Jim Dickson MP: speeches

Speeches

• 15 Sept 2026 · Sepsis Awareness Month · Hansard source

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  I am pleased to co-sponsor the debate alongside the hon. Members for Kingswinford and South Staffordshire (Mike Wood) and for Ashfield (Lee Anderson), both of whom are fellow officers of the all-party parliamentary group on sepsis. I pay tribute to the hon. Member for Kingswinford and South Staffordshire for that amazingly moving and revealing speech and for sharing his experience in a way that I hope all Members will take note of and that will make a difference to the way the Government take these issues forward. I am grateful to the Backbench Business Committee for granting time for this debate on Sepsis Awareness Month, with World Sepsis Day having taken place on Sunday. I was pleased to welcome my constituent, John Snow, to Parliament last year and am extremely appreciative that he is with us today in the Gallery, alongside his wife Karen and his daughter Gracie. John developed sepsis in 2024. After first believing he was suffering with muscle pain, the situation rapidly deteriorated, resulting in hospital admission with heart attack-like symptoms and his lips turning blue. John and Karen were not aware at this point that John had many of the signs of sepsis. Within hours, his kidneys had shut down, needing dialysis, and his body went into septic shock with doctors putting him into an induced coma. It was unclear if John would survive, and the coma lasted for two weeks, during which time John was transferred from Darent Valley hospital in Dartford up to St Thomas’s just across the river from where we are now. After a month, thankfully, John pulled through. But this good news was accompanied by the desperately difficult decision from his doctors that he needed to have a quadruple amputation. He has received amazing support from the Dartford community, which has rallied round to help fund support for his family. A special mention must go to the wonderful Dartford working men’s club, led by the amazing Nick Byram. The club not only held fundraisers for the family but has held sepsis awareness events to ensure that more people know the symptoms. Notwithstanding this great community effort, there remains so much to do to improve post-infection support for people like John. I have been privileged to have kept in touch with John and Karen during John’s exceptionally brave recovery journey. When we met in July, he told me of the exceptionally long delay he was experiencing in receiving his new prosthetic hand. John was cast for the prosthetic at the end of last year, but due to issues relating to the move of his local prosthetic centre, it was not assembled, leaving him worried that his body may change and the prosthetic would not fit. The challenges that causes are compounded by the fact that he cannot have the casting for the second prosthetic hand until he has had the first one for a year—a timer that has not yet been able to start. John has also experienced delays and dysfunctions with his facial surgery, which he is currently undergoing with the support of surgeons and doctors. John’s case illustrates how much we have to do to spread knowledge about sepsis and to improve care for those who have it. As others have done, I commend the campaigning work of Lord Mackinlay of Richborough, who has not only helped to raise awareness of sepsis in our health system, but has met John and provided encouragement to him in his recovery journey.

• 7 Sept 2026 · Local Government Reorganisation · Hansard source

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  There have been lots of different views about reorganisation in my constituency, but one thing everybody is fully agreed on is that Kent county council is a failing organisation. It is too big to be effective, and it consistently lets down residents right across the county. It is critical that we get this right because it is residents who live with the results. While the pause is under way, how can we ensure that momentum is not lost in improving local services and ensuring that Kent and its different communities start to receive decent services? For instance, in my case, I am disappointed that we have lost the Thames Estuary growth board. How can we ensure that we will get the structures and powers we need to succeed and thrive?

• 8 Jul 2026 · National Youth Strategy · Hansard source

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  It is a pleasure to serve under your chairship, Ms McVey. I congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for Huddersfield (Harpreet Uppal) on securing this important debate. In Dartford and our towns and villages we have an increasingly youthful population, with a quarter of households in the constituency comprising a family with children. Our young people do our community proud, from our brilliant Kent youth county councillors, including Madalena, Amelia, Sam, Stephan and Flourish; our Dartford youth councillors; Heritage, who got to the final of Monday’s Poetry by Heart national competition; and so many others who star in our cultural and sporting life. And let us not forget eight-year-old Ruth, who wrote a brilliant and persuasive handwritten letter to me last week about YouTube. Ahead of the Government’s very welcome national youth strategy last year, it was a pleasure for me to work with the YMCA to host an event to discuss with our Dartford young people what they wanted to see in the strategy. The concerns they shared at the event were many and varied. They worry about their futures: how they will find affordable housing, cope with the cost of living and deal with growing challenges to their mental health and to their sense of community in a digital age. There was a strong feeling in the room that their generation needed better public transport, access to more varied job opportunities locally, and more places for them and other young people to come together. Last year’s national youth strategy was a wonderful document. It rightly promised a place-based approach to rebuilding a local offer for young people, and I hope that for Dartford it will mean more sports facilities such as a rebuilt Swanscombe Pavilion and more youth provision in the town centre. I hugely welcome the youth guarantee. The challenges faced by young people getting into the early stages of a career come through in the people I meet and the stories I hear across Dartford. It is welcome that Dartford will host one of the Government’s new youth hubs, providing access to expanded employment and wraparound support services. But we need to go further, as others have said, to rebuild the youth services lost over the past decade and a half, and to give young people a chance to meet, create, play sport and learn. One of the great underacknowledged dimensions to young people’s excessive use of social media and its effect on their mental health is the loss of such opportunities. We owe it to young people in Dartford and across the country to give young people back the chance to grow, to take risks and to unlock their talent.