Layla Moran MP: speeches

Speeches

• 11 Sept 2026 · Terminally Ill Adults (End of Life) Bill · Hansard source

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  I pay tribute to all the Members who have shared their story; I feel we have learned a bit more today about how the hon. Member for Birmingham Yardley (Jess Phillips) became how she is. I am sure we have all heard so many heartbreaking stories from our constituents, and I want to thank all those who have contacted me, whether or not we agree, because sharing these stories is profoundly difficult. One constituent with incurable cancer contacted me, asking for the freedom to choose when to give up their battle. Her own brother had an incurable melanoma spreading down his neck, which left him barely able to speak to his loved ones. He went out at 2 am in his dressing gown, climbed on to a bridge and jumped on to a motorway below. This was witnessed by two girls who were walking home from a party. My constituent asks: “how many more need to take their own lives in horrific ways because they simply cannot bear the pain, discomfort and hopelessness any more?” She wants the right to decide for herself when enough is enough. Then there is the constituent whose sister went abroad to access assisted dying. The 84-year-old sang to her sister, who ended her life peacefully with her family around her. My constituent said: “It was a painless, peaceful and dignified death at the time of her own choosing. Together with giving birth to my children, it was one of the most beautiful experiences of my long life.” I do not believe that only families with means should be able to have that experience; it should be open to everyone. Let me turn to the issue of palliative care. I pay tribute to the hon. Member for Calder Valley (Josh Fenton-Glynn), who is a fellow member of the Health and Social Care Committee. Although we wrote the reports together, I have come to a different conclusion, with great respect. It is, frankly, a stain on successive Governments that palliative care is in this state. Our Committee’s findings were stark: commissioning variation creates a postcode lottery, bereavement support is frequently inaccessible, services are fragmented, workforce and skill shortages are widespread, and systemic inequalities persist.

• 11 Sept 2026 · Terminally Ill Adults (End of Life) Bill · Hansard source

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  No, I shall not. It is worth noting that the NHS has not been meeting its own standards on palliative care for decades. The then Minister for Care, the right hon. Member for Aberafan Maesteg (Stephen Kinnock), appeared before our Committee in the spring, and he mentioned the importance of workforce. I ask again, where is that workforce plan? We need it, but that will not be the whole answer; we also need better data and early identification, clearer guidance and joined-up working with adult social care and local authorities. The Government have said that they will publish a modern service framework for palliative and end-of-life care, and it is very positive that the interim MSF has been published, but let me tell the House how I see it as Chair of the Health and Social Care Committee. I genuinely do not believe that palliative care would have been included in the early batch of MSFs if it were not for this Bill forcing the Government to do so. Furthermore, given all the issues and competing priorities of the NHS, let alone the competing political priorities of this Government or any other that comes after it in the next four years, I do not believe that palliative care will improve as fast as we want it to without the pressure of a Bill like this. I do not believe that this is an either/or proposition. I want palliative care to improve, therefore I will be voting for this Bill. I have to end with one more constituent’s story, and it is the story of Robert. His two parents had different views on this issue: his father did not agree with assisted dying, but his mother did. We are lucky in Oxfordshire that we have some of the best palliative care in the country. He described how her care was exemplary—she died without pain and was well looked after—but he felt that her wishes were not respected while his father’s were, and there were consequences to her not being able to access assisted dying, as her brother could not be there at her bedside when she passed. For those constituents who want a real choice at the end of life, I will tirelessly continue to want to improve palliative care, but I will also be supporting the Bill.

• 9 Sept 2026 · Summer Health and Resilience · Hansard source

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  May I welcome the Secretary of State to her place? I look forward to working with her as I have done with her predecessors. May I draw her attention to our Committee’s work on corridor care, and the correspondence between the Committee and the Minister for Secondary Care, who is in her place? I thought it was a constructive session. In our correspondence with the Department, we raised the issue of staff fatigue. Staff will understandably have questions, such as whether summer is the new winter, what now happens to the leave they were planning to take and the training they must attend, which they often cannot attend during the winter, so can she be clear with staff about that? In the letter responding to the Committee, the Department said that there are new NHS staff standards and new occupational health and wellbeing support, which is all fine, but it then says that there will be “a continued focus on workforce sustainability through the upcoming NHS Workforce Plan.” Where is that workforce plan?

• 8 Sept 2026 · Israel and Palestine · Hansard source

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  I have to say that I shed a tear—not necessarily at the sanctions part of the statement, but the part where the Government said that the occupation is illegal. Ever since my election as the first British-Palestinian MP, I have stood up to ask that question in statements such as this—I do not speak for the people of Palestine; I speak here for the people of Oxford West and Abingdon, but I could only ever speak for myself—and, frankly, I felt gaslit every single time I could not get a straight answer, so for that I say thank you. Now that Britain is standing tall on the world stage again—the United Nations was founded in Westminster in 1946, and we are applying international law without fear or favour again—how does the Foreign Secretary intend to work with Members across this House so that we can all play our part in ensuring that that institution and ours stand tall forever more?

• 8 Sept 2026 · Health Bill · Hansard source

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  The hon. Lady may be aware that the Health and Social Care Committee has a pre-appointment hearing with the incoming chair of the CQC tomorrow morning. One question I would like to ask them hinges on the answer to another question, on which I would have loved an update from the Minister. The previous Secretary of State said that HSSIB will not be merged with the CQC until the CQC is ready, but we have never had a list from the Government as to exactly what metrics they will use to decide when that happens. That will have a bearing on what kinds of questions we ask the chair and CEO. What specifically do the Government mean by “ready”? Does the hon. Lady not see that as a problem?

• 7 Sept 2026 · Health Bill · Hansard source

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  I thank my hon. Friend for his intervention; he has been a doughty campaigner on this issue, as have other members of the Committee, including the hon. Member for Chelsea and Fulham (Ben Coleman). We also know that much of the data is based on the data being taken from Chelsea and Westminster hospital, and not much else across the country. We have a lot of questions about that contract, hence why we came to the same conclusion. However, I primarily urge the Government please to consider new clause 85, in the name of the hon. Member for Thurrock (Jen Craft), which would impose duties on ICBs for delivering education, health and care plans. In my constituency we held a roundtable to provide evidence for our own hearing on this issue—by the way, this was based on a recommendation that came out of the Education Select Committee’s work on EHCPs, so we decided to take up the “H” bit. In that roundtable, I heard movingly from families who kept saying things like, “Everything is a battle.” One child, Stefan, suffers from multiple epiphyseal dysplasia, which affects his hips, and needs support to get around. He is very bright and desperately wants to learn. His mother was at that roundtable, and told me that, exceptionally and against school policy, he is allowed to keep a phone on him. There is no one whom the school can employ to make sure he can be wheeled from class to class, so instead what happens—and mother and school have done everything they possibly can—is that Stefan rings his mum so that she can come from home and deliver him to his next class. Ridiculously, this is the kind of thing that goes to tribunal, and then those tribunals cannot hold the ICBs to the same level of accountability as local authorities. The whole thing is nonsensical.

• 7 Sept 2026 · Health Bill · Hansard source

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  I thank the Minister for accepting our amendment on this issue. We pressed her and her colleagues over and over again—to the extent that we got a letter back that we honestly thought had been generated by AI, because the logic in it had no follow-through at all. I am delighted that she has listened. On what else does she intend to listen to us? In particular, there are amendments on the Health Services Safety Investigations Body, Healthwatch and health inequalities, which we will consider tomorrow, and, most importantly, the special needs amendment, which we are considering today. What else will she listen to us on?

• 7 Sept 2026 · Health Bill · Hansard source

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  I am grateful to the hon. Member for his intervention, and for the work of that Committee. We are doing work together right now on children’s mental health, so I am sure we will continue to pursue this theme. The point is that the impact was not just on that child; it was also on the mother, who could not work, and there was also the distress of having to battle the system. The mental health of both parents was affected. It does not need to be this way, and I genuinely believe that accountability is part of the answer. As such, my plea to the Government is simply to say that it is past time that the “H” part of EHCPs is put on a statutory footing, and I urge the House to support new clause 85.

• 7 Sept 2026 · Health Bill · Hansard source

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  Let me start by taking up the theme of maternity, which has already been mentioned by a number of Members. I welcome the Government’s commitment to instating a maternity commissioner. I sit on the expert reference group—that is what we are called—that feeds into the maternity and neonatal taskforce, so I see how the Government are trying to pull all these different issues together. The Health and Social Care Committee has heard repeatedly, and across a number of inquiries, how important this issue is, and we need someone who is independent of Government and able to knit it all together. Our Committee’s “Black Maternal Health” report heard how workforce shortages are undermining efforts to improve maternity care, data is lacking, and there is a culture in which women, particularly black women, are not listened to. Investment and training are needed to tackle that. The “First 1000 Days” report found that the UK has some of the worst early years health outcomes in Europe, including in infant mortality, and we have called for proper targets for early years professionals in the long-lost workforce plan. As an aside, where is the workforce plan? I would love to see it. Locally, Oxford University hospitals provide maternity care for my residents, and indeed for my own family—baby took their first steps this weekend, finally! It was a momentous occasion. I also reflect genuinely that there are people in my National Childbirth Trust class who did not have as good an experience as we did. They have been proactively contacted by the hospital to have an apology and an explanation given for their awful, traumatic birth, and they did not even complain. In part, that is a result of the CQC inspections and, more importantly, the inclusion by Baroness Amos of OUH and John Radcliffe hospital in her report. I toured the hospital again this summer and heard specifically from trust leaders and midwives. They are doing everything they can to respond to all the criticisms being levelled at them by families, but they told me that there is only so much that they can do without a new building. Baroness Amos’s report said: “The maternity and neonatal units sit across multiple floors… We saw delivery suites that didn’t have windows, that were cold, small and cramped and had pillars in the middle of them affecting where equipment could be placed”. A large number of the suites did not have en suites. Can you imagine what it must be like to give birth in those rooms? As the Government knit together their action plan, I beg them not to forget investment, particularly capital investment, when they empower the commissioner to do their good work. Let me move on to a few other amendments. I support the work to tackle health inequalities in new clauses 90 and 91. Our Committee hears over and over again that if we want to unlock productivity in the NHS, that is where we need to focus. I also support the campaign of my hon. Friend the Member for Newton Abbot (Martin Wrigley) and his cross-party new clause 34, which echoes the findings of my Committee. The Government really need to think again when it comes to Palantir and instead supercharge the capability of UK-based companies.

• 2 Sept 2026 · Rewiring the State · Hansard source

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  I warmly welcome the First Secretary to her post. I also welcome her good judgment in taking one of the esteemed former members of our Health and Social Care Committee, the hon. Member for Worthing West (Dr Cooper), to be her Parliamentary Private Secretary. I know the First Secretary has probably already had some of this in her ear already, but I cannot lose this opportunity. This morning, the Health and Social Care Committee, with the Education Committee, heard moving evidence about why death by suicide has now overtaken almost everything else as the No. 1 reason that we lose children in this country. Often when we dive into issues like this, we find that education is not talking to health or to the local authorities. It cannot be beyond the wit of man, or indeed a shared governance structure with the right fiscal flows, to stop these stories happening. Will the First Secretary of State meet me to discuss what we are seeing in the Committee so that we can unlock the potential in all parts of society, because without doing that, I fear that the devolution agenda might fail?