Lincoln Jopp MP: speeches 2026

Speeches

• 13 Apr 2026 · Middle East · Hansard source

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  Will the defence investment plan be signed before the local elections on 7 May?

• 26 Mar 2026 · Local Government Reorganisation · Hansard source

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  In answer to my hon. Friend the Member for North West Norfolk (James Wild), the Minister referred to the importance of local identities. As she knows, in the local government reorganisation, my Spelthorne constituency will be subsumed into something called “West Surrey”. I am very much looking forward to meeting her on 22 April to make representations about why it should be called “West Surrey and South Middlesex”, to take account of Spelthorne’s special circumstances. If she is to commission her officials to do any research work in advance of that meeting, may I recommend a book called “The Real Counties of Britain”, written by Mr Russell Grant, which would set the context for our discussion perfectly?

• 26 Mar 2026 · Pothole Repairs: Strategic Road Network · Hansard source

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  The scourge of potholes is pretty universal, but will the Minister join me in encouraging all my Spelthorne residents who have a complaint about a pothole to report it via the Surrey county council website? Reporting potholes is the only way to get them sorted.

• 26 Mar 2026 · Business of the House · Hansard source

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  The Government have designated April the Month of the Military Child to recognise the unique demands and pressures on the children of service personnel, particularly in times of heightened international tension and when we have military personnel deployed on operations overseas. Will the Leader of the House join me in encouraging all Members to pay particular attention to whether they have sons and daughters of service personnel in their constituency, to focus on them and understand them as much as possible, and to see what provision is being made for them in schools?

• 25 Mar 2026 · Northern Ireland Troubles: Legacy and Reconciliation · Hansard source

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  1. What steps he is taking to replace the Northern Ireland Troubles (Legacy and Reconciliation) Act 2023.

• 25 Mar 2026 · Northern Ireland Troubles: Legacy and Reconciliation · Hansard source

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  I associate myself with your comments, Mr Speaker, about the Table Clerk and I wish him happiness in his next steps. I also wish the hon. Member for Strangford (Jim Shannon) many happy returns. Second Reading of the Northern Ireland Troubles Bill took place on 18 November, and the remedial order, which removed the protections from the Northern Ireland Troubles (Legacy and Reconciliation) Act 2023, was passed on 21 January, leaving our Northern Ireland veterans, of whom I am one, with no protections under the law. It feels rather like the Government have left our veterans in no man’s land, with no rounds in the magazine and no rounds in the chamber. How is that not a dereliction of duty?

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

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  Will the hon. Member give way?

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

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  The Minister is very generous with her time, and I am grateful to her for that. She welcomed the research funded by the SUDC UK in Bristol, but I do not think we have heard any commitment to Government-funded research into this area. Will she clarify whether she will take that forward?

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

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  As ever, the hon. Member is making an incredibly powerful speech. I know he feels these things incredibly strongly. I am sure we are all looking forward to his closing remarks.

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

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  It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Sir John. I thank the hon. Member for Rossendale and Darwen (Andy MacNae) for securing this debate. I also recognise my predecessor as the Member of Parliament for Spelthorne, Kwasi Kwarteng, who sponsored this debate back in 2023. All Members have expressed that they simply cannot imagine what it is like to be a parent sitting in the Public Gallery or watching our proceedings at home. I am struck by the fact that many of those parents would have been sitting there in 2023, hearing, “This is raising awareness,” and, “We have to get going on this.” They have seen the personnel round here change a bit, and have seen us swap sides, but they are still sitting there, and very little has been done since 2023. I hope the Minister can give us some reassurance about what action can actually happen, so that when we have another Westminster Hall debate in three years’ time, and the same people are sat in the Public Gallery, they are not just looking at a different group of people saying the same things and not doing anything. I have come here to speak on behalf of two of my constituents, Louis Rogers and Harry Pitts. They cannot be here today because they are dead, and their death is unexplained. We can all forgive the hon. Member for Rossendale and Darwen for doing so, but he said that sudden unexplained death in children is the fourth largest “cause” of death, and of course it is not. He did not mean it, and we all know that. It is just a categorisation, and that is important. I am deeply suspicious whenever I see a pie chart that says, “There is this thing and that thing, and that thing is caused by that thing. Oh, and this huge chunk is ‘others’. We haven’t been able to do that big chunk; that is just ‘others’.” It makes me very suspicious, and suggests to me that someone somewhere is not trying hard enough to make that chunk much more explainable. There are one or two other things that sudden unexplained death in children is not. It is not sudden infant death syndrome, and the crucial word there is “syndrome”. SIDS is a thing that has been identified; research has been done, preventive measures have been put in place, and deaths from SIDS have been drastically reduced—more power to their elbow. SIDS should show us a way forward about how we might approach this issue with more effort and research. Sudden unexplained death in children also has no respect for persons. It is not to do with socioeconomic circumstances; it is as likely or unlikely to happen to princes as to paupers. It is important that people slay that dragon in their minds. I want to come to the notion of it being unexplained. It will not come as a massive surprise to hon. Members to hear that I was once in the Army; I have mentioned it on the odd occasion. If I asked someone a question in the Army, they were perfectly within their rights to say, “I don’t know, sir”—but it was a crime if they finished the answer at that point, because everyone in the Army would only say one thing when asked that question: “I don’t know sir, but I will find out.” What we have done hitherto is say to parents, “I don’t know,” and not gone to the crucial second bit of saying, “but I will go away and find out.” As other hon. Members have mentioned, we need to raise awareness within the NHS—and it would be hugely beneficial if the NHS could do what it said it would do in 2003 and put it on the website—as well as raise awareness in society more broadly. It is awful to think that some parents who have suffered unimaginable and unexplained loss could also suffer stigmatisation within their communities—that they could suffer from suspicion because, obviously, babies don’t just die for no reason, do they? Equally, it would be hugely beneficial to raise awareness among the police so that they can handle cases far more sensitively. I have heard stories of great practice, but also of not great practice. I also cannot imagine the concern over siblings that must affect so many families affected by sudden unexplained death in childhood. Will the Minister commit to coming up with a plan for sudden unexplained death in childhood? To begin with, we have to get a plan, because without a plan, we cannot change it. Once someone says, “We have got a plan,” we are beholden to report back at a periodicity—let us say, every two years—to see whether we are doing what we said we would. I have mentioned it already, but the NHS website and raising awareness more broadly is equally important. We in this House and in this Chamber should not be satisfied with one Westminster Hall debate. We have raised awareness generally. We really owe it to our young children—to Louis and Harry and all the other children whose deaths are unexplained—to do the work to give an explanation and reduce the number of deaths in the future.

• 24 Mar 2026 · Defence · Hansard source

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  With the points the hon. Member has just made, it seems he has forgotten that a year ago his own party suspended seven of its Back Benchers for voting with an SNP proposal to lift the two-child benefit cap. If he is going to be quite so forthright in his criticism of us, could he explain why his Government have done such a volte-face in the intervening 12 months?

• 24 Mar 2026 · Defence · Hansard source

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  I am grateful to the Liberal Democrat spokesman for giving way. I think he is warming up to his leader’s new Dr Strangelove plot to have his own independent nuclear weapon. Could he tell us how much it is going to cost the UK?

• 24 Mar 2026 · Defence · Hansard source

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  When I was new to this place, I clearly did something very wrong, because the accommodation Whip allocated me an office that is geographically nearer to Trafalgar Square than to this Chamber. There is one compensating benefit, which is that when I look out of the window, I can see the statue of General Bernard Law Montgomery, Viscount Montgomery of Alamein, and if my hon. Friend the Member for Huntingdon (Ben Obese-Jecty) moves his head a bit, I can see Field Marshal Alanbrooke, on whose statue is written: “Alanbrooke, Master of Strategy”. The Minister will be aware that the art of strategy is the matching of ends, ways and means. In the few short minutes that I have, I want to use that framework to reflect on the approach that the Government have taken recently. I wish to also use the model of the three components to fighting power: the moral, the physical and the conceptual. The Minister will be fully aware of this. We know that this is a good model because Napoleon made the observation that “The moral is to the physical as three is to one.” Let us quickly run through the physical component and some developments that we have seen. On the base at Diego Garcia, despite Conservative Members asking a thousand times for the reason why the Government asserted that our position was untenable in the long term and that they had to do this leaseback agreement with Mauritius, we have never, ever been given a definitive view on which court or jurisdiction made it untenable. It has never been delivered in this place or anywhere else, and that has undermined the Government’s position a little. The Defence Committee heard representations from the Ukrainians we were training that, although they loved the training and were grateful for it, we were starting to lag behind. This was in November 2024. The absence of drones in the British military armoury and the environmental constraints on Salisbury plain meant that although the training was good, it was really lagging behind reality. It is a shame that the Minister for the Armed Forces is no longer here, but he has given us a decent amount of time. He said that we cannot rewrite history and we cannot run from it, which is absolutely right. I just wanted to remind him of the reason we had only one Type 45 at six weeks’ readiness to go to sea. After the widely lauded 1998 strategic defence review, which I appreciate was before the time of the Minister for Veterans and People, the Government came to the conclusion that we needed 12 Type 45s to fulfil the strategic defence review. Subsequently, the Labour Government cut that number down; I think the first cut was to eight, and then down to the six that we have now. They also chose a home-grown propulsion system that was subsequently proven not to work, which has meant that, having cut the original fleet in half, we are now having to cut what remains in half—quite literally, in order to take the propulsion system out of the side. We then had the strategic defence review. I sat on the Defence Committee and heard the reviewers say that the answer was 2.5%, after which they came back and said that it was actually 2.7%, and then that they had been told it would be 3% some time in the future, and then 3.5%; then, on the eve of the NATO summit, it went up to 5%. I am not surprised, therefore, that the defence investment plan has been a long time in coming. We do not have time to rehearse the arguments about the moral component of fighting power, and the huge undermining of the Government’s actions over the Northern Ireland Troubles Bill and the remedial order, and, indeed, the revelation that our own Prime Minister volunteered to work for free for Phil Shiner in attacking British service personnel such as myself; I do have to declare an interest as a veteran who spent three and a half years in Northern Ireland. Lastly, when I was at the Ministry of Defence, where I spent five years, we had a saying: “plans without resources are hallucinations”. Without the defence investment plan, the SDR is meaningless. When the Minister winds up, I would like her to acknowledge the fact that on 10 March, the Defence Committee was privy to a secret briefing in the Ministry of Defence. To a man and woman, the all-party Defence Committee came out of that briefing and took the unprecedented step of issuing a statement that, in our view, the Government should adopt Conservative party policy and go to 3% of GDP within this Parliament. That is unprecedented, and it needs to be listened to.

• 24 Mar 2026 · Defence · Hansard source

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  Was the hon. Member in the Chamber to hear the Prime Minister make his statement on the war in the middle east, in which he said that British sovereign bases, British troops and British people had been attacked? He said that it was therefore right that we defend ourselves, but that we cannot shoot all the drones out of the air and they have to be attacked on the ground. Does the hon. Member remember the Prime Minister coming to this House and saying that, and would he like to repeat his point that the Prime Minister has been absolutely crystal clear on his position throughout this conflict?

• 17 Mar 2026 · Middle East · Hansard source

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  I thank the Foreign Secretary for her statement. I am slightly struggling to see what it adds to the answer to the urgent question we had yesterday, but it is always nice to see the Foreign Secretary. When she asks the US Government to de-escalate, what do they say in response?

• 17 Mar 2026 · Youth Unemployment · Hansard source

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  A couple of weeks ago, I hosted a student roundtable, with two pupils from my eight secondary schools and two from my further education college. I agree with the Secretary of State in that I was left incredibly excited for them and by their hopes and aspirations for the future. However, we also had a discussion about how AI-proof those plans were. His statement mentioned short AI courses, and he also talked about the urgency. Can he tell us how short these short courses will be, who is going to deliver them and how the young people of Spelthorne will sign up to them?

• 17 Mar 2026 · Jury Trials · Hansard source

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  13. What assessment he has made of the potential impact of his proposed changes to jury trials on the criminal justice system.

• 17 Mar 2026 · Jury Trials · Hansard source

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  I think what the Health Secretary is actually doing at the moment is paying people to fudge the waiting lists. I want to be very clear, because there are slightly mixed messages from the Justice Secretary: are there any circumstances in which he would consider the reintroduction of jury trials for those cases that are going to have them removed?

• 17 Mar 2026 · Ministerial Salaries (Amendment) Bill · Hansard source

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  I am reminded of that great fictional character Sir Humphrey Appleby, who once observed that a party with 300 members gets to form a Government, but 100 are too young and too callow, and 100 are too old and too silly, so the Government pretty much select themselves. I congratulate the Minister on making it into the middle group. On the subject of second jobs, being a Minister is essentially a second job, for which the Minister is remunerated. Does he not feel that it is a bit mean-spirited to pull up the drawbridge on other MPs who might desire to have a second job, just as he does?

• 16 Mar 2026 · Strait of Hormuz · Hansard source

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  The Minister has come here to give us a pretty vague response of, “We’re in discussions with allies about making a plan,” and does not want to give us any more detail than that; I can potentially see why. When he has those discussions with allies, will he please remember that the British taxpayer kindly gifted two Sandown class minehunters to the Ukrainian navy and that we have trained up their crews, who are now at a NATO standard? The Defence Committee visited them in Portsmouth, and they were proud of those credentials. We have heard from my right hon. Friend the Member for New Forest East (Sir Julian Lewis) that Ukraine seems to be leaning into supporting allies in the Gulf. Therefore, when the Minister is having discussions with allies about making a plan, will he bear that in mind? Of course, those craft cannot deploy back to the Black sea because of the Montreux convention, and I believe the crews are there and ready to operate.

• 16 Mar 2026 · Middle East: UK Armed Forces Personnel · Hansard source

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  Ministers were all over the airwaves this weekend saying two things: first, that they would like to see a de-escalation of the conflict in the middle east; and, secondly, that they would like to see the strait of Hormuz secured for shipping. Why on earth does the Secretary of State think that those two aims are mutually exclusive? If they are mutually exclusive, how can he achieve both?

• 12 Mar 2026 · Business of the House · Hansard source

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  On Monday, my wife asked me what we were doing at work this week, and I said I was trying to support the British pub industry. She looked at me and said, “Trust me, you’re doing your bit already.” We probably will not agree on the reasons why the pub industry is suffering a bit, but does the Leader of the House agree that we would show some leadership in our communities if all 650 Members committed to going to their local pub and buying a drink this weekend?

• 12 Mar 2026 · International Women’s Day · Hansard source

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  Let me start by paying huge tribute to the hon. Member for Gorton and Denton (Hannah Spencer) for her maiden speech. She spoke with grace, poise and purpose, and her constituents are very lucky to have her representing them here, whether they voted for her or not. Members on the Conservative Benches will know that I am not overly competitive—I just have to win everything—so I was rather devastated that she made a far better maiden speech than my own meagre offering after the 2024 general election. The hon. Lady said she wanted to put Gorton and Denton on the map, and she certainly put it on my radar. As she was listing the distinguished people from her constituency, I wondered whether she would get around to mentioning Ethel “Sunny” Lowry, who was born in Gorton, and was the first British woman to swim the English channel in 1933. I know what hon. Members are thinking: surely I have some neat segue to other women doing water-based heroics from my own Spelthorne constituency. I would not like to disappoint them. In 1903, at 111 White Hart Lane in Barnes, young Amy Gentry was born to a Cockney father who had worked his way up and become a publisher. They bought a camping plot on Hamhaugh island, which is the southernmost point of the River Thames, and also the southernmost point of my constituency. She went there from the age of one—her dad got a boat and they used to love messing around in it. Before she was 10 years old, the people on Hamhaugh island had gymkhanas, and she was entered into a dinghy racing contest, which I think she won, and which clearly gave her a taste for competition. The war then intervened in Amy’s growing up, and hon. Members will be only too aware that in 1918 we passed in this place the Representation of the People Act. The tide was turning in respect of votes for women, women’s individuality and women expressing themselves. In 1920, Weybridge rowing club decided that they would form a women’s section—considerably revolutionary at the time. They got a group of young ladies together and trained them in how to row properly, and the women’s rowing movement began. In 1925, young Amy Gentry went over to the charity regatta in the Netherlands, where she competed against France, Belgium and Holland. By 1927 the sport had developed that much further that there was an eights competition on the Oxford and Cambridge course between Putney and Mortlake. She wrote at the time that she felt like she was rowing backwards at times—obviously, literally she was rowing backwards, but she did not feel like she was going anywhere—so dreadful were the conditions. In 1932, her father went to a boat builder and asked, “If you build my daughter a boat, will she win?” The boat builder said, “She will,” and indeed she did. She carried all before her from 1932 to 1934. She became the secretary of Weybridge rowing club, and by 1939 she was its chair. She was the driving force in women’s rowing in the country. One of the clubs that had been useful and had adopted women’s rowing with some enthusiasm was the Vesta rowing club, which set up the first women’s regatta. At the time, a gentleman from the club said: “While I do not approve of rowing for women, as they will do it anyway the best thing I can do will be to help them do it properly.” We can see what the attitudes were at the time. Nevertheless, Amy was fantastic at it. She retired from the highest level of the sport in the late 1930s. Obviously, the second world war came around, and in 1939 she became the secretary to Barnes Wallis. For hon. Members who are not familiar with the dam busters raid, Barnes Wallis was instrumental in developing the bouncing bomb. He and Amy Gentry would go to Silvermere lake, where he would fire various projectiles from a catapult across the lake—sort of a high-grade stone skimming competition—and then he and Amy would row out to collect them to see how they fared. Barnes Wallis was a pretty serious guy, but when that they were rowing out to one of the projectiles, Amy pointed out, “Wallis, you may be in charge, but I am in charge in this boat. Sit down.” After the war, rowing went from strength to strength. We were represented in the European championships in 1952 and in 1954, carrying all before us at the national and international levels. As a slight aside, at the 1954 European games Amy Gentry handed out some prizes to one of the crews, including to a young lady called Bette Shubrook, a member of the London rowing club. She had met her soon-to-be husband at the London rowing club on regatta on Boxing day. His name was Graham Hill. She went on to be Bette Hill, and she became the only person to be married to and the mother of a Formula 1 world racing champion. Amy was instrumental in bringing the European championships here in 1960, and she was awarded the OBE in 1969. She died in June 1976 in Stanwell in my constituency. The significance of that date is a sad irony: she did not quite live to see the moment one month later when women were allowed to compete in rowing in the Olympic games, in Montreal. In the Oxford and Cambridge boat race, when the women’s crews go under Barnes bridge in the latter stages of the race, they pass a huge pub on the south bank of the River Thames called the White Hart, which is at the end of White Hart Lane, where Amy Gentry was born. If hon. Members happen to be watching in a month’s time and see that moment, perhaps they will join me in raising a glass to the remarkable woman, Amy Gentry.

• 11 Mar 2026 · Finance (No. 2) Bill · Hansard source

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  They’ve gone up in smoke! [Laughter.]

• 11 Mar 2026 · Finance (No. 2) Bill · Hansard source

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  Could the Minister tell us when he last met a farmer?