Jeremy Hunt MP: speeches

Speeches

• 5 Jan 2026 · Venezuela · Hansard source

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  Most people’s thoughts on Maduro’s capture will be, “Good riddance”, and I would have liked the Government to have been more categorical in supporting US action to remove an illegitimate and evil dictator, but if the new US approach extends to the annexation of Greenland, the sovereign territory of a NATO member, it could mean the end of the alliance, with disastrous consequences. How much planning is going on at the Foreign Office to make sure that such a disaster does not happen? We understand that discussions between allies have to be private, but from the outside, it looks like Europe is weak and divided. Can the Foreign Secretary reassure the House that the right conversations are happening, and that we are not just hoping for the best?

• 26 Nov 2025 · Budget Resolutions · Hansard source

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  The hon. Gentleman is absolutely right that we should look at the facts, which are very clear: the OBR upgraded growth for this year, and then downgraded it for every single year of the forecast thereafter. The overall size of the economy is shrinking as a result of the measures taken by the Chancellor in the previous Budget—and, I am afraid, made much worse in this Budget. I agree with the hon. Gentleman that we need to go further on planning reform, but I do not think we have had any plan from the Government for the really substantive changes that would align incentives between local communities and national Government when it gets to things like planning approval for big infrastructure projects. I would cheer from the rafters if we heard that from the Chancellor, because it is urgently needed. Can the Government please not tell us that everything is going to be fine just because they are not the evil Tories? That is what I think is most disappointing of all, because those terrible Tories got inflation down from 11% to 2% and saw 4 million new jobs in the economy, as opposed to nearly 200,000 fewer. They grew the economy faster than France, Germany, Italy or Japan, and they attracted more greenfield foreign direct investment than anywhere in the world apart from China and the United States.

• 26 Nov 2025 · Budget Resolutions · Hansard source

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  I will give way one last time to my right hon. Friend.

• 26 Nov 2025 · Budget Resolutions · Hansard source

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  I am proud that I dealt with a real black hole of £72 billion, not a fake one of £22 billion, in my fiscal events, and I met the fiscal rules every time. If the hon. Lady is really concerned about that low headroom, why did the shadow Chancellor at the time—now the current Chancellor—not object once to the fact that headroom was reduced to that level? I will tell the House why she did not object: because if I had left headroom any higher, I would have had to cut spending more or increase taxes more, and that would have made the recession we were heading into deeper and worse, with more unemployment, fewer jobs and more poverty. That is why I am proud that I took the right decision. Even now, it may not be too late, because a Government who try to do the right thing with the time they have left are more likely to earn the trust of the British people than a Government who have given up. Please do not treat government as an exercise in survival. That would be a betrayal of the Government’s mandate. People with the broadest shoulders, as the Chancellor described them, will be rightly angry today. But it is the people who depend on public services, who are looking for a job and who are on the poverty line, who need a strong economy more than anyone else, and they will finish today feeling more scared than ever about their prospects.

• 26 Nov 2025 · Budget Resolutions · Hansard source

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  My hon. Friend is absolutely right. The Chancellor makes a great play of fiscal responsibility—incidentally, I hope she will correct the record, because she said that she was reducing debt, when the OBR’s economic and financial outlook says that it is going up from 95% of GDP to 96% of GDP. On my hon. Friend’s point, yes: when the previous Conservative Government came into office, the Government were borrowing nearly £1 in every £4 that we were spending on public services, and we reduced that deficit from 10% to 2%, and Labour opposed us every single step of the way.

• 26 Nov 2025 · Budget Resolutions · Hansard source

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  I absolutely agree with the hon. Gentleman, but I profoundly disagree on the way the Government are choosing to do that. By expanding the welfare bill and expanding the number of large families living in poverty, they are making the root causes of poverty worse and not better. The Chancellor says that there is a growth plan, but it was very difficult to discern it at all in today’s Budget. We know, for example, that raising public sector productivity to private sector levels would add 0.4% to annual GDP growth. We know that proper planning reforms would add 0.4%, that proper welfare reform would add 0.3% and that getting energy bills down properly would add 0.3%. We know that AI could dwarf all that, according to Microsoft and Accenture, potentially adding 1% a year. We got none of that today. Instead, we had a Government arriving in office saying that they wanted “Growth, growth, growth” without knowing how they were going to get there. Growth needs a plan, not a soundbite, and it is that lack of a plan—or even a guiding philosophy—that has resulted today in a Budget that damages growth, damages investment, damages jobs and, most tragically of all, damages opportunities for young people, of whom there will shortly be a million not in employment, education or training.

• 26 Nov 2025 · Budget Resolutions · Hansard source

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  I absolutely share the hon. Lady’s concern. That standard was introduced when I was Health Secretary. This could have been the Budget in which the Chancellor announced we would speed up treatment for people with mental illness and not park them on welfare. This could have been the Budget that said that we will eliminate fraud by stopping completely benefit applications by phone. It could have been the Budget that said that instead of relying on migration to help firms expand, we will make sure that people at home are fit to join the workforce. Instead, the welfare bill is going up by around £14 billion, not least because of the totally unfair abolition of the two-child cap, which I fear will see more children, not fewer, living in the structural poverty caused when there are no adults in the household at work.

• 26 Nov 2025 · Budget Resolutions · Hansard source

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  I recognise that the hon. Gentleman’s concern about child poverty is sincere; I just have a totally different view as to how to reduce child poverty in this country. I think financing people to have ever larger families will mean more children growing up in poverty, not fewer. The evidence for that is that under the previous Conservative Government, we had a million fewer children growing up in workless households, and child poverty in absolute terms fell. The hon. Gentleman needs to look at that evidence. The price we are paying for this mushrooming welfare bill is rising taxes which are already starting to destroy growth: 180,000 fewer payroll jobs in the last year; unemployment up, inflation up and interest rates higher than they would have been. The tragedy is that absolute poverty—which, as I said, fell under the previous Conservative Government—is now likely to rise under Labour as jobs vanish and welfare rolls soar.

• 26 Nov 2025 · Budget Resolutions · Hansard source

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  I would be happy to tell the hon. Lady which Government were responsible for 11% inflation: the Russian Government were responsible for 11% inflation. I will happily look in the eye the 200,000 fewer children in absolute poverty after a succession of Conservative Governments because of the 4 million jobs created on our watch. Let me say this. Those dreadful Tories also increased the number of doctors and nurses in the NHS by a third, and those posh Tories increased standards in state schools to have the highest reading standards in the western world. That, Madam Deputy Speaker, is because progressive instincts do not pay the bill for good public services—a strong economy does.

• 26 Nov 2025 · Budget Resolutions · Hansard source

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  I do not want to leave the hon. Lady out, but I promise that this will be my last intervention.

• 26 Nov 2025 · Budget Resolutions · Hansard source

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  Labour Members might find that hard to hear from a former Conservative Deputy Prime Minister, but they might want to listen to the Resolution Foundation, which has been saying exactly the same thing on the airwaves today. No one disputes the progressive credentials of the Resolution Foundation. It has been warning against this rise in the minimum wage and all the extra workers’ rights, which it says could lead to a crisis in youth unemployment.

• 26 Nov 2025 · Budget Resolutions · Hansard source

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  Budgets are not easy for Chancellors, because there are so many things beyond their control, but being forced to make trade-offs reveals priorities. I am afraid today’s priority was not economic growth, but political survival. That is because there was one central call the Chancellor had to make today: do we reform welfare, or do we raise tax? Getting our welfare bill down to pre-pandemic levels would save about £47 billion a year within five years. It would not have been easy, but it would have meant no tax rises and plenty of headroom in public finances. Instead, welfare spend is going up, and jobs and growth are going down. In every single day of the Government’s first year, around 2,200 people have been signed off not just work, but from even having to look for work. That is 1 million more people on universal credit just in the last year. Most of those claimants cite mental ill health, but every doctor I spoke to as Health Secretary said that people with anxiety and depression need social contact. That means being at work, not being at home.

• 24 Nov 2025 · Topical Questions · Hansard source

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  I thank the Minister for Housing and Planning for his constructive meeting last week on the community infrastructure levy. Could he tell the House whether Liberal Democrat-controlled councils such as mine in Waverley should be charging the community infrastructure levy to private householders who do a straightforward extension on their house?

• 20 Nov 2025 · Bus Services · Hansard source

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  My constituents in Cranleigh, Shamley Green, Bramley and Shalford find it very difficult to get to their local hospital in Guildford, and to the community hospital in Milford. There is no direct bus service. A quarter of older people do not have cars. What will the Government do to help them solve that problem, which is becoming more and more difficult?

• 19 Nov 2025 · Myalgic Encephalomyelitis · Hansard source

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  It is a privilege to speak under your chairship, Mr Mundell. I thank the hon. Member for Wells and Mendip Hills (Tessa Munt) for calling this debate. I would like to use my short time to tell the story of a young man who made me understand the tragedy of ME six years ago. He was a very promising first-year student at Durham University called Tom. He was on track to get a first in maths. He was a big hockey player, but in his second year, he started struggling, first to walk upstairs and to climb hills, and eventually he found that he could not wash himself, eat by himself or even read. Then, to his enormous frustration, he dropped out in his third year. When all his friends were starting a new life with their first job, he had to stay at home and go through the nightmare of first trying to get a diagnosis and get someone to agree that he had a problem, and then trying to get treatment for it. Tom felt that he was going in circles: doctors were not really persuaded and he was not getting any answers. He was very lucky because he had two remarkable parents, Alex and Denise, who could afford to go to America. In fact, they moved to America and they got him enrolled on clinical trials. This story has a positive ending, because six years on, he is doing incredibly well. He is actually thriving; he has a job and a partner, and his life is back on track—except, sadly, in America rather than here. As the hon. Member for Wells and Mendip Hills said, there are 400,000 people with ME or with long covid symptoms that are like severe ME. For some of them, it is already too late. Maeve Boothby O’Neill and Sarah Lewis tragically lost their lives, and coroners issued prevention of future deaths notices.

• 19 Nov 2025 · Myalgic Encephalomyelitis · Hansard source

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  I thank the hon. Lady for talking about that very sad case. I actually think that the NHS is better than it was because of long covid. The real cause for hope is Edinburgh University’s DecodeME study, which the chief executive of Action for ME, Sonya Chowdhury, described to me as being like a treasure hunt map with eight crosses where there is a genetic code that matches ME, but where we then have to go and dig up that treasure. That is what is now waiting to happen, and why funding is so important. Ultimately, with the quality of research in this country, there should be no need for anyone to have to go to the United States or Germany for their treatment. During the pandemic, more lives were saved through treatments and vaccines discovered in this country than any other country in the world. We have amazing research happening here. My plea to the Government is this: the last Government started the process by ignoring some of the scepticism in the medical community about whether ME was really a serious condition. It would be fantastic, and it would give so much hope, if this Government could now finish the job and invest in research that will transform the lives of so many people like Tom.

• 13 Oct 2025 · Security Update: Official Secrets Act Case · Hansard source

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  The Minister said categorically and very carefully that the National Security Adviser took no decisions as to the contents of the evidence provided to the CPS. Will he clarify for the House whether the NSA had any influence at all—direct or indirect, and whether about provision or omission—over the contents of that evidence, provided by his own deputy, which led to the collapse of the trial?

• 13 Oct 2025 · Topical Questions · Hansard source

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  My constituent Steve Dally was charged £70,000 by Liberal Democrat-controlled Waverley borough council for the apparent crime of building a home extension. I met the Housing Minister earlier this year to talk about abuse of the community infrastructure levy. Could he update the House on his plans to stop it?

• 13 Oct 2025 · Baby Loss · Hansard source

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  It is a great privilege to follow the hon. Member for Rossendale and Darwen (Andy MacNae). I thank him for working with me and the hon. Member for Sherwood Forest (Michelle Welsh) to secure the debate, and I thank my many colleagues on the all-party parliamentary group on patient safety. I would also like to thank the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, the right hon. Member for Ilford North (Wes Streeting), for being here himself today. It means an enormous amount to families up and down the country to see that commitment from him. I know it is an issue in which he has taken enormous personal interest. I think the most difficult meeting I had when I was doing his job many years ago was with a man called Carl Hendrickson, who came to see me a few days before I stood at that Dispatch Box to give the statement on the Morecambe Bay inquiry. Carl lost both his wife and his son at Morecambe Bay NHS Foundation Trust. A midwife mistook some fitting by his wife as just fainting. His wife died an hour later from an embolism. The next day, his son Chester died from brain damage. He came to see me with his 11-year-old son, Conrad. I will never forget it, because it was obviously going to be a very difficult meeting and I asked him whether he would like his son to sit outside with some of the civil servants while we discussed what happened. He said no, because he wanted his son to know, for the rest of his life, that he had taken his concerns about what went wrong right to the very top and asked awkward questions. And that was what he did. I owe a great debt to the Morecambe Bay families: to Carl and to Simon Davey, Liza Brady, James Titcombe and many others. The American thinker Margaret Mead had a saying: “Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful committed individuals can change the world; indeed, it’s the only thing that ever has.” For me, those Morecambe Bay families were that small group of thoughtful, committed people, along with the families from Mid Staffs, Shrewsbury and Telford, East Kent, Nottingham and many other places. As we reflect in this very sad and meaningful Baby Loss Awareness Week about what has gone wrong, it is also important to remember that progress has been made since then. Since the Morecambe Bay inquiry, the overall number of baby deaths is down by about 20%. That is about 700 fewer a year, or two fewer a day. The NHS is better than it was about being honest about mistakes. There have been a lot of reforms. We have a chief inspector of hospitals and a CQC that is set up to call a spade a spade when there is poor care. We have the duty of candour, which will be further strengthened by the new Hillsborough law. We have medical examiners, we have Martha’s rule and we have “freedom to speak up” guardians. Despite those improvements, there are some warning signs. Since the pandemic, the decline in baby deaths has plateaued. The number of maternal deaths has actually increased. As the hon. Member for Rossendale and Darwen just said, there is big inequality. You are far more likely to die as a black or Asian mum. You are far more likely to die as a black or Asian baby, or a baby from a deprived background, than other babies. Still we have a third of NHS staff, according to the staff survey last year, saying that they are afraid to raise safety concerns, and half saying that they do not think anything will happen if they do. The thing that is so important to remember—I have said this to the House on many occasions—is that if you are in a birthing unit and present at a C-section and something goes wrong, there is nothing as a professional that you want more than to be open, honest and transparent about what happened, so that lessons can be learned and you can make sure that mistake never happens again. But our system makes that practically impossible. We have the CQC, the NMC, the General Medical Council and the trust. Lawyers get involved and people worry. There is jeopardy for clinicians: that if they are honest and open about the ordinary human mistakes that anyone can make, they will be punished for it. The result is that the one thing that needs to happen more than anything else—truthfulness to the bereaved families and learning the lessons so that the tragedy is not repeated—can be the very thing that does not happen at all. Instead, we get a five-year legal process happening and the truth is not established for maybe five, six or seven years after that. So what needs to happen to put it right? We all have our lists of things, and I echo absolutely everything that was said in the wonderful speech before mine. For me, first of all, it is absolutely essential that we get the CQC back on its feet. It went badly wrong, but under new leadership that the Secretary of State has put in place, I believe it is now going in absolutely the right direction. We must return to the one-word ratings so that parents and families know absolutely whether the care in their local hospital or NHS organisation is safe. That is really important. Secondly, we have a litigation culture. At the moment we spend about £3.5 billion annually in maternity awards for where maternity care has gone wrong, which is not far off the £4 billion total cost of all NHS maternity units. It has gone so badly wrong that many parents think that when something goes wrong, their only friend is not a doctor but a lawyer—that cannot be right. We need to have much better accountability. The Government are rightly absolutely committed to bringing back family doctors. People having their own GP would make an enormous difference, because at the moment there is no one inside the NHS to turn to when these things go wrong, and going back to the system of everyone having their own GP could make a really big difference to that. We need to support the work of brilliant charities such as Tommy’s, Sands, the Clinical Human Factors Group and Baby Lifeline in their contribution to making maternity care safer. We also need to tackle the dangerous culture of “normal” births, which still sees too many mothers steered away from getting a surgical intervention when that would be the safest route for them and their baby. Those are all important changes. I would like to say one final thing, which is that we must not return to a targets culture. I have some concerns about the new NHS league tables. I know they are set up with the best of intentions, but safety and quality is not one of the factors that ensures a move up the list. I know the Secretary of State will take great care in the way that those are implemented, but I think it is really important that there is always a bottom line—a floor—on safety and quality below which the system never goes. What I really want to say to the House, in conclusion, is that we must not lose hope. If we had the same levels of maternity safety as Sweden, one fewer baby would die every day; if we got to the same levels as Japan, two fewer babies would die every day. If we could get the NHS back on the trajectory it was on in the years leading up to the pandemic, we would be able to get to care as safe as Sweden’s in the next five or six years, so it really is something within our grasp. I will finish by saying this. The NHS was set up on the premise of equality, and the idea that no matter who we are—whether we are rich or poor, young or old, from the north or the south, from the city or the country—everyone should be able to access the healthcare they need. Everyone means every baby, too. We talk about safety more than any other healthcare system in the world. In this very sad week, when we remember all the people who have lost their dear babies and their dear loved ones in the process of having babies, let us redouble our efforts to make the NHS the safest, highest-quality healthcare system in the world.

• 22 Jul 2025 · Neighbourhood Health Services · Hansard source

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  My constituents in Cranleigh have no train service and no direct bus service to the Royal Surrey County hospital in Guildford, which is a big issue for older residents who do not drive. Does the Secretary of State agree that some of the empty rooms in Cranleigh Village hospital could provide a very good opportunity for the expansion of neighbourhood health services, and if he has not been briefed on this pressing issue by his officials, may I brief him, or one of his Ministers, on it in the autumn?

• 17 Jul 2025 · Freedom of Religion or Belief: UK Foreign Policy · Hansard source

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  I thank the hon. Member for the brilliant job he is doing as our religious freedom envoy, which has support across the House. Does he agree that for all sorts of reasons, including political correctness and a worry about being seen to be glorifying our imperial history, our foreign policy has not done enough on freedom of religion and belief, but that countries that start to erode religious freedoms soon erode other freedoms as well, which is why it is vital that we redouble our efforts?

• 15 Jul 2025 · Taxes · Hansard source

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  Does the shadow Chancellor agree that, following the welfare U-turns, public finances today are in a far worse state than they were a year ago when the Government came into office? There is a crucial difference: a year ago, the Conservative Government were taking difficult decisions to bring taxes down in order to grow the economy; because this Labour Government are failing to take those decisions, there is only one way taxes can go, and that is up.