Kirith Entwistle MP: speeches 2026

Speeches

• 27 Jan 2026 · Women’s Safety: Walking, Wheeling, Cycling and Running · Hansard source

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  It is a pleasure to serve under your chairship, Ms Jardine, and I thank my hon. Friend the Member for Lowestoft (Jess Asato) for securing this important and timely debate. Put simply, women are not safe running, walking, cycling or even just existing. We are not safe in our own homes; we are not safe in pubs, bars, restaurants, at school or at work; and crucially, for the purposes of this debate, we are not even safe at the gym. Girls are at risk, too. How many of us here today have stories that start with our wearing school uniform? When I was at school, men in cars slowed down beside me, men in white vans asked me where I was going, and grown men followed me and asked to wear my glasses; I am not wearing them today. As the daughter of a prison officer, I was educated early, not in confidence but in caution. My dad would say, “Don’t take your phone out when you are walking home. Don’t listen to music on a walk home. Stay alert. Cross the road if a man’s behind you. Walk with your keys between your fingers.” All of that does not just disappear when we grow up. Only last week, when I was going for a run in Bolton, I shared my location with my family over WhatsApp, just in case. “Just in case”—those words tell us everything. I wear a running vest with a phone pocket. I clip my SOS fob to my clothes. I plan my route as if I was carrying out a risk assessment, and that is the point. Men do not make contingency plans to exercise, but we absolutely have to. When it comes to exercise, women are constrained by the hours that we can safely be outdoors. Even in daylight, safer does not mean safe, and after dark many women feel pushed indoors. Here is the bitter irony: a lot of us can only exercise when it is dark, because we are primary caregivers. We do the school runs, and we care for our elderly or disabled relatives, or our children with additional needs. Society relies and depends on that care, and then acts surprised when women’s lives are more restricted and when we are forced to pay for safety. For many women, a gym membership is the price of feeling secure enough to exercise at all. Women-only spaces in gyms are growing, and that is progress, but where is the acknowledgment that many women are paying simply to do what others can do for free—exercise without fear? Let us be clear: this is not a confidence gap; it is a safety gap that is rooted in our environment and systems. In winter, nearly three quarters of women change their outdoor exercise routines for safety, and over four in five say they feel unsafe in parks at night. I know that most of us avoid parks altogether.

• 27 Jan 2026 · Women’s Safety: Walking, Wheeling, Cycling and Running · Hansard source

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  My hon. Friend makes the important point, which I will come on to, that well-lit spaces would make a world of difference for so many women and girls. The safety gap that I mentioned earlier is also written into our transport patterns. In Greater Manchester, women make less than a third of all cycling trips. When women are asked why that is, they talk about traffic danger, harassment and intimidation. One Bolton resident told me that routes can feel pleasant by day but unusable after dark, and that one incident can be enough to stop women from cycling altogether. Women’s participation in outdoor exercise is already lower than men’s, but the safety gap widens again for women from ethnic minority backgrounds, who face higher levels of harassment on the streets. Black, Asian and minority ethnic women are nearly 20% less likely than white women to exercise outdoors regularly, and half as likely to cycle to work. If we bear in mind both the ethnicity and gender pay gaps, we are also less likely to be able to afford a gym membership. In Bolton, I am proud of the grassroots work that is making a difference, including Horwich Ride Social’s women-only rides, Krimmz girls youth club’s glow rides and the United We Run campaign, which gives thousands of Bolton women access to the Her Spirit fitness app. These initiatives, while brilliant, are also a warning sign. Women should not need safety in numbers. It is time that we address women’s safety properly, as we should have done for decades. That starts by building routes that we can actually use—the well-lit, connected routes that were mentioned earlier—and, as my hon. Friend the Member for Lowestoft said, treating harassment as public safety, making it easier to report and making it clear that it will be taken seriously. Finally, we must put women’s safety into transport planning from day one, and ensure that progress is measured so that we can check whether the gender gap in cycling and walking is closing.

• 20 Jan 2026 · Support for Ukraine · Hansard source

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  11. What steps her Department is taking to support Ukraine.

• 20 Jan 2026 · Support for Ukraine · Hansard source

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  The Bolton branch of the Association of Ukrainians in Great Britain is situated in my constituency and helps families to settle and keep community ties strong. As the UK marks the first anniversary of the UK-Ukraine 100-year partnership, what more is the Foreign Secretary doing, working across Government, to ensure that Ukrainians in the UK are provided with the support they need to rebuild their lives?

• 20 Jan 2026 · Domestic Abuse-related Deaths: NHS Prevention · Hansard source

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  It is a pleasure to serve under your chairship, Sir John. I thank my hon. Friend the Member for Stroud (Dr Opher) for securing this important debate, which has crucially focused on the important fact that prevention has to work across the NHS. When domestic abuse escalates towards serious harm or death, what can the NHS do to stop it? For too long, we have talked about domestic abuse as if it happens outside public services—as if it starts and ends behind closed doors—but the truth is that the NHS is already in the story; it just has to connect the dots. The moment someone sits in a GP waiting room trying to keep their voice steady, the moment that someone turns up at A&E with an injury that they cannot easily explain, the moment that someone finds out they are pregnant at a maternity appointment and are terrified of going home, or wants to ask for help but cannot because their perpetrator is sat there with them—those are moments of contact with the NHS and crucial opportunities to save a life. The NHS absolutely has a duty of care to its patients: it must not just treat injuries but respond when someone is at risk. In domestic abuse, risk is not theoretical. The most recent national figures show that there are 108 domestic homicides a year. For the first time, suspected suicides linked to domestic abuse have overtaken intimate partner homicides. That is a flashing warning light for the health service. If suicide is preventable, domestic abuse-related suicide must be treated as preventable too. A duty of care is real only if staff are trained and equipped to carry it out. If someone reaches out in the NHS and gets silence or disbelief back, or if a note is taken but there is no action, that can be the moment that they stop asking for help. In domestic abuse, missed moments can be fatal. For the majority of victims and survivors, health professionals are the first—sometimes the only—person they disclose to. People often assume that a victim’s first call is to the police, but the first brave step for many survivors who disclose is often telling a GP, a midwife, a nurse, a health visitor or even their pharmacist. Our healthcare system is the frontline of support for victims of domestic abuse. Tragically, too many survivors are forced to seek help again and again before the system even responds. In fact, 85% seek professional support about five times before they finally receive help. In Bolton, we see both the challenge and one of the solutions. We operate a system called Identification and Referral to Improve Safety, a specialist training programme that links GP practices directly with domestic abuse support services. IRIS is delivered by Fortalice, a local domestic abuse charity—I am incredibly grateful to Gill and her team for their hard work. Since it began in 2014, nearly 3,000 victims have accessed support, and 274 healthcare professionals were trained in the last year alone. That training matters, because it changes what happens in the room. It helps clinicians ask safe questions, spot warning signs and act so that when someone says, or their face or demeanour tells us, that they are not safe, the response is not panic or paperwork but support. We need that consistently, because Bolton has seen what happens when the system does not join the dots. One case that has stayed with local services is the domestic homicide review of Margaret—not her real name: an 80-year-old woman killed by her husband in 2019. While the husband was in hospital, Margaret disclosed fear and abuse and said that she did not feel safe. Those concerns were discussed in a meeting between hospital staff and social workers, yet once her husband’s physical health stabilised, he was discharged home. Days later, Margaret was dead. If a patient can say, “I am not safe,” and the NHS cannot act, the NHS is not yet safe enough. So how do we make it consistently safe? I have three practical asks. First, we need proper and consistent domestic abuse training—not a one-off e-learning module but trauma-informed training, refreshed over time for the whole team, including reception staff, as my hon. Friend the Member for Stroud said, who are often the ones who see the warning signs first. The Government have said that they will launch a mandatory safeguarding and learning programme that covers domestic abuse. That is welcome, but it must be embedded in day-to-day NHS practices. Secondly, there must be sustained funding for evidence-based pathways, such as IRIS and the specialist services that it relies on, because referral routes work only if support exists and exists safely. The Government have set out an ambition that by 2029 there will be dedicated referral services for women and girls affected by abuse in every area of England. That is exactly the direction we should be travelling in. However, those routes must cover the whole NHS. Finally, the NHS should establish a universal codeword scheme, so that a victim can ask for support just as easily as we can at pharmacies, a bar, a pub or even a restaurant. The NHS is our frontline and it absolutely needs to be well-equipped to spot, safeguard against and deal with domestic abuse, as it should have been doing for decades. Domestic abuse thrives in silence and isolation. The NHS can be the opposite of that: a place where someone is seen, believed and connected to safety. Bolton has shown what is possible when services work together—when we connect the dots. Now we need our NHS to match that with consistency; every week we delay, more families will be left asking the most painful question of all. They reached out for help, so why were they still not safe?

• 14 Jan 2026 · Northern Powerhouse Rail · Hansard source

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  I welcome the fact that we are delivering Northern Powerhouse Rail—promised by the Tories, abandoned by the Tories and now delivered by this Labour Government. It will make a big difference to my constituents. However, it would be remiss of me not to take this opportunity to put on the record my ask that the Secretary of State work with the Mayor of Greater Manchester on extending the tramline to Bolton North East and ensuring better services on both Northern and Avanti West Coast.