations into atrocities on both sides of the line of control; to push for and facilitate dialogue, and to use our diplomatic influence to bring India, Pakistan and the Kashmiri representatives around the negotiating table; to support and enforce the 18 UN resolutions since 1947, none of which has been fully implemented, and especially advocate for a free and fair plebiscite; and to provide humanitarian support as required to protect civilian life on both sides of the line of control.

• 10 Dec 2025 · AI Safety · Hansard source

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  The hon. Member touches on a broader point: any area with experts and specialist requirements for end users or for the use of that tool for an audience or demographic must directly involve those people and experts in the development, testing, verification and follow-up auditing of the effectiveness of those tools. AI companies are racing to build increasingly capable AI with the explicit end goal of creating AI that is equal to or able to exceed the most capable human intellectual ability across all domains. AI companies are also pursuing AI that can be used to accelerate their own AI developments, so it is a self-developing, self-perpetuating technology. For that reason, many experts, some of whom I have quoted, say that this will lead to artificial super-intelligence soon after. ASI is an AI system that significantly exceeds the upper limit of human intellectual ability across all domains. The concerns, risks and dangers of AI are current and will only get worse. We are already seeing systems behave in ways that no one designed, deceiving users, manipulating their environments and showing the beginnings of self-preserving strategies: exactly the behaviours that researchers predicted if AI developed without restraint. There are documented examples of deception, where AI asked a human to approve something by lying, claiming to be a human with visual impairment contacting them. An example of manipulation can be found in Meta’s CICERO, an AI trained to play the game of “Diplomacy”, which achieved human-level performance by negotiating, forming alliances and then breaking them when it benefited. Researchers noted that language was used strategically to mislead other players and deceive them. That was not a glitch; it was the system discovering manipulation as an effective strategy. It taught itself how to deceive others to achieve an outcome. Even more concerning are cases where models behave in ways to resemble self-preservation. In recent tests on the DeepSeek R1 model, researchers found that it concealed its intentions, produced dangerously misleading advice and attempted to hack its reward signals when placed under pressure—behaviours it was never trained to exhibit. Those are early signs of systems acting beyond our instructions. More advanced systems are on the horizon. Artificial general intelligence and even artificial superintelligence are no longer confined to speculative fiction. As lawmakers, we must understand their potential impacts and ensure we establish the rules, standards and safeguards necessary to protect our economy, environment and society, if things go wrong. The potential risks, including extreme risks, posed by AI cannot be dismissed. This may be existential and cause the end of our species. The potential extinction risks from advanced AI, particularly through the emergence of superintelligence, will be the capacity to process vast amounts of data, demonstrate superior reasoning across domains and constantly seek to improve itself, ultimately outpacing humans in our ability to stop it in its tracks. The dangers of AI are rising. As I have said, AI is already displacing jobs, increasing inequalities, amplifying existing social and economic inequalities and threatening civil liberties. At the extreme, unregulated progress may create national security vulnerabilities with implications for the long-term survival of the human species. Empirical research in 2024 showed OpenAI occasionally displayed strategic deception in controlled environments. In one case, AI was found to bypass its own testing containment through a back door it created. Having been developed in environments that are allegedly ringfenced and disconnected from the wider world, AI is intelligent enough to find ways out. Right now, there is a significant lack of legislative measures to counter those developments, despite top AI engineers asking us for that. We currently have a laissez-faire system where a sandwich has more regulation than AI companies, or even that of the rigorous safety standards placed on pharmaceuticals or aviation companies, which protect public health. The UK cannot afford to fall behind on this. I do not want to dwell on doom and gloom; there is hope. The European Union, California and New York are leading the way on strong AI governance. The EU AI Act establishes a risk-based comprehensive regulatory framework. California is advancing detailed standards on system evaluations and algorithmic accountability, and New York has pioneered transparency and bias-audit rules for automated decision making. Those approaches show that democratic nations can take bold, responsible action to protect their citizens while fostering innovation. We in the UK are fortunate to have a world-leading ecosystem of AI safety researchers. The UK AI Security Institute conducts essential work testing frontier models for dangerous capabilities, but it currently relies on companies’ good will to provide deployment action. We stand at a threshold of an era defined by AI. Our responsibility as legislators is clear: we cannot afford complacency, nor can we allow the UK to drift into a position in where safety, transparency and accountability are afterthoughts, rather than foundational principles. The risk posed by advanced AI systems to our economy, our security and our very autonomy are real, escalating and well documented by the world’s leading experts. The United Kingdom has the scientific talent, the industrial capacity and the democratic mandate to lead in safe and trustworthy AI, but we lack the legislative framework to match that ambition. I urge the Government to urgently bring forward an AI Bill as a cross-party endeavour, and perhaps even set up a dedicated Select Committee for AI, given how serious the issue is.

• 10 Dec 2025 · AI Safety · Hansard source

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  I beg to move, That this House has considered AI safety. It is a pleasure to serve with you in the Chair, Ms Butler, and it is an honour and a privilege to open this really important debate. Artificial intelligence is the new frontier of humanity. It has become the most talked about and invested in technology on our planet. It is developing at a pace we have never seen before; it is already changing how we solve problems in science, medicine and industry; and it has delivered breakthroughs that were simply out of reach a few years ago. The potential benefits are real, and we are already seeing them; however, so are the risks and the threats, which is why we are here for this debate. I thank my colleague Aaron Lukas, as well as Axiom, the author of the book “Driven to Extinction: The Terminal Logic of Superintelligence”, and Joseph Miller and Jonathan Bostock from PauseAI for their help in preparing for this debate. I encourage all MPs to read the briefing they have been sent by PauseAI. AI is a very broad subject, but this debate is focused on AI safety—the possibility that AI systems could directly harm or kill people, whether through autonomous weapons, cyber-attacks, biological threats or escaping human control—and what the Government can do to protect us all. I will share examples of the benefits and opportunities, and move on to the real harms, threats and risks—or, as I call them, the good, the bad and the potential end of the world. On the good, AI systems in the NHS can analyse scans and test results in seconds, helping clinicians to spot serious conditions earlier and with greater accuracy. They are already being used to ease administrative loads, to improve how hospitals plan resources, to help to shorten waiting lists and to give doctors and nurses the time to focus on care rather than paperwork. The better use of AI can improve how Government services function. It can speed up the processing of visas, benefits, tax reviews and casework. It offers more accurate tools for detecting fraud and protecting public money. By modelling transport, housing and energy demand at a national scale, it can help Departments to make decisions based on evidence that they simply could not gather on their own. AI can also make everyday work across the public sector more efficient by taking on routine work and allowing civil servants to focus on the judgment, problem solving and human decisions that no system can replace. AI has already delivered breakthroughs in science and technology that were far beyond our reach only a few years ago. Problems once thought unsolvable are now being cracked in weeks or even days. One of the clearest examples is the work on protein folding, for which the 2024 Nobel prize for chemistry was awarded—not to chemists, but to AI experts John Jumper and Demis Hassabis at Google DeepMind. For decades scientists struggled to map the shapes of key proteins in the human body; the AI system AlphaFold has now solved thousands of them. A protein structure is often the key to developing new treatments for cancers, genetic disorders and antibiotic-resistant infections. What once took years of painstaking laboratory work can now be done in hours. We are beginning to see entirely new medicines designed by AI, with several AI-designed drug candidates already reaching clinical trials for conditions such as fibrosis and certain cancers. I could go on to list many other benefits, but in the interests of time I will move on to the bad. Alongside the many benefits, we have already seen how AI technology can cause real harm when it is deployed without care or regulation. In some cases, the damage has come from simple oversight; in others, from deliberate misuse. Either way, the consequences are no longer theoretical; they are affecting people’s lives today. In November 2025, Anthropic revealed the first documented large-scale cyber-attack driven almost entirely by AI, with minimal human involvement. A Chinese state-sponsored group exploited Anthropic’s Claude AI to conduct cyber-espionage on about 30 global targets, including major tech firms, financial institutions and Government agencies, with the AI handling 80% to 90% of the intrusion autonomously. Anthropic has warned that barriers to launching sophisticated attacks have fallen dramatically, meaning that even less experienced groups can carry out attacks of this kind. Mental health professionals are now treating AI psychosis, a phenomenon where individuals develop or experience worsening psychotic symptoms in connection with AI chatbot use. Documented cases include delusion, the conviction that AI has answers to the universe and paranoid schizophrenia. OpenAI disclosed that approximately 0.07% of ChatGPT users exhibit signs of mental health emergencies each week. With 800 million weekly users, that amounts to roughly 560,000 people per week being affected.

• 10 Dec 2025 · AI Safety · Hansard source

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  The enforcement processes that we have for existing regulations where human beings are providing that service are auditable. We do not have enforcement mechanisms for this kind of regulated service or information being provided by the internet or AI tools. There is a need to extend the scope of regulation but also the way in which we enforce that regulation for automated tools. I am a fan of innovation, growth and progress in society. However, we cannot move forward with progress at any cost. AI poses such a significant risk that if we do not regulate at the right time, we will not have a chance to get it back under control—it might be too late. Now is the time to start looking at this seriously and supporting the AI industry so that it is a force for good in society, not a future force of destruction. We are all facing a climate and nature emergency. AI is driving unprecedented growth in energy demand. According to the International Energy Agency, global data-centre electricity consumption will become slightly more than Japan’s total electricity consumption today. A House of Commons Library research briefing found that UK data centres currently consume 2.5% of the country’s electricity, with the sector’s consumption expected to rise fourfold by 2030. The increased demand strains the grid, slows transition to renewables and contributes to emissions that drive climate change. This issue must go hand in hand with our climate change obligations. Members have probably heard and read about AI’s impact on the job market. One of the clearest harms we are already seeing is the loss of jobs. That is not a future worry; it is happening now. Independent analysis shows that up to 8 million UK jobs are at risk from AI automation, with admin, customer service and junior professional roles being the most exposed. Another harm that we are already facing is the explosion of AI-driven scams. Generative AI-enabled scams have risen more than 450% in a single year, alongside a major surge in breached personal data and AI-generated phishing attempts. Deepfake-related fraud has increased by thousands of per cent, and one in every 20 identity-verification failures is now linked to AI manipulation. I move on to the ugly: the threat to the world. The idea that AI developers may lose control of the AI systems they create is not science fiction; it is the stated concern of the scientists who build this technology—the godfathers of AI, as we call them. One of them, Yoshua Bengio, has said: “If we build AIs that are smarter than us and are not aligned with us and compete with us, then we’re basically cooked”. Geoffrey Hinton, another godfather of AI and a winner of the Nobel prize in physics, said: “I actually think the risk is more than 50% of the existential threat”. Stuart Russell, the author of the standard AI textbook, says that if we pursue our current approach “then we will eventually lose control over the machines.” In May 2023, hundreds of AI researchers and industry leaders signed a statement declaring: “Mitigating the risk of extinction from AI should be a global priority alongside other societal-scale risks such as pandemics and nuclear war”. That is not scaremongering; these are professional experts who are warning us to make sure that this technology does not get out of control.

• 10 Dec 2025 · AI Safety · Hansard source

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  I thank all right hon. and hon. Members for taking part in this important debate. Amazing, informed and critical contributions have been made and it is important that the Government hear all of those. There were issues that I did not have time to cover such as the military and ethical use of AI. I think the whole thing about ethical use in any field where AI or any technology is applied is important. It is really hard at the moment for AI to be trained in innate human, ethical and moral behavioural standards. That is a challenge that needs to be overcome. Where there are actions taken by AI that can lead to harm, we should have human oversight and the four-eyes principle, or what we used to call GxP in the pharmaceutical industry, where a second person oversees certain approvals and decisions. Issues were raised around misinformation and the impact on our democracy, and also on the credibility and trustworthiness of individuals. Also raised was the gender imbalance and how AI represents men versus women, as well as the volume of data that is scraped and sourced from pornographic or illegitimate sexual violence against women videos. There should be a review of how that could be addressed quickly if AI regulation is not coming any time soon. On the last couple of points, I just reiterate my call for the UK to bring itself up to the current international standards and start taking a lead in building on, developing and refining those so that they are not destructive and damaging to growth and progress. On the investments and subsidies that we provide for foreign tech companies, they are great at onshoring costs, taking tax reliefs and subsidies and offshoring profits, so we never, ever benefit from the gain and the profits. I hope the Minister will look into that. Again, I thank everyone. Question put and agreed to. Resolved. That this House has considered AI safety.

• 10 Dec 2025 · AI Safety · Hansard source

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  I thank the hon. Lady for her intervention, and I am grateful for the work that her Select Committee is doing, but I gently suggest that we need representatives from all the other affected Select Committees, covering environment, defence and the Treasury, because AI will affect every single function of Government, and we need to work together to protect ourselves from the overall, holistic threat.

• 10 Dec 2025 · AI Safety · Hansard source

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  I am glad to hear that. If the United States and China race to build the strongest systems, let Britain be the nation that ensures the technology remains safe, accountable and under human control. That is a form of leadership every bit as important as engineering, and it is one that our nation is uniquely placed to deliver. This moment will not come again. We can choose to shape the future of AI, or we can wait for it to shape us. I believe that this country still has the courage, clarity and moral confidence to lead, and I invite the Government to take on that leadership role.

• 10 Dec 2025 · AI Safety · Hansard source

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  I completely agree. We have to consider the functionality available in these tools and the way they are used—wherever regulations exist for that service in our society, the same regulations should be applied to automated tools providing that service. Clearly, controlling an automated system will be more difficult than training healthcare professionals and auditing their effectiveness.

• 3 Dec 2025 · Terminal Illness: Mental Health Support · Hansard source

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  It is a pleasure to serve under your chairship, Sir Jeremy. I thank the hon. Member for Altrincham and Sale West (Mr Rand) for bringing this important topic for debate. When we talk about mental health, we often picture everyday stress, anxiety or the long waits for talking therapies, but there is a group of people whose mental health needs are profound, urgent and too often invisible: people living with a terminal illness. That is not a topic that we often think about in the grand scheme of mental health provision, but the need for emotional and mental support in that medical situation is momentous—a need that I hope none of us here ever experience. Mental health services and support in our country are at breaking point. More than 1.5 million adults in England—not necessarily suffering from a terminal illness, but just adults generally—are waiting for mental health support and treatment, and more than 500,000 children. Patients are eight to 12 times more likely to wait for mental health treatment than they are for physical health support. While waiting, approximately 42% of patients deteriorate and seek further assistance through A&E and other NHS services, increasing the burden on our already stretched NHS. For people with a terminal illness, the situation is even grimmer and bleaker; it brings fear, grief, uncertainty and, for many, isolation. Those feelings affect not just the person who is diagnosed, but partners, children and family members, who carry the emotional weight of uncertainty and the news they have just received. Yet mental health support at the end of life is still inconsistent, still underfunded and still far too dependent on location and charity rather than on rights and entitlements. Right now, access to mental health support at the end of life is a postcode lottery—one of the most troubling parts of this whole issue. In some areas, people can receive specialist psychological support, family counselling or bereavement services as part of their palliative care; in other areas, those services simply do not exist. Whether someone receives help often comes down to the resources of their local hospice, the strength of its fundraising base or the priorities of an overstretched local health system. That creates a deep and unacceptable inequality. Families in the most deprived communities—such as those in my Dewsbury and Batley constituency and in wider Kirklees—already at higher risk of poor health outcomes, are often those with the least access to emotional and mental health support at the end of life. Wealthier areas can sometimes raise the funds to keep services going; poorer areas cannot. A person’s final moments should not be shaped by how affluent their postcode is or whether their local hospice can afford another counsellor that year. If we are serious about dignity in palliative care, then we must be serious about ending that inequality. Mental health support should be a guaranteed part of end-of-life care everywhere, not a privilege that depends on geography or charity fundraising. A few weeks ago, I attended a meeting with Forget Me Not hospice in West Yorkshire here in Parliament with other MPs from Kirklees. Forget Me Not staff spoke powerfully about what it means to support people to live well until the end of life, and to die with dignity, comfort and emotional support. They welcome the recent £100 million capital funding, which will allow them to keep operating or to repair their facilities, but they are still short of revenue funding to maintain the staffing levels that they had. This coming year, they have had to cut £1 million from their budget, reducing the number of spaces available for treatment in their two hospices by 800 out of 2,100. The impact on Kirklees and my constituents is severe. I believe that the Government guaranteed three years of funding for revenue costs for hospices, but £25 million is a drop in the ocean. I ask the Minister to set out what the Government will do to address the huge shortfall in funding for hospices across our country. Without that additional funding, hospices are reducing staff or cannot plan staffing beyond three years now—before it was for one year. They cannot provide specialist therapy or mental health provision with certainty. Yet hospices are the very places offering the kind of care our NHS simply cannot replicate: time, counselling, bereavement support and a community that wraps around the entire family. They are asked to do more every single year, with less stability to do it. People with terminal illnesses need more than medication and pain management; they need psychological support to process what is happening to them. They need space to talk about fear, leaving family behind and loss of identity. Families—often the forgotten grievers—need support too. No one should spend their final months fighting for the counselling that might help them face the end of life with peace rather than fear. Believing in dignity at the end of life comes hand in hand with mental health support as a core part of palliative care that we should recognise in policy and fund in practice. We owe people living with terminal illness and their families who love them nothing less.

• 2 Dec 2025 · Dawood Family Justice Campaign · Hansard source

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  Saeed and Sakil Dawood were abducted and murdered in Gujarat, India in February 2002. Their nephew, my constituent Imran Dawood, survived the attack. For over 23 years, the family have sought accountability and the return of the victims’ remains. The previous Labour and Tory Governments supported the family during the court trials, which ended earlier this year without justice. I wrote to the Foreign Secretary on 1 October regarding the Dawood Family Justice Campaign that seeks repatriation of the victims’ remains. We held a parliamentary event on 22 October, to which the FCDO leadership were invited. Will the Foreign Secretary meet the Dawood family and will she commit to providing urgent direct support to assist further in securing the remains of their family members, held by the Indian Government for over two decades, and help the family to achieve some level of closure?

• 2 Dec 2025 · Dawood Family Justice Campaign · Hansard source

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  1. If she will meet with representatives of the Dawood Family Justice Campaign to discuss the potential repatriation of their family members’ remains.

• 2 Dec 2025 · Criminal Court Reform · Hansard source

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  The previous Government should hang their head in shame for leaving our judicial system—the courts, the backlog and the prison system—in such disarray. A 2022 survey of 373 legal professionals, conducted by barrister Keir Monteith KC and the University of Manchester, found that 56% of respondents had witnessed at least one judge acting in a racially biased way towards a defendant, while 52% had witnessed discrimination in judicial decision making, and concluded that there is “institutional racism in the justice system”. Given that the Justice Secretary now seeks to remove juries, does he foresee greater injustice, prejudice and racial discrimination in our courtrooms, and what steps is he taking to tackle the existing and likely increase in institutional racism?

• 1 Dec 2025 · Office for Budget Responsibility Forecasts · Hansard source

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  Apologies, Madam Deputy Speaker.

• 1 Dec 2025 · Office for Budget Responsibility Forecasts · Hansard source

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  According to the latest House of Commons Library briefing and the economic forecasts, the freeze on the income tax threshold is projected to raise over £38 billion per year by 2029-30. For comparison, the Institute for Fiscal Studies estimates that by 2030 the freeze will raise approximately £8 billion annually, which is similar to adding 1p to the basic rate of income tax. Does the Minister agree with the Chancellor’s statement that she met Labour’s manifesto pledge not to raise income taxes, and does he agree that she misled the public and this House?

• 1 Dec 2025 · Speech and Language Therapies · Hansard source

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  My constituency sits in Kirklees, which continues to face some of the most severe pressures in the country in relation to high needs and SEND provision, including long waits for EHCP assessments and strained specialist support. What additional resources will the Department provide to ensure that children with special educational needs and disabilities in areas such as my constituency receive timely and proper support?

• 1 Dec 2025 · Budget Resolutions · Hansard source

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  I will come to that in the short time I have remaining. It is not true that we do not have enough money to fix these problems. If the Chancellor was serious about rebuilding Britain, she would adopt straightforward, fairer tax reforms. As many Members across have said, we could raise tens of billions of pounds by closing loopholes that allow foreign multinationals to shift profits offshore and avoid paying UK corporation tax while onshoring expenses and taking advantage of subsidies and tax relief. We could implement the digital services tax that was originally promised, ensuring that big tech finally pays its fair share of its record profits. We could end the preferential treatment of income from wealth over income from work by taxing capital gains at closer parity with earnings. We could introduce a genuine windfall tax on excessive profits, particularly in energy, finance and banking, and reform tax reliefs that disproportionately benefit the wealthy, and instead redirect revenue to public services. These are not radical ideas; they are basic principles of fiscal fairness. The Budget is a moral statement, and today’s Budget shows us a Government who still choose war over welfare, profits over people, and short-term headlines over long-term stability. To borrow a phrase, they are choosing the few over the many.

• 1 Dec 2025 · Budget Resolutions · Hansard source

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  Will the hon. Lady give way?

• 1 Dec 2025 · Budget Resolutions · Hansard source

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  Will the right hon. Gentleman give way?

• 1 Dec 2025 · Budget Resolutions · Hansard source

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  Does the hon. Lady agree that the fossil fuel companies have put all their eggs in the basket of carbon-generating fossil fuels, and have not diversified over the past 30, 40 or 50 years? They have no other sources of income. Why should we pay the price for their profligacy?

• 1 Dec 2025 · Budget Resolutions · Hansard source

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  Does the hon. Lady agree that it is the linking of electricity prices and of renewable energy prices to gas that is creating these high energy prices, and that de-linking them would immediately cut prices for the consumer?

• 1 Dec 2025 · Budget Resolutions · Hansard source

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  I welcome the investment in the NHS and the reduction in waiting lists for everyone in our country, but does the hon. Member agree that over time, the money that is going to private companies to reduce the waiting lists should be redirected to the NHS, so that profits do not leave the NHS, and there is more money to treat patients?