Jess Brown-Fuller MP: speeches 2025
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Speeches
- 16 Dec 2025 · Topical Questions · Hansard source
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Andrew Turner has been fighting on behalf of parents of disabled children across the country who cannot access their children’s trust fund when their child turns 18, even though that money could provide support for the additional cost of living that comes from being a profoundly disabled young adult. Andrew has seen 10 Justice Ministers come and go since he started his campaign. Will the Minister assure me that the current Minister will be the last one Andrew has to meet before the situation is remedied?
- 16 Dec 2025 · Legal Aid · Hansard source
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My question follows on from that of the Chair of the Select Committee. In 2024, 39% of family court proceedings involved neither party being legally represented; in cases of domestic abuse, this forces victims to relive their experiences and confront their trauma repeatedly. The provision of legal aid in such cases is wholly inadequate, which presents an unacceptable barrier to many victims accessing fair and effective legal representation. Does the Secretary of State agree with me and the Domestic Abuse Commissioner that legal aid should be provided in all domestic abuse cases to end self-representation and protect victims from retraumatisation?
- 16 Dec 2025 · Planning Reform · Hansard source
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The Minister referred in his statement to the housing crisis we face, yet there are an estimated 1.4 million homes with planning permissions that are yet to be built. We know that developers favour land banking—waiting until the situation is so acute that they can then deliver those homes for more money, or renege on their commitment to deliver social homes by claiming that the cost pressures mean that they can no longer be delivered. We have seen that in my constituency. Does the Minister therefore agree that “use it or lose it” planning permission would get houses built, and that he does not have a housing crisis, but a building crisis?
- 16 Dec 2025 · Finance (No. 2) Bill · Hansard source
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The right hon. Member is making an impassioned speech that certainly represents the feeling of farmers in my rural constituency. Does he agree that farmers are also up in arms at these billionaire companies that are ripping small farms out of the system and building their empires? Any time the small family farms do make a profit, they reinvest it straight back into the farm so that they can farm the following year.
- 15 Dec 2025 · NHS: Winter Preparedness · Hansard source
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My constituent Fred is eligible for a flu vaccination, but has had his appointment cancelled three times due to a lack of vaccines in the local area. Pharmacies and GPs are asked to guess what their need will be, sometimes a year in advance and without sight of the JCVI’s eligibility criteria, and this naturally results in conservative estimates, so that they do not have waste. What emergency measures are the Government taking to get additional vaccines to rural and coastal areas like mine, in order to slow down the crisis in our A&E?
- 15 Dec 2025 · Veterans · Hansard source
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My constituent Liz was thrown out of the military for being gay and has since received redress for this injustice via the LGBT financial recognition scheme. Liz told me that she has never attended any veteran support group because her discharge from the military left her feeling unworthy of the title of veteran. What steps is the Department taking to encourage those veterans to engage with support schemes like the brilliant female veterans scheme running at Tuppenny Barn in Southbourne in my constituency to rebuild trust after the grave injustice that they experienced?
- 15 Dec 2025 · Veterans · Hansard source
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13. What steps he is taking to ensure that veterans receive adequate support after leaving the armed forces.
- 9 Dec 2025 · Creative Education · Hansard source
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Does the Minister agree that a creative arts education opens up multiple opportunities and careers for young people that do not necessarily involve being on a stage or creating music? The creative industries need intelligent engineers to make the lights and sound work, so a creative education can open many doors to exciting careers in the creative industries.
- 9 Dec 2025 · Creative Education · Hansard source
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Will the Minister give way?
- 9 Dec 2025 · Water Scarcity · Hansard source
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I thank my hon. Friend for making a valid point. I am sure that for that reason, she agrees that the best way to address our failing water system is to make water companies into public benefit interest companies, so they are beholden to their customers and the environment before the needs of their shareholders. Although these companies may profess to care about the public, they are always looking far more closely at the bottom line and how shareholders feel. With confidence in water companies at an all-time low, Southern Water being one of the worst offenders, it is hard to believe that the Secretary of State will sign off on the Havant Thicket project without encouraging the company to prove that all other options have been exhausted. I would appreciate it if the Minister provided an update on whether the Government are in favour of the scheme. I understand that the decision has been deferred until spring 2026. That provides an opportunity for the Minister to meet local campaigners from my constituency and the neighbouring one who would love to share their thoughts on the project, which could end up providing a blueprint for the rest of the UK. Water scarcity is not just about supply. It is also about demand, which is rising exponentially with a projected deficit of billions of litres of water a day, as many hon. Members have mentioned. That is why I tabled an amendment to the Planning and Infrastructure Bill calling for all new developments to introduce dual piping at the build stage so that households could introduce grey water recycling into their homes without a huge cost. The cost to the developer would have been very small—we are talking in the single hundreds of pounds—and yet if households had decided to start using grey water in their washing machines, for example, or to flush their toilets, they could have made huge savings in the long run. Although the Government chose not to accept my amendment, there does need to be a serious conversation about the use of grey water to reduce demand on drinking water. We also need urgently to implement schedule 3 to the Flood and Water Management Act 2010, which is long overdue. Although local authorities can choose to make SUDS mandatory for all new developments—I know the Minister is passionate about SUDS, as she has told me in many a Westminster Hall debate—as my local authority, Chichester district council, has done, it is still not mandatory across the country, so I would appreciate an update from the Minister on the review of schedule 3. Portsmouth Water is undertaking a project in my constituency of Chichester to install meters on every property for which it provides water, which should mean that those that use more water pay more, and those who are conscious of their water use see a saving on their bills. With water bills going up exponentially across the country, I am sure that would be a welcome saving to lots of my constituents in Chichester.
- 9 Dec 2025 · Water Scarcity · Hansard source
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It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mr Stuart. I am very aware that the Division bell might ring at any moment to signal that we have to go to the main Chamber for a vote, so I will very slowly begin what I had planned to be a three or four-minute speech, while waiting for the bell to ring. I thank my hon. Friend the Member for Horsham (John Milne)— [ Interruption. ]
- 9 Dec 2025 · Water Scarcity · Hansard source
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It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mr Stuart, as much as it was 15 minutes ago. I thank my hon. Friend the Member for Horsham for securing this important debate. The south-east, where my constituency is, has been designated as water stressed since 2021. As reflected in many of the contributions, that sometimes feels quite hard to believe in such a wet country. Much of my constituency is a low-lying coastal plain, and weather volatility is causing severe conditions on both ends of the scale. Droughts and floods are a commonplace occurrence, whereas before they were less likely. I would like briefly to talk about chalk streams. I am very lucky to represent two of England’s 200 chalk streams, and over-abstraction on the River Ems over many years means that the point of constant flow has moved two kilometres downstream since the 1960s. That means that a large proportion of the river is drying up every summer when it never used to. Constituents have told me harrowing accounts of trying to rescue the salmon that migrate down the River Ems, and it feels like a total catastrophe when people are trying to save those fish. The Test and the Itchen, just outside my constituency, are also rare habitats and important chalk streams. They, too, are really impacted by over-abstraction. To address that, Portsmouth Water is building the first new reservoir in more than 30 years, the Havant Thicket reservoir, just on the border of my constituency. That was largely favoured by the local community, because it would create a new space and an exciting environment for people to visit and walk around. Then Southern Water got involved. It saw this brilliant idea that was popular among the population, and it put forward a proposal to invest in Havant Thicket with Portsmouth Water by introducing an effluent recycling scheme, the first of its kind in this country to supplement our drinking water supply. By investing in that technology, Southern Water can use clever accounting tricks to maintain its bottom line by describing the technology as an asset rather than investing in fixing its existing infrastructure, which is much less appealing to its shareholders. The cost of the scheme to introduce effluent recycling into the drinking water supply at the Havant Thicket reservoir is estimated to be £1.2 billion, but the costs are spiralling every year. There is also no lasting legacy to this project. The plant will become redundant in 60 years, but customers will be paying for it in their bills for far longer. It is also hugely energy intensive. At the same time, as many hon. Members have mentioned, Southern Water wastes 100 million litres of water every day from leaky pipes that it has failed to maintain.
- 9 Dec 2025 · Water Scarcity · Hansard source
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My hon. Friend raises an important point about the infrastructure necessary at waste water treatment works. In Bosham in my constituency, a new development is coming online, which has hundreds of homes. Currently, Southern Water says that it does not have any more capacity at the waste water treatment works. Yet because it has the statutory duty to connect, people will potentially be moving into the homes without any of the water infrastructure. Meanwhile Chichester harbour, which is a protected landscape, is having more and more sewage dumped into it because the water infrastructure has not kept pace. Does my hon. Friend agree that water companies should play an important role in the planning decisions before the houses are brought online, so that those houses are built where the infrastructure is?
- 9 Dec 2025 · Water Scarcity · Hansard source
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Will the hon. Member join me in asking the Minister to share her thoughts on the Southern Water boss having an incredible pay rise to get round the fact that bonuses for chief executives have been banned? These private companies will always find workarounds unless we change the structure of the water companies themselves.
- 8 Dec 2025 · Child Poverty Strategy · Hansard source
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I refer Members to my entry in the Register of Members’ Financial Interests as chair of the all-party parliamentary group for infant feeding. The Government’s response to the Competition and Markets Authority’s report into infant formula, which aims to give parents the confidence to choose any brand of formula regardless of price point, because they are all nutritionally equivalent, is a welcome first step as part of the child poverty strategy, but without tackling and enforcing the marketing legislation so that formula companies cannot continue to use intangible claims on their packaging, the Government’s announcement will not protect all parents. Will the Secretary of State please tell me when we can expect the legislation to be reviewed, as committed to in the Government’s announcement last week?
- 8 Dec 2025 · Restriction of Jury Trials · Hansard source
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The Liberal Democrats agree that under the current system victims and survivors of rape are being failed and far too few see justice served. However, for those victims who do decide to proceed through the justice system, fewer than 10% withdraw after a charge has been made, so the Deputy Prime Minister’s standing in the Chamber and using an assessment of the data to justify his reasoning for removing jury trials does not hold up to scrutiny. It seems that a number of the Deputy Prime Minister’s Back Benchers, including the former Deputy Prime Minister, the right hon. Member for Ashton-under-Lyne (Angela Rayner), agree with the Liberal Democrats that the delays that plague our system will not be addressed by reducing jury trials, with the Government neither diagnosing the cause of the crisis nor providing the solutions to the record backlog. How do the Government justify restricting jury trials when backlog issues are caused by court mismanagement and broken private contracts rather than the jury system, as identified and confirmed by those working in the system from all sides? Will the Minister confirm which stakeholders, including victim support organisations and legal professionals, have been consulted on the reforms? What feedback has she received?
- 3 Dec 2025 · Local Media · Hansard source
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Does the Minister recognise that, while we are talking about the struggles local media outlets are facing—and that huge drop in revenue over 15 years—taking away £32 million by removing the opportunity for them to carry advertisements for licence changes could have a huge impact?
- 3 Dec 2025 · Local Media · Hansard source
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The shadow Minister makes a very valid point about businesses diversifying and utilising the new online space. I have V2 Radio in my patch, which is a relatively new radio station, but in order to attract people to its radio station, it also puts its news on social media and has a really active website. It also plays a huge role with the voluntary sector in large campaigns that spread across the constituency. It does a Christmas appeal every year and a “Beds for Kids” campaign earlier this year, getting beds for young people who do not have them. Does the shadow Minister agree that the companies that are diversifying and making sure that their news gets to everybody who wants it are more likely to succeed in this complicated framework that we now live in?
- 2 Dec 2025 · Catapults and Antisocial Behaviour · Hansard source
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The Minister raises a really important point about data. I say the same whenever I am out in my constituency doing Q&As—report, report, report—but there is always a reticence from my constituents, who say that they feel like they are reporting all the time, then they never hear back from the police and they are not sure where the information goes. Also, when they are talking about antisocial behaviour, there is always a concern that it is going to come back on them and they will be identified as the people who are actively reporting these crimes. Can the Minister provide any advice for those constituents who feel anxious about consistently reporting and feel like they are being a burden or a nuisance?
- 2 Dec 2025 · Catapults and Antisocial Behaviour · Hansard source
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I congratulate the hon. and gallant Member for Spelthorne (Lincoln Jopp) on securing this important debate. As many Members present will attest, there appears to be a rising use of catapults, as well as an increase in antisocial behaviour more broadly, especially in areas with large bodies of water but also in towns and cities. Since the election last year, I too have heard sickening reports of catapults being used to fire metal ball bearings in attempts to kill or injure wildfowl and other birds in our local communities. Videos of such acts tend to end up on social media and spread quickly. The footage is deeply disturbing to anyone decent and respectful of our natural environment and wildlife. The consequences are felt acutely by organisations such as Brent Lodge wildlife hospital in my constituency. During a visit earlier this year, the people there told me that they are treating an increasing number of birds injured by solid projectiles. Those acts fundamentally represent wider societal failings. We must do more to educate children and their caregivers so that they understand that this behaviour is completely unacceptable. It is especially pertinent—this was alluded to by the hon. Member for Windsor (Jack Rankin) —given the known link between those who injure animals and those who go on to think it is acceptable to injure humans. Societal investment in addressing such behaviours as early as possible would prevent further harm in the future. With social media a prevalent way of young people engaging with society, it does not take long for a trend to catch on, and injuring wildlife is one of the more appalling recent trends to have spread quickly. Brent Lodge hired an outreach officer who has been spending time going to schools and talking about wildlife crime to educate and inform, and I applaud those efforts. An X-ray of the brain of a swan that has been hit repeatedly by an air gun is not an image that a young person who is shown it will be quick to forget. A concern expressed repeatedly by those who write to me is the feeling that, despite reporting such acts to the police, nothing will happen—certainly no form of punishment or intervention by the schools, even when the local community could identify the people who carried out the crime. Their experiences reflect a troubling national picture: just 6% of crimes reported to the police lead to a suspect being charged, and 6,000 cases per day are closed without a suspect being identified. Responsibility for those statistics lies firmly with the previous Government, who in the decade prior to this Parliament hollowed out our local police forces. Since 2015, the number of police community support officers has fallen by more than 4,500, leaving our local police forces with a near impossible task. In particular in rural communities, where officers must cover huge areas, the police are overstretched, under-resourced and unable to focus on the crimes that affect our communities the most. The lack of visibility is clear, because individuals engaging in criminal and antisocial behaviour feel emboldened to continue when no one is following it up, even when they are caught in the act. Beyond the barbaric use of catapults, I have received further complaints from constituents about individuals climbing public buildings, threatening and abusive behaviour in our high streets, and the dangerous riding of high-speed e-bikes. There is also a persistent issue in constituencies such as mine with specific rural crimes such as hare coursing and theft of farm equipment. Those who contact me about those crimes say, again, that their faith in the police to address them is low, but they understand that the pressures on the police are such that they are going to the most serious cases, and often a farmer reporting people in their field chasing hares fundamentally is not understood at a police call centre. Everyone deserves to feel safe in their own home and walking down their own streets, and that applies to the wildlife that we live with as well. Everyone deserves to feel that their property is protected and that if someone tries to take it, a real effort will be made to recover it. However, for too many people in the UK today, that is simply not the reality. The Government must take urgent action to address that—first, by reversing the trend of decreasing numbers of PCSOs and special constables, and ensuring that forces have the resources to deal with the issues that society is facing. The Liberal Democrats are also calling for the creation of a national online crime agency to tackle online fraud and abuse, which would free up local police officers to spend more time doing the thing that they want to do and is why they joined the police in the first place: community policing. They would be able to spend more time dealing with burglaries, neighbourhood crime and antisocial behaviour such as that we have discussed today. We also need a renewed commitment to tackling the declining number of police desks, which dropped by 25% between 2015 and 2025. That has contributed significantly to the sense of police disappearing from our streets. We would ensure that police desks were placed in community hubs, including libraries and shopping centres. What steps are the Government taking to provide specific support for police forces such as mine to deal with rising antisocial behaviour and the use of catapults against wildlife, and what are they doing to reverse the trend of declining numbers of PCSOs and police desks in communities, which would ensure that a visible police presence returned to our rural constituencies?
- 2 Dec 2025 · Criminal Court Reform · Hansard source
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The Government’s plan, announced today, to reduce the use of trial by jury would be an historic upheaval of our court system, with profound consequences. The Justice Secretary has not argued in favour of judge-only trials on their own terms; instead, he has argued that there is no alternative, which is simply not true. Many within the legal profession have argued that removing trial by jury is a misdirection from the multitude of problems that underlie the backlog. Those problems, caused by years of Conservative mismanagement, have resulted in countless wasted hours of sitting time and in victims failed time and again. Perhaps the defendant does not arrive in court because of the broken private contract, there is no interpreter, the witness care unit forgets to tell witnesses to attend, key evidence is not served until the day of trial so the defence has no time to consider it, or there are not enough court staff to manage security on the door, so the trial runs late. Maybe our crumbling court infrastructure means there is no running water, a broken lift or even a flooded courtroom. We need a real solution to tackle these issues that plague our justice system, but instead the Justice Secretary intends to remove a huge number of jury trials, despite his previous opposition to that, all while the Ministry of Justice capital budget is being cut by 3% in real terms every year. While I welcome the £500 million investment in victims and witness support over three years, the total courts maintenance backlog is estimated at £1.3 billion. Where is the investment to fix the collapsing infrastructure in the justice system? Will the Justice Secretary consider reopening many of the Crown courts closed under the Conservatives, including mine in Chichester? As he confirmed to the media today, an entire jury’s worth of prisoners have been released in error in recent weeks. Does the Secretary of State have confidence in his Department to oversee such an extreme and radical reform when it is not even getting the basics right?
- 27 Nov 2025 · Business of the House · Hansard source
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The Chichester district council local plan was finally adopted this summer after years of speculative development in our area in the wrong places and without the right infrastructure to go with it. This robust local plan was hard fought for by local councillors, but this Government’s new housing targets are putting more pressure on areas such as mine to deliver more homes, and it could render the local plan essentially meaningless. Appeals are being won for development on greenfield sites and farmland that were not identified in this hard-fought-for local plan. Will the Leader of the House please make time to debate the effectiveness of the Government’s planning policy, which disproportionately affects constituencies such as mine?
- 27 Nov 2025 · Access to Arts and Culture · Hansard source
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I refer Members to my entry in the Register of Members’ Financial Interests, as I am the chair of the all-party parliamentary group for performing arts education and training— I said that as quickly as I could! The music and dance scheme funds exceptional schools that train the next generation of artists who will go on to lead the industry, both on and off the stage. Those schools nurture talent regardless of wealth, and are the very definition of social mobility, but some are now at risk of closure because the fund is not guaranteed beyond next year. Will the Minister guarantee secure, ringfenced funding so that those vital institutions can continue to increase access to an industry that has been identified as a leading area of growth?
- 27 Nov 2025 · Domestic Abuse: Children · Hansard source
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It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Ms Jardine. I thank the hon. Member for Isle of Wight West (Mr Quigley) for securing this timely and poignant debate, highlighting that children in their own right are victims of domestic abuse, and sharing some powerful words from his constituents. That is never easy to do, and I commend him for that. Children should be growing up in a safe and loving home, free from violence and fear, and that is not the case for so many. The hon. Member shared a really powerful phrase—domestic abuse does not affect one generation; it echoes through the next. By the end of my speech today, the police will have recorded 11 more instances of domestic abuse. Every 40 seconds, a call is made to the authorities reporting a domestic abuse incident, but analysis shows that only one in five victims of domestic abuse will actually make a report. The Office for National Statistics estimates that there were nearly 4 million victims in the year ending March 2025; 800,000 cases were recorded in that year. Of those 800,000 cases, only 41,000 offenders were actually convicted. Behind those shocking statistics are women and men who are living in fear, and children, scared for their parent and often for themselves and their siblings. As the hon. Member for Lowestoft (Jess Asato) said, these are often our nation’s hidden children. Failure to protect children should be at the forefront of our minds as policymakers. That is why I absolutely share the Government’s ambition to halve violence against women and girls throughout the duration of this Parliament, thus protecting more children from harm. The Liberal Democrat campaign, led by my hon. Friend the Member for Eastbourne (Josh Babarinde), who grew up in a household experiencing domestic abuse, led to the Government introducing a domestic abuse identifier at sentencing. I thank the Government for working so constructively with my hon. Friend to see that realised in the Sentencing Bill. It will allow the Government to track the data more efficiently and to understand how many domestic abuse perpetrators are currently serving a custodial sentence. It will allow the Government to exclude those abusers from any future early release schemes, and it will show whether the Government’s reducing reoffending programmes are leading to a reduction in reoffending rates of domestic abuse. We Liberal Democrats have also called for an expansion of the high-quality perpetrator programmes within prison settings to prevent repeated harm. That is not the end of our ambition to better protect victims of domestic abuse. I hope that the collaborative relationship to tackle the issue continues across the House, because there is so much more that can be done. The system to protect victims and their children is currently disjointed. Often, the gaps in provision are filled by the incredible voluntary sector and charitable organisations. In my constituency of Chichester, organisations such as My Sisters’ House, Paragon and Safe in Sussex, as well as Lifecentre, provide exceptional support to those who have suffered at the hands of domestic abusers. The reality of increased costs associated with running those organisations, alongside an increasing number of cases, means that those organisations recognise that they could be supporting so many more victims. As the hon. Member for Isle of Wight West alluded to, with more families coming forward and children being rightly identified as victims of domestic abuse, the numbers are rising. We need sustainable funding for support services for survivors, including multi-year settlements, so that organisations can plan for longer term programmes, rather than waiting to find out if they can continue to support victims in their area every year.
- 27 Nov 2025 · Domestic Abuse: Children · Hansard source
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My hon. Friend makes a really important point about local government reorganisation. Voluntary and charitable sector organisations rely on local authority funding and Government funding—they rely on multiple streams of income. I plead with the Minister to make sure that the Government funding, at least, is secured beyond one year, so that these organisations have the reassurance during LGR that they will be able to maintain their provision in some sense. We also need a statutory definition of honour-based abuse, and better training for police, social care and education professionals. In every police force, we need specialist violence against women and girls taskforces, and every force should undergo training via Naturewatch on the links between domestic abuse and the abuse of animals. Perpetrators of domestic abuse identify the special bond people build with their pets and can use that to exert control over partners or children. Across the country, we have seen cases where warning signs were missed, reports were ignored and opportunities to intervene were tragically lost. The programme run by Naturewatch has been taken up by police forces across the country, including the Metropolitan police and Sussex police, but we should encourage every force to take it on, as there is a direct link between the treatment of animals and domestic abuse. We must set up support services so that they are in the ideal position to listen to a child crying out for help, no matter how hard it is to hear them. We in the Liberal Democrats are also extremely concerned by the chronic underfunding of children’s social care. After a decade of cuts to local authority budgets under Conservative Governments, many councils have been forced to scale back their early intervention services. I have been told by those working in the sector that they feel like they are firefighting every day, rather than spending the time they so desperately want to spend with the families they could prevent from entering crisis. Instead, they are dealing with mounting caseloads, burnout and an inability to resource their departments properly. This is short-sighted and dangerous. Tragically, too often, the consequences are felt too late. The report into the heartbreaking case of Sara Sharif is a damning indictment of Surrey county council’s failure to protect a young girl from her abusers. My hon. Friend the Member for Woking (Mr Forster) made a passionate plea for the recommendations of the safeguarding review to be explored by the Government so that lessons can be learned nationally. Early support does prevent crises from escalating, it protects children who witness domestic abuse in their household, and it identifies risks at the earliest opportunity. The Liberal Democrats have long called for greater integration between health and social care, with far more involvement from local authorities in the planning, commissioning and delivery of services. This must include education settings, which play a vital role in identifying situations where abuse may be present. We need to ensure that training and support for teachers is readily available, so that they can spot the signs and call for help. Teachers have an increasingly challenging role in our complex environment: they are not only teachers but, quite often, caregivers and social workers. They may be the only lifeline that a child has, so they need to be able to spot the signs of domestic abuse, be they misbehaviour, withdrawal or a failure to engage in the classroom. In addition, as the hon. Member for Dulwich and West Norwood (Helen Hayes) mentioned, it is so important to have education campaigns so that children understand and can spot the signs of what is not a happy household, and understand what is normal and what is not, and what they should and should not put up with. Another vital part of the picture is the family court system, which plays a key role in protecting children from situations where domestic abuse is present while also considering the importance of keeping families together. It is a desperately difficult job, yet there have been a number of situations where the system has failed and, frankly, we are only seeing the tip of the iceberg. I thank the Government for their recent steps, including removing parental responsibility from those convicted of the most serious sexual offences, as was mentioned by the hon. Members for Stafford (Leigh Ingham) and for Dulwich and West Norwood. Campaigners fought hard for that change, and it is welcome. Could we also consider removing parental responsibility from those on bail, to ensure that individuals capable of committing horrendous abuse are kept away from their children as early as possible? With that in mind, what are the Government doing to integrate health and social care services across the country to ensure that as much protection as possible is provided for vulnerable children and families? What are the Government doing to raise awareness of the warning signs of a child living in a household with domestic abuse? When will we see further legislation to deal with the rising issues in our family court system? Will the Government consider specific measures to keep those on bail on charges of offences against children away from their children? The Liberal Democrats stand ready to work with Members in all parts of the House to ensure that every child is protected, every survivor is heard and every perpetrator is held to account.
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