Lizzi Collinge MP: speeches

Speeches

• 23 Jun 2026 · Fly-tipping: Residential Areas · Hansard source

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  It is a pleasure to serve under your chairship today, Mr Stringer. I thank my hon. Friend the Member for Great Grimsby and Cleethorpes (Melanie Onn) for bringing forward this important debate. Fly-tipping is not only damaging to our environment—it makes our communities worse places to live. No one wants to walk past those huge piles of rubbish. I represent Morecambe and Lunesdale, which hosts some of the most beautiful spots in the country. I have a national landscape, a national park, the beautiful Lune valley and of course Heysham and Morecambe, which look out across the beautiful Morecambe bay. Morecambe’s town motto is “Beauty surrounds, health abounds” and I would like to preserve that beauty for my constituents. Rural constituents contact me about this issue, but as the debate is focused on residential areas, I will limit myself to talking about problems raised with me in towns like Morecambe, Heysham and Carnforth. I put on the record my thanks to the local Wombles groups and the litter-pickers, who go out every week in all conditions to help tidy up our community. Residents in Morecambe regularly tell me about their frustration at rubbish left in alleyways and ginnels. They worry about letting their kids go out to play because of broken glass. They are worried about rats—not to mention the expense. Millions of pounds are spent in England every year just to clean up waste. I asked my constituents what more could be done to tackle fly-tipping and an overwhelming number of people cited the cost of properly disposing of rubbish as a driver for fly-tipping. Private waste companies and council removal services are expensive and people without a car just do not have any other option, so if money is tight, there is a strong temptation to do the wrong thing and avoid disposal fees. Although I might get very grumpy at the outcome, we have to take an approach of what works and what might prevent the problem. Suggestions from my constituents included regular neighbourhood skip days, where people could use council skips, three bulky item pick-ups per year, keeping the restrictions on van trips to the tip but removing the need to book so that people can go on spec, community waste points and incentive schemes. I am really interested in the Minister’s comments on prevention. Prevention will not fix the problem entirely; we need enforcement. I am really pleased to see the Government publish the waste crime action plan, which takes a zero-tolerance approach. The Environment Agency receiving an extra £45 million over the next three years is important to boost enforcement. I really like that fly-tippers will face being ordered to clean up their mess and will be required to repay the cost of their illegally dumped waste. That is really important. They could also face penalty points on their licences and, if they are a serious repeat offender, even lose their licences. Constituents talk to me about cameras. I know that some councils have been using drones as well, and we have to look at all the ways that we can tackle this issue. Lancaster city council covers the Lancashire part of my constituency, and it found that across the whole of their district, fly-tipping is prevalent in five wards. Those are the five most deprived wards, so people who already face a lot of challenges also have to deal with their neighbourhood looking like crap. It is just not fair. What surprised me was that the city council said that some people told them that they did not know that fly-tipping was illegal—they did not know that it was a criminal offence. I am slightly suspicious of that. To close, the waste crime action plan allows for tougher enforcement, which is very welcome, and for more resources for that. We also have to make sure it is easier for people to do the right thing in the first place, encourage a sense of pride in people’s local communities and ensure that people take personal responsibility for their actions.

• 22 Jun 2026 · Pathways Study: Puberty Suppression · Hansard source

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  Puberty suppressors have been used for many years for precocious puberty, but the evidence base for their use in gender dysphoria lacked rigour, so I welcome the news that the trial will go ahead, as recommended by the Cass review. Will the Secretary of State confirm that the medications are only one part of the research, and can he outline some of the other measures being looked at? Given the small numbers expected to take part in this trial, will research also be undertaken into the impact on young people who are showing gender distress but are unable to access a trial or, of course, be prescribed puberty blockers, in order to get a full clinical picture? Will he furthermore ensure that all young children showing gender distress will have some care and support?

• 15 Jun 2026 · Brain Cancer · Hansard source

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  One of my constituents, Joseph Towers, has experienced at first hand the brutality of brain cancer and the delays in treatment that affect people across the country. I am short on time, so I will say these few things directly to the Minister. The UK ranks 22nd out of 29 wealthy nations for our five-year brain cancer survival rate. Other countries are doing it better and we can improve too. One area that we need to improve immediately is access to drug trials. My constituent Joseph was simply lucky to get on to a drug trial; many are not. There are also delays in rolling out medicines once they are approved. His drug, Vorasidenib, had its approval set back by three months because of discussions on changes to its quality-adjusted life year scores. What are the solutions? We need the full-time brain cancer specialist within the national cancer plan. We need to spend the money that is already allocated and, of course, ensure future funding. People living with brain cancer need to be allowed access to trials and drugs that are not specifically designated for brain cancer. We are very short on treatments; tumours are often inoperable, so drugs are the main way forward. As the petition says, genome sequencing is vital for developing and delivering treatments. We need to understand the market forces determining which conditions get privately funded by pharmaceutical companies, and fill the gaps where needed. We also need to make sure that bureaucracy does not delay drug trials. Yes, drug trials take time to ensure safety and efficacy, but too often what takes up time is delays in approval and funding, rather than the science. When patients are excluded from a trial—for proper scientific reasons and for the veracity of the trial—I would argue for compassionate access to those drugs alongside the trial. We owe it to Joseph, to the families who have contacted us ahead of the debate and to every person who will receive this devastating diagnosis to do better and to move far more quickly than we are moving today.

• 8 Jun 2026 · Progression of Bills through Parliament · Hansard source

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  I am sorry; I will not give way, as I want to finish this speech. The House of Lords at its best provides detailed scrutiny of legislation, proposing amendments to make it more workable and addressing criticisms of it. But this was not the House of Lords at its best; this was the House of Lords that I remember from my early adulthood: the Lords who kept blocking the equalisation of the age of consent for gay men and who delayed the repeal of section 28. What august company for these modern-day peers to be in! In each of those cases, the primacy of the Commons was asserted, and I really hope that once again the primacy of the Commons and the will of the British people prevail. Opponents of the Terminally Ill Adults (End of Life) Bill will say that the actions of those few peers were the Lords providing the scrutiny that the Commons did not. I say: what utter nonsense. We have already heard that over 1,200 amendments were proposed, including a pregnancy test for all applicants, regardless of their sex or fertility status. Is that scrutiny, or is it filibustering? I think we know the answer. In the Commons, the Bill had more scrutiny in terms of debate on the Floor and hours in Committee than any Government Bill of recent times. I remember those debates in the Commons; for the most part, they were nuanced, thoughtful and well intentioned. I remind Members that the issue of assisted dying has been debated for over 100 years in this country. I have also sat on multiple Bill Committees, including some of the longer and more contentious ones in this Parliament, and they did not last as long or see as many amendments debated as the Terminally Ill Adults (End of Life) Bill did in the Commons. If a process that went above and beyond the process for any Government Bill is not sufficient to pass a law, what is? The debate in this place and the subsequent amendments to the Bill addressed matters of substance that were raised because of often understandable concerns. They were supported by many of us who support the right of someone to choose the timing and manner of their own death in principle, but who would not support a Bill that exposed people to the risk of not making that choice freely or that did not have strong guardrails. My conclusion, and the conclusion of the Commons debate, was that this was about how a Bill would operate in practice. What we saw in the Lords was not that. The majority of Lords were first prevented from voting on any aspect of the Bill whatever, and the clogging of the debate with unserious amendments prevented a proper debate on matters of substance. Where does that leave us? It leaves us in a dangerous status quo where terminally ill adults, with the means to do so, go abroad to die, often too early. It leaves us with a legal situation where the manner of someone’s death and the intention of the people who were with them are determined after someone is dead and cannot make their views known. It leaves hundreds of terminally ill adults taking their lives every year, often in very upsetting circumstances. Most people will die a perfectly ordinary death, managed well by palliative care, but palliative care cannot help everyone, no matter how good it is. Anyone who says otherwise is unfortunately not telling the truth. That has been demonstrated, unfortunately, by too many difficult deaths and by the pain of too many families who are left behind. The debate today is about something even bigger than those tragedies; it is about the constitutional settlement of the United Kingdom. It is about the reasons why we have decided that those with no democratic mandate should not be able to block the will of the elected Chamber. It is about trust in Parliament—trust that we will act with dignity and respect for the proper way of doing things, and know our constitutional places and the limits placed on our power, which are there for a very good reason. It is about the ability of the Lords to behave in a way that allows us to have flexibility in our constitutional settlement, to move with the times and not to be bound by a single, rigid written document. I see great value in having flexibility in our constitutional mechanisms. However, that relies on individuals and groups of individuals operating with honour—something that, unfortunately, this episode did not demonstrate. I worry that if that is repeated, we risk having to move to a more rigid system to enable the primacy of the Commons. The British people expect high standards of scrutiny from parliamentarians, in both this place and the other place. In the case of the Terminally Ill Adults (End of Life) Bill, the House of Commons did its job very well. In the other place, the Lords were prevented from doing their job properly by the actions of a minority. Not only for the memory of Nat—our friend and fellow campaigner—but for every person in this country, that cannot be allowed to stand.

• 8 Jun 2026 · Progression of Bills through Parliament · Hansard source

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  Brief? Will the right hon. Member give way?

• 8 Jun 2026 · Progression of Bills through Parliament · Hansard source

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  Will the hon. Gentleman give way?

• 8 Jun 2026 · Progression of Bills through Parliament · Hansard source

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  Will the right hon. Member give way?

• 8 Jun 2026 · Progression of Bills through Parliament · Hansard source

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  My hon. Friend is making some excellent points about the need for challenge, debate and quality in this place and the other place. Does he agree that it is a shame that the Lords did not have an opportunity to express their view on the Bill because we never got to the end of business?

• 8 Jun 2026 · Progression of Bills through Parliament · Hansard source

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  Will the hon. Gentleman give way?

• 8 Jun 2026 · Progression of Bills through Parliament · Hansard source

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  Will my hon. Friend give way?

• 8 Jun 2026 · Progression of Bills through Parliament · Hansard source

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  It is a pleasure to serve under your chairship, Sir Edward. I want to speak about the process of the Terminally Ill Adults (End of Life) Bill, which was prevented from completing its parliamentary journey by a small number of unelected peers who showed through their actions that they had no respect for the constitutional settlement of this country, no respect for the House of Commons, no respect for their own role as scrutineers and no respect for the British public.

• 1 Jun 2026 · Health Bill · Hansard source

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  First, I must declare that my husband works for NHS England, which is a bit awkward, if I am honest. Today I will speak to a few different aspects of the NHS modernisation Bill, including the single patient record, the independence of the Health Services Safety Investigations Body, or HSSIB, and possible changes to the make-up of NHS foundation trust boards. I welcome the introduction of a single unified patient record, accessible to patients and clinicians in one place. Too often patients are forced to carry the burden of holding together their own medical history. I have heard the same story from countless constituents: they arrive at appointments with records that they have pieced together themselves, having to rehash their medical history over and over again to each new clinician. That clearly does not work for the patient, and it does not work for the clinician either, because when clinicians do not have access to the full picture, decisions are made with incomplete information, and the right diagnosis or treatment might be missed or, even worse, an unsafe care decision could be made. The single patient record addresses long-standing issues of fragmented records and poor communication between NHS services, and this Bill is an opportunity to make things work that much better, but that needs to come with strong safeguards. People rightly want to know that their personal, private information will only be used for proper purposes and will be kept secure. I urge the Secretary of State to take full notice of the Science, Innovation and Technology Committee’s views on that. In other ways, the single patient record can make our data more secure. I recently received a letter containing personal information, and I had been sent to my last house but one. That is not secure at all. I will talk quickly about the abolition of HSSIB and its responsibilities moving to the CQC. There is a fragmented and confusing patient safety and regulatory landscape, but independence and the appearance of independence in patient safety investigations is very important. I would like strong reassurances from the Minister that there will be still an independent investigative function that patients and staff can have confidence in. Harmed families have told us just how important that is. Finally, I flag the changes to the make-up of NHS foundation trust boards. The Bill appears to remove the requirement for registered nurses and doctors to be represented on trust boards. I hope that is an oversight that can be examined and rectified in Committee. For all its faults, the NHS is there for us right from the beginning and right to the end of our lives, and for the most difficult moments in between. From the birth of our children through to every broken bone and every anxious wait in A&E, we are supported by the NHS and its staff. If we want it to remain for future generations, we have to be willing to modernise it, reform it and make sure it is fit for how people live today.

• 21 May 2026 · Women’s Health and Wellbeing: Online Censorship · Hansard source

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  It is a pleasure to serve under your chairship today, Mr Stringer. I thank my hon. Friend the Member for Milton Keynes Central (Emily Darlington) for securing this important debate. Getting accurate health information is essential, and it is a fact that most people go online to get it. Some 48% of UK adults have used online health information, including from social media, to self-diagnose at least once in a year, according to a 2024 study by AXA. The same study found that 30% of young adults have turned to social media platforms such as TikTok and Instagram to access health information. Machine-learning tools such as ChatGPT are now, according to a 2026 study by AXA, the first source for symptom-checking for 36% of people—twice the number who would first go to the NHS website. That is worrying in and of itself, given how entirely inaccurate machine-learning tools such as ChatGPT can be. They do not necessarily give accurate information; what they do is build plausible sentences, but that is a debate for another day. We have already heard how medically accurate women’s health information is being systematically removed or downgraded by the algorithm. This is also known as shadow-banning. Content creators quite often do not know that it is even happening. We have also seen products removed from sales platforms, including Amazon, with adverts or posts being blocked for using words such as “vagina”, “period”, “menopause”, “pregnancy” or “fertility”. At the same time, adverts for erectile dysfunction or testosterone products remain visible. That is just one example. Advertisements for at-home fertility testing kits were automatically rejected by Amazon because they contained the word “vagina”, although the word “semen” was allowed. For context, the word “vagina” was contained in safety advice that said, “It’s not safe for you to use this product if you’ve had vaginal or cervical surgery within the last three months.” That is a safety implication, never mind anything else. A recurring pattern in reports and research is that algorithms and moderation systems appear to interpret women’s anatomy and women’s reproductive language as adult or sexual in nature, in a way that comparable men’s health content simply is not. A vacuum of information is being created by medically accurate language being removed or downgraded. What happens in this vacuum? What fills this vacuum? Misinformation. Unfortunately, the health and wellbeing advice online is quite often entirely without scientific basis. It often appeals to language like “natural”, “gentle” or “traditional”, or uses the accurate chemical names of everyday products or food to make them sound scary or unhealthy. That is easy to do. Take the chemical dihydrogen monoxide. That sounds like a very scary chemical, doesn’t it? That is water. It is easy to make things sound unhealthy and unsafe. We see this pattern again and again: good, anatomically and medically accurate information is buried while nonsense is peddled by grifters—sorry, “influencers”—who usually have their own supplements to sell, funnily enough, or are being paid to promote things that they simply do not understand. The shadow-banning of certain words—the removal of anatomically accurate terms—means that content providers who do know what they are talking about, such as medics and scientists, are drowned out. As a result, women are left with a sea of misinformation, bad advice and often poor health. What should we do about it? I recognise that some of these problems can come as an inadvertent and unintended consequence of important action to make online spaces safer, particularly for children. But children are not harmed by hearing medically accurate words or understanding how adult bodies work. As a parent, I make a point of using the correct anatomical terms. I am not going to lie: occasionally that has led to a bit of public embarrassment, especially when you have toddlers, but it means that my kids can now understand and find information about their own bodies. I ask that social media and online sales platforms work with campaigners and Government to figure out how to keep people safe online while not restricting vital, medically accurate content. That work needs to be done across different Departments, and it needs to include regulators. We need to align the very welcome women’s health strategy with wider digital online safety frameworks so that women’s access to accurate health information is treated as a shared priority. We need to find successful ways to disseminate valid, scientifically based women’s health information. That would involve the active testing of possible solutions, such as trusted expert accreditation, co-designed with clinicians, women’s health organisations and the platforms themselves. There is wider work to do on general health and scientific literacy in the population and the content creator space. I am sure that many of the people peddling nonsense do not know what they are doing because they do not have the critical thinking skills or the simple baseline knowledge to know what it is that they are selling. In conclusion, women must be able to get medically and scientifically accurate information about their health—and we must work together to deliver it.

• 19 May 2026 · Energy Security · Hansard source

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  My constituency has the Heysham 1 and Heysham 2 power plants. The reason why nuclear power will possibly go down is because plants are coming to the end of their lives and the right hon. Lady’s Government did nothing about that for 14 years. Why did she not deliver when she was in government?

• 19 May 2026 · Energy Security · Hansard source

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  Part of my constituency is in Lancashire, where fracking testing took place. We suffered earth tremors as a result. Does the Secretary of State agree that the British people do not want fracking in our communities, and do not want the risks that we saw in Lancashire?

• 20 Apr 2026 · Maternity Commissioner · Hansard source

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  It is a pleasure to serve under your chairship, Sir Alec. I thank my hon. and learned Friend the Member for Folkestone and Hythe (Tony Vaughan) for introducing this important debate. It is hard to fathom but, over the course of this speech, at least four babies will be born in England—they will come into the world, their tiny hands stretching out and a whole future beginning for them with their first breath. The births of my children were among the most significant moments of my life, as is the case for most parents, but alongside the joy comes something that I think every birthing parent will recognise: just how vulnerable you are in that situation and how frightening childbirth can be. You are placing your life and your baby’s life in the hands of others, in the hands of chance and in the hands of the brutal reality of natural processes. I first became involved in maternity advocacy after the frankly quite awful birth of my first child in 2014. Only when that happened did I realise how much harm had been done to someone close to me when she gave birth in 2011. I remember apologising to her with a newborn in my arms: “I’m so sorry; I had no idea how bad it is.” This has happened to women up and down the country. Today, I represent Morecambe Bay, where both those births took place, and where baby Ida Lock was born and died in 2019. Ida and her parents are always on my mind when we talk about issues such as this. I feel obliged to say that the vast majority of maternity care is safe. We talk about all the failings and all the horrors that women have seen, but I do not want that to frighten families. We have to accept that the worst tragedies are exceptions, but the experience of parents who have seen avoidable harm to themselves and their babies is the reason we are here today debating the pros and cons of a maternity commissioner. I will be honest: I do not necessarily have fixed views on this. It has been really interesting to hear colleagues speak, and I look forward to hearing more. I am also very interested in the outcome of Baroness Amos’s investigation. But we cannot just keep trying to learn lessons; we need to take action right now. We have had review after review and inquiry after inquiry, and yet here we are.

• 20 Apr 2026 · Maternity Commissioner · Hansard source

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  I absolutely agree. There is work to do to prioritise the actions that have come out of all those inquiries, because trying to do too much will lead to it all being done badly. There must be a real focus on what will make the difference to women’s safety and experience. Countless national and local maternity reports have revealed persistent issues with care, a failure to listen to expectant mothers, staffing pressures, a lack of transparency and institutional cultures that have encouraged cover-up. That is against the background of increased medical complexity in pregnancy and birth, wider aspects of public health having worsened, and the racism and misogyny that still permeates our society. These failures are a long time in the making. Failed regulation contributed to the historic problems at Morecambe Bay—and that was under a Labour Government. Structural changes to our care system and wider society under successive Conservative Governments have impacted care. Due to austerity, we had a £37 billion capital investment shortfall in the 2020s compared with our peer countries. We know that increased poverty affects maternal and neonatal mortality, and as a nation we have become more poorly over the past 15 years. It is now on us and the Government to fix the problem. As a member of the patient safety all-party parliamentary group, as well as through my own work as a constituency MP, I have seen that tragedies are often partly or completely avoidable, whether through effective diagnostics, timely or better treatment, or simply listening to women when they say that something is wrong. The consequences of these failures are devastating. A study by the Royal College of Obstetricians and Gynaecologists showed that up to 75% of pre-term babies who died could potentially have been saved with different care. Even when the worst is avoided, bad experiences can leave lasting damage. They can erode trust in services and make families more anxious about seeking care in the future. I want to touch on a couple of aspects of this issue that have not had the concerted operational effort put into them that they ought to have had. The first is the conditions that midwifery and obstetric staff work in, including the wider picture of the health of the nation. Most midwives, doctors and support staff are doing their absolute best in challenging circumstances, and most people go into maternity care because they want to deliver babies safely into this world and support families. They often go above and beyond, but they are being stretched too thin by the demands of their jobs. They are looking after ever more complex cases on every shift, and in 2023 alone, midwives and support workers put in over 100,000 hours of overtime. Even hospitals that are rated highly for maternity care feel the strain, with staffing gaps leading to interrupted handovers, missed checks and limited time for training. Over time, that pressure leads to burnout, staff leaving, and the loss of the experience that the system depends on. When the system is stretched like that, it is staff and patients who feel the consequences. I hope that the Minister will ensure that while we drive down waiting lists in elective care, we support maternity staff, improve their work environment and do not lose sight of the wider improvements to public health that we need to make to reduce complexity and comorbidities. The second thing I want to talk about is culture, particularly the ability of staff to speak up, the need for brave and open leadership, and the need for lessons truly to be learned. I am not saying that is easy to do—it is quite tricky, and it takes concerted effort and skilful leadership—but culture simply means, “The way we do things around here.” It can be a tangible thing that we can affect. Unfortunately, long-term failures and the spotlight that comes with them can cause staff to feel under attack, defensive and unsupported. Even where they have not been part of any particular case, staff groups can become entrenched. During the problems at Morecambe Bay and since, we have found that people working in opposition to each other in entrenched staff groups has caused huge amounts of harm. Poor leadership compounds the effect. I have spoken many times about the harm caused by cultures of silence, where staff do not feel able to come forward to raise concerns, problems are not addressed head on, and families are left without proper answers when things go wrong. We need to create environments where people are able to speak up, raise concerns early and be open when mistakes happen, because if staff do not feel safe to tell the truth and fear being blamed or punished, problems are hidden instead of being fixed. More than that, staff need to be supported when they raise a concern or even when they cause harm, because staff do not listen to what the leadership say; they see what they do, look at their actions and behave accordingly. To be clear, human beings will make mistakes, and patients will be harmed by those mistakes. That is inevitable. Not all cases of harm can be prevented, but they can always be learned from. In any organisation, culture is set from the top. The leadership have to show through actions that concerns are taken seriously and that no one will be penalised for speaking honestly. Working as a maternity advocate, I was shocked that organisations that are meant to be care organisations would respond to a bereaved family not by reaching out, caring for them and holding them, but by keep them at arm’s length, lying to them and even, when it came to coroner’s inquests, being adversarial. It beggars belief. Linked to that is the fact that families often feel the need to take legal action simply to get answers. That costs huge amounts of money, still sometimes does not get them answers, and sets up an adversarial approach that can cause further harm to families. I hope that the Public Office (Accountability) Bill, also known as the Hillsborough law, will shift the legal risk for organisations. The current legal risk to many hospital trusts appears to be telling the truth—that seems to be how they see it. I hope that the new law will shift the legal risk so that it is far riskier to obfuscate than to be candid. There are so many different aspects of maternity safety that I could talk about all day, such as the way that “normal” birth culture still permeates the education of our midwives and some practice, despite having been shown to be harmful. The wider culture around birth seems to say that it must be a joyful, wonderful experience at all times, when in reality it is messy, brutal and quite often unpleasant, even when it all goes well. We should be learning from other countries. For example, Japan has no-fault compensation for profound cerebral palsy. That separates the process of giving compensation from the process of investigating what happened and what went wrong. It appears to have lowered the legal costs associated with maternity care, but more importantly, it seems to have reduced the number of babies born with profound cerebral palsy. We all know that maternity care needs to be improved in this country, whether through the appointment of a maternity commissioner or actions such as implementation of recommendations in the Amos review. I thank my colleagues for their contributions, and their constituents for sharing their stories. To make maternity care safe, we need to ensure that services are properly staffed, creating the conditions for safe care, where handovers can be done properly and staff have time to do their jobs well and are supported to rest and recover. That also means making sure that women are listened to, that concerns are taken seriously and that, when things go wrong, they are handled with honesty and care. It means accountability for leaders as well as frontline staff. I urge the Minister to consider whether the leadership of a maternity commissioner can give us the change that our constituents deserve.

• 13 Apr 2026 · Middle East · Hansard source

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  My constituents are horrified by the civilian toll of US-Israeli and Iranian military attacks, including the threats to basic civilian infrastructure. They are also very concerned about the long-term domestic impact of the closure of the strait of Hormuz, for example on food prices. First, can the Prime Minister reassure my constituents that UK bases will never be used to target civilians or civilian infrastructure? Secondly, can he reassure them that the Government are planning for all possible domestic impacts?

• 24 Mar 2026 · Oil and Gas · Hansard source

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  We know that we will be using North sea oil and gas for some time to come. I welcome the Chancellor’s announcement about short-term and medium-term measures to address the crisis in the middle east and the inevitable impact on our energy costs, as well as her quick action on heating oil. The motion is, however, about not just the immediate crisis but a long-term strategic approach to energy security. The position of the Conservatives and Reform on increasing our reliance on oil and gas is based on false assumptions, not on the facts of the situation that we find ourselves in. This could be an ideological discussion—clearly, they are trying to turn it into another nonsense culture war—but does not need to be, because it is easy to overturn the Opposition argument with evidence and a number of facts. First, gas and oil prices are inherently volatile and often under the control of malign international actors. Oil and gas prices are set internationally, and gas and oil from the North sea are traded internationally, so unless the Opposition are suggesting that we nationalise the North sea and seize its products, their suggestion that it would somehow help with pricing is absolute nonsense. The more that we rely on gas and oil, the longer that gas will set the price of electricity. Of course, oil sets the price of all sorts of things, from transport to food and energy. Gas setting the price of electricity is bad, because it makes electricity cost more. Conversely, the higher the level of wind, solar, nuclear and storage, the less gas will set the price of electricity, and the cheaper that electricity can become. The more that we move away from technology that is reliant on gas and oil, whether it is at home, in transport or in industry, the less we are subject to geopolitical storms, such as the invasion of Ukraine or the current crisis in the middle east.

• 24 Mar 2026 · Oil and Gas · Hansard source

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  My hon. Friend is making some really good points. There are certain industries that do need gas, so does he agree that we need to shepherd that limited resource carefully, and that the transition in other areas of energy will support us to keep that gas and oil where we cannot replace it?

• 24 Mar 2026 · Oil and Gas · Hansard source

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  The hon. Lady is absolutely correct. The central premise of the motion simply does not stand up to any scrutiny. Secondly, the Opposition want to talk about levies to pay for the cost of new clean energy infrastructure, but they conveniently forget that all energy infrastructure needs to be renewed and replaced. Wind, solar and nuclear are cheaper than new gas and oil infrastructure. We also need to improve our grid, and that has to be paid for somehow. Whichever way we cut it, we need to build that infrastructure and pay for it, but the Conservatives and Reform simply do not have an answer on how they would do that. To be really clear, and to build on the point made by my right hon. Friend the Member for Oxford East (Anneliese Dodds), the skills of North sea gas and oil workers are absolutely vital in building and operating that new infrastructure. They have fantastic skills, and they need to be part of the clean energy transition. Last week, I met a Ukrainian delegation as part of the Energy Security and Net Zero Committee. It described in very brutal and frank terms how Putin has used energy as a weapon of war and the severe impact that has had on the people of Ukraine. Ukraine’s previous reliance on gas had left it exposed to Putin using energy in this way, and its message was clear: the only way to get energy security and keep the lights on domestically is with home-grown clean energy, with distributed generation and storage, providing protection against Putin’s attacks and the wider geopolitical instability that we have seen. The economic case for clean energy has been very clearly made. The arguments made by the Opposition in favour of continuing our reliance on oil and gas are nonsense. Let us not forget—

• 24 Mar 2026 · Oil and Gas · Hansard source

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  Will my hon. Friend give way?

• 24 Mar 2026 · Oil and Gas · Hansard source

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  I would like to finish. Finally, climate change in and of itself is a huge threat to our economic security, our physical health, the entirety of our wellbeing and the ability to feed ourselves. The Opposition say, “If we transition to clean energy, it will not make much of an impact”, but actually it will, because we are being global leaders. Every half a degree that we prevent in heating will save hundreds of thousands of lives every year. We must do something; we cannot sit on our hands and do nothing, as the Opposition would like us to do. This Government are meeting the challenge of climate change, not with hair shirts or by trying to do without, but by building a better world. We are improving our quality of life, with cleaner air—we are not killing tens of thousands of people with dirty air every year—warmer homes and good clean energy jobs.

• 16 Mar 2026 · Heating Oil Support · Hansard source

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  I thank the Minister for his statement and the swift response to the need of my rural constituents who are reliant on heating oil and LPG. This crisis has shown that our strategic approach of getting off the reliance on global fossil fuel markets is absolutely the right one, but it has also exposed the under-regulation of the heating oil market domestically, so can the Minister tell me what this Labour Government will do to tackle that under-regulation?

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

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  I thank the Secretary of State for his answer. About 10 days ago, we saw alleged attacks by both US and Iranian forces on water desalination plants in the middle east, which is in direct contravention of international law. Civilians in the middle east are reliant on desalinated water for survival, and targeting it is absolutely unacceptable. Can the Secretary of State confirm that UK forces operating in the middle east continue to operate fully under international law, and that we condemn operations that target civilian infrastructure?