John Hayes MP: speeches 2026

Speeches

• 24 Mar 2026 · Sudden Unexplained Death in Childhood · Hansard source

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  In calling my long-standing friend, Mrs Hodgson, I let hon. Members know that she has agreed to leave a couple of minutes at the end for Mr MacNae to wind-up. In turn, he is about to agree to leave a couple of moments at the end for me to move the motion.

• 24 Mar 2026 · Points of Order · Hansard source

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  On a point of order, Madam Deputy Speaker. I rise as chairman of the all-party parliamentary group for acquired brain injury and to voice my concern about the news that 287 patients in a hospital in Northampton are to be relocated across the country. NHS England has told local health bosses that the hospital is not fit for purpose and so they must relocate those patients, many of whom are brain injured. The hon. Member for Northampton South (Mike Reader) is also very concerned, as many of the patients are his constituents. Given that you have probably not had notice of a statement from the Government, how may I draw it to the House’s attention beyond this point of order? How can Ministers be asked to come here to explain what they will do about this woeful situation?

• 24 Mar 2026 · Water Supply and Housing Targets: West Kent · Hansard source

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  Tom Tugendhat will move the motion and the Minister will respond. I remind other Members that they may make a speech only with prior permission from the Member in charge and the Minister. I have had notice that one Member will intervene, which is fine. Unfortunately there will not be an opportunity, Tom, to wind up. That is the custom in these short debates.

• 18 Mar 2026 · Points of Order · Hansard source

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  On a point of order, Mr Speaker. Further to the point made by my right hon. Friend the Member for New Forest East (Sir Julian Lewis), and notwithstanding your ruling, Mr Speaker, “Erskine May” makes it clear that Ministers come to the House to answer questions, does it not? While the Standing Orders might need refining, do they not already make it clear that that is the purpose of the sessions that we have daily and, in the case of the Prime Minister, weekly?

• 18 Mar 2026 · Cheadle Train Station · Hansard source

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  Before I call the Minister, I remind Members that we must conclude by 4.42 pm, when the next debate will begin.

• 18 Mar 2026 · Cheadle Train Station · Hansard source

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  Order. I will call Tom Morrison to move the motion and then call the Minister to respond. I remind other Members that they may make a speech only with prior permission from the Member in charge of the debate and the Minister. As is the convention in these 30-minute debates, there will unfortunately not be an opportunity for the Member in charge to wind up.

• 18 Mar 2026 · Social Enterprises and Community Ownership · Hansard source

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  Order. I see that lots of Members are bobbing. Given that I am going to call the wind-ups at 5.22 pm, Opposition spokesmen will have five minutes each and the Minister will have 10 minutes. You will appreciate that time is limited, so let us try to get everyone in. I suggest speeches of about three minutes.

• 18 Mar 2026 · Social Enterprises and Community Ownership · Hansard source

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  Excellent. Thank you, everyone, for being so disciplined with your speeches.

• 18 Mar 2026 · Social Enterprises and Community Ownership · Hansard source

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  Order. Members are getting two minutes each. Let us try to get everyone in.

• 18 Mar 2026 · Social Enterprises and Community Ownership · Hansard source

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  I am discouraging interventions generally, but that was delightful. Carry on.

• 18 Mar 2026 · Social Enterprises and Community Ownership · Hansard source

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  Minister, will you leave a couple of moments for Jo Platt to sum up?

• 18 Mar 2026 · Social Enterprises and Community Ownership · Hansard source

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  That was excellent timekeeping.

• 17 Mar 2026 · Immigration Reforms · Hansard source

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  There has been too much immigration into this country for too long, and that is certainly the view of the vast majority of the people I speak to in my constituency. I suspect it is a widespread view among law-abiding, patriotic Britons from all kinds of backgrounds. Three myths have been perpetuated to sustain the level of immigration that we have endured. The first is that it is necessary for our economy—that we need labour. What migration has actually done is to displace investment in domestic skills, to perpetuate a labour-intensive economy at a time when we should have been automating and taking out labour demand, and to feed the greed of those employers who, rather than paying a decent wage for employees who understood their rights, were happy to take cheap labour. Those have been the effects of the arguments about the economy. The second myth has been about multiculturalism: this curious notion that we can absorb all kinds of people into our country without a shared sense of belonging, a common sense of what being British is all about, and that these co-existing subcultures would somehow cohere. In fact, as Trevor Phillips, himself of course the child of migrants, argued long ago, we have ended up with the ghettoisation—his words, not mine—of large parts of our country, with co-existing subcultures, without the bonds that bind us together in the shared sense I have described. The third myth is that migration would not have a detrimental effect on some of our public services. Just imagine the figures for a moment—I am speaking now of legal migration. Between April 2022 and March 2023, the number of people entering Britain was 944,000—944,000 people extra in a year—yet when we debate housing, transport infrastructure, the health service, the availability of dentists and GPs, we never consider the effect of population growth at that scale on the demand for all those services.

• 17 Mar 2026 · Immigration Reforms · Hansard source

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  Not the Minister, of course—I except him from that general description. It is time that the political establishment faced up to the fact that what they have perpetuated for too long is at odds with the intuition, experience and will of the British people. We need to cut migration of all kinds, and we need to cut it now, or they will dispense with us and elect people who will.

• 17 Mar 2026 · Immigration Reforms · Hansard source

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  I should have congratulated the hon. Member for Perth and Kinross-shire (Pete Wishart) on securing the debate and said how pleased I am that you are in the Chair, Mr Stringer. My hon. Friend will know that the care visa system established by the previous Government brought here more dependants than care workers. Everyone who arrives in a country brings an economic value and an economic cost; they all want houses, they all want health and they all want education for their children. That was a flagrant example of what my hon. Friend described: more dependants came, and the cost was much greater than the value.

• 17 Mar 2026 · Immigration Reforms · Hansard source

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  The hon. Gentleman is of course right. The blame for all this should not be laid exclusively in the hands of the Labour party or Labour Governments. Successive Governments have administered a regime that has been out of tune with the sentiments of the vast majority of the population, who know what I have said is true. For the hon. Gentleman is right to say, too, that those successive Governments have allowed unsustainable levels of net migration. If we look at the history, however, we see it was once quite different. In 1967 net migration was minus 84,000, in 1987 it was just 2,000, and in 1997 it was 48,000. It is in my time in this House—although, I hasten to add, not at my behest—that migration has soared, and we have begun to accept that hundreds and hundreds of thousands of people can be added to our population without taking account of the fact that that brings additional pressure on public services. That is not to say that many of those people do not make a positive contribution to our country—of course they do, in all kinds of ways—but to ignore the facts in terms of, for example, the growth in demand for housing is a dereliction of duty of which politicians across the political spectrum are guilty.

• 17 Mar 2026 · Immigration Reforms · Hansard source

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  Illegal migration, of course, is of a different order. Illegal immigration is about breaching borders. A nation means very little unless it has territorial integrity. What is the purpose of a nation that has porous borders? Indeed, it barely deserves to be described as such. The hon. Gentleman is right to draw attention to the way our borders have been breached, with impunity, over time. Bear in mind that nine out of 10 of the people who arrive in dinghies are men, and 75% are under the age of 40. Let us be clear about who is coming, and for what purpose. Many are economic migrants and, frankly, given where they come from, if we came from those places, we might come, too, because we would see a better life here and want that life for our families. I do not criticise the individuals; I criticise a system that permits that level of illegal migration. Legal migration matters because of its scale and its character. It has led to a change in our society at a pace that many people find it impossible to comprehend, still less to cope with, so it is time that the political establishment, populated as it is by the liberal bourgeoisie—

• 11 Mar 2026 · Disability Equipment Provision · Hansard source

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  Have the Government made any assessment of the return and reuse of equipment? That is not always possible, as I said earlier, but it would be an incredibly powerful message to send to many of those people who have waited so long, and, I think, a very straightforward thing to do. If that assessment has not been made, will the Minister commit today to making such an assessment? That would be a positive outcome from this debate.

• 11 Mar 2026 · Disability Equipment Provision · Hansard source

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  I want to speak about three things in this debate, which was helpfully secured by the hon. Member for Aberdeenshire North and Moray East (Seamus Logan). The first has already been dealt with but requires some amplification: the system is not working as well as it should. The figures that we heard quoted about access to wheelchairs, for example, are stark and surprising. In researching for the debate, I was surprised that, according to figures from NHS England—and we heard it again from the hon. Member—70% of wheelchair users wait more than three months for their chair, 30% wait more than six months, and 15% more than 12 months. Those are pretty astounding figures. I say to the Minister: do not let the perfect be the enemy of the good. If those people could be provided with some help—perhaps not the chair ideally suited to their needs but something that assisted them—through a recycling scheme, I am sure that they would feel that the authorities were at least making an effort. If someone is sitting at home, hearing nothing and getting nothing, they must get increasingly frustrated. Let us be more creative in how we improve those numbers. Recycling equipment has to be at the heart of that. It is not a perfect solution, because equipment often has to be tailored to the specific requirements of the individual concerned, but it might help. The second point I want to raise is about housing. There are real problems with adapted housing, with the obligation on developers to build enough adapted houses, and with local authorities facing up to their responsibilities. I know that you are a great expert in this field, Mr Betts—a greater expert than me—but I would like to go back to the days when adapted housing was built for the elderly, the infirm and the disabled, perhaps with a resident warden who would take personal care in their interests and be available night and day for their needs. I am talking not about a distant individual obtained by means of a telephone or—heaven forbid—online, but about someone with hands-on knowledge of local residents. That existed in our lifetimes, and it does not exist now in any significant shape or form. Let us think again about best practice from past times in respect of housing, and create some obligations on local authorities and private developers to build a sufficient number of adapted homes. It is not just me; various reports have indicated the need. Analysis published in January 2026 by the Office for Equality and Opportunity, “Disabled people’s lived experience of housing in the UK: an evidence review”, stated that there are specific requirements or financial provision to provide suitable housing, but that the physical design of adaptations needs more understanding of individual needs, and that too often adaptations were not focused on the quality of life, wellbeing or independence of the person living there. Let us do more, and better, in respect of housing. My final point—I said I was only going to make three—is perhaps something that others will not raise, or certainly have not so far: the way that the provision of all kinds of other services can support disabled people. For example, various organisations that represent the blind and partially sighted have reported that flat bank cards have been a huge disadvantage to partially sighted people. Access to cash is actually quite important, because coins, which can be felt and are tactile, are important for small transactions. These small things make a huge difference to people’s lives. We need to think more laterally, and give considerably more thought to such small ways in which we as a Parliament, and the Minister as part of a Government, can make a huge difference to disabled people in all our constituencies.

• 11 Mar 2026 · Disability Equipment Provision · Hansard source

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  On that specific point, the Government have said that that additional money for the grant will provide about 5,000 additional home adaptations. It would be really useful if the Minister, when he responds, could describe how local authorities will access that funding, how those 5,000 adaptations will be distributed across the kingdom and what kind of adaptations we are talking about. Are we talking about adaptations to new build houses or long-standing traditional houses in the private or public sectors? A bit more detail on that would be very welcome.

• 10 Mar 2026 · Courts and Tribunals Bill · Hansard source

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  The right hon. Gentleman is right that the rule of law is a living thing, and the connection between the public and the exercise of criminal justice is fundamental. Central to that is the age-old principle of juries and jury service. It is a direct engagement of the public in something that otherwise would be remote from the vast bulk of them. Does he retain my view that jury service is critical, and that juries should play a continuing part in the criminal justice system, or is he determined to minimise the number of jury trials? That is certainly what his proposal looks like to the vast majority of people in the Chamber.

• 10 Mar 2026 · Points of Order · Hansard source

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  On a point of order, Mr Speaker. Yesterday, the Government brought a statement to the House entitled “Protecting What Matters”. One might think that that could be preserving historic buildings or endangered wildlife, or simply affirming the importance of our Christian heritage. In fact, the statement was about defining anti-Muslim hostility. I am not going to debate that, but I seek your advice on whether a title of that kind is misleading—it cannot possibly have been deceptive, but it is certainly confusing. Is it fair to Members to entitle statements in a way that gives them no chance to anticipate what is going to be debated and prepare accordingly?

• 9 Mar 2026 · Children’s Wellbeing and Schools Bill · Hansard source

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  I congratulate my right hon. Friend on making the case for banning mobile phones in schools and for restricting access to social media. We do not need more discussion or consultation, and we do not need more research, because research already shows the harm that those things are doing. By delaying and prevaricating, we are robbing children of the chance of a healthy life, so let us just move on and do what so obviously needs to be done.

• 9 Mar 2026 · Children’s Wellbeing and Schools Bill · Hansard source

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  Will the hon. Lady give way?

• 9 Mar 2026 · Children’s Wellbeing and Schools Bill · Hansard source

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  Would my right hon. Friend allow me?