Marie Goldman MP: speeches

Speeches

• 1 Jun 2026 · Equality Act 2010: Code of Practice · Hansard source

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  I thank the Minister for advance sight of her statement. After the Supreme Court’s ruling last year, the Government’s job was to give people, businesses and organisations clear, workable guidance. The code is instead unworkable, exclusionary and expensive for businesses. As the Minister knows, the Government must ensure that they meet the legal obligations placed on them by the public sector equality duty. That requires the Minister to have due regard to the need to eliminate unlawful discrimination, harassment, victimisation and any other conduct, to advance equality of opportunity between people who share a protected characteristic and people who do not, and to foster good relations between people who share a protected characteristic and people who do not. Yet the Government’s own equality impact assessment identifies disproportionate harm to those with protected characteristics, and a failure to set out how that harm will be addressed. Can the Minister really say, hand on heart, that she believes the guidance does that? The impact assessment notes how the guidance will likely impact women who are not trans, yet do not meet cultural and social expectations around what a woman should look like. There have already been stories of women with mastectomies being challenged when accessing women-only spaces because they do not look like women. Has the Minister truly considered that? For trans, non-binary and intersex people, the code operates from a position of exclusion. It risks driving those small minorities away from public life, as leading mental health charities have since warned. The guidance conflicts with our core British values of tolerance, decency, respect for individual liberty and the rule of law. That is why I urge the Minister to withdraw it and to accept that this issue needs to be resolved by Parliament as law makers. To achieve that, I beg the Minister to adopt the Liberal Democrat proposal to appoint a joint committee of cross-party MPs and peers, to conduct post-legislative scrutiny of the Gender Recognition Act 2004 and the Equality Act 2010, taking evidence from all communities who have been impacted, in order to propose amendments or new legislation that it sees as necessary to ensure that existing rights are protected. If we work together we can fix this; sowing division will not.

• 28 Jan 2026 · Health Inequalities: Women · Hansard source

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  In September, I raised the case of my constituent Mary in the House. Mary is among the parents of at least 7,000 children who have suffered birth defects because of the anti-epilepsy drug sodium valproate after it was prescribed to pregnant mothers in the 1970s. Next week marks the second anniversary of the Hughes report into the sodium valproate and pelvic mesh scandals. Mary and other mothers like her needed redress and support for their children years ago, and the Government response to the Hughes report is long overdue. What assessment has the Minister made of the impact on the women and their children who are left in limbo by this Government’s failure to respond to the Patient Safety Commissioner’s report of February 2024?

• 2 Dec 2025 · Budget Resolutions · Hansard source

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  Like many Members across this House, my team and I deal with casework about special educational needs on an almost daily basis, so I welcome the announcement that from 2028 the Government will be centrally funding SEND, in theory ending the postcode lottery of SEND provision and lessening the pressure on financially strapped local authorities. However, there was no new money for schools in the Budget, and the OBR estimated that almost £2 billion would need to be cut from the SEND Budget in 2028-29, so how will this work? The Government and the Education Secretary have long said that the SEND reforms will not be about cutting funds, yet when asked by The Guardian whether the SEND White Paper would have any role in this cut, it was reported that His Majesty’s Treasury said that it would. It is parents and children that must be at the heart of any reform, not cost cutting, but I worry that the Budget sets the scene for just that. I encourage the Government to assure families that their children’s needs will not be ignored because, amid the cuts, they are deemed too expensive. Sadly, this Budget worsens the economic outlook for young people. The Resolution Foundation has noted that the rise in the minimum wage for under-20s could make it even harder for this age group to find work because, coupled with last year’s employer national insurance rise, it will make hiring even more expensive. Freezing the threshold for when student loan repayments must start is not just another stealth tax; it is one that is specifically aimed at young people. The Government’s decision to again freeze tax bands will also disproportionately impact young people, who earn most of their income through wages rather than dividends and who spend a much larger share of their income on essentials that are impacted by higher inflation, such as food and rent. Turning to disabled people, my Liberal Democrat colleagues and I welcome the long-overdue removal of the two-child benefit cap, but this change does not help families raising disabled children, who were already exempt from it and are far more likely to be living in poverty. Rhetoric suggesting that benefit claimants get luxury cars is simply misleading, unhelpful and ultimately punitive. It does nothing to fix our economy, but it does create an enemy of vulnerable people. People from disabled communities have told me that they used to be forgotten entirely, but are now upset at being scapegoated for the country’s ills, and are getting tired of it. One disabled person told me recently that they almost wished disabled people could go back to being forgotten. Research from Sense, the charity for disabled people with complex needs, points out that two in five parents of disabled children cannot properly heat their homes in winter, with the same proportion skipping meals so that their child can eat. There are so many other measures that should have been in the Budget, but it does absolutely nothing to support these communities. Finally, on mental health, Renew Counselling, a 100-year-old charity in my constituency delivering mental health support, wrote to me after the Budget to remind me of the extra strain the rise in the minimum wage will place on it. It is not that it disagrees with paying it, but where is the support for those charities?

• 23 Oct 2025 · Black History Month · Hansard source

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  The hon. Member speaks very powerfully and knowledgeably, in particular about maternity services. I note with interest the maternity services review being kicked off by the Government at the moment. Does the hon. Member agree that many of the changes he is suggesting could be implemented right now and that we do not need to wait for the outcome of that review before we get started?

• 3 Sept 2025 · Living Standards: East of England · Hansard source

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  It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mrs Hobhouse, and I thank the hon. Member for Norwich South (Clive Lewis) for letting me speak. As a fellow east of England MP, I thank him for securing this important debate, and I hope he agrees with me that health is central to living standards. As vice-chair of the East of England all-party group, I note that my predecessors published a report on levelling-up in the region in 2022. The report found that women in the region can expect to spend 19 years of their lives in less than good health, compared with 16 years for men. According to an international Global Burden of Disease study, 42% of ill health in the east of England can be linked to preventable factors linked to socioeconomic deprivation and other health inequalities. I regularly receive casework from constituents experiencing long delays in referrals following GP appointments. That is shown in the data, with gynaecology waiting times a particularly bad example. For example, in June Chelmsford’s Mid and South Essex integrated care board had the highest gynaecology treatment waiting list of any ICB in the east of England at 15,768, with almost half of women waiting for longer than 18 weeks for treatment—well below the Government’s 92% target. Indeed, one of my constituents wrote to tell me that she would face a 78-week wait for a gynaecology appointment, not 18 weeks. We all recognise that the longer someone needs healthcare, the more complex, financially costly and serious the consequences can be, and we need the Government urgently to bring down referral waiting lists. As the Royal College of Obstetricians and Gynaecologists noted, the public health grant must be adequately funded to address the underlying causes of sickness, especially those that acutely affect women. In Chelmsford, my city council has emphasised how important that is, helping to meet one of the statutory duties of ICBs, which is health and wellbeing, especially in the context of reduced staffing, the abolition of NHS England, and ICBs being asked to reduce their costs by 50%. I urge the Government to commit to expanding the number of women’s health hubs in the east of England in particular.

• 2 Sept 2025 · English Devolution and Community Empowerment Bill · Hansard source

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  I also used to be a councillor, like many Members across the Chamber. I was deputy leader of Chelmsford city council for five years and an opposition member at Essex county council. I have seen at first hand the work of local councils and I know that they do it in very difficult circumstances—circumstances that have got harder and harder, with dwindling funds and increased demands on council services. Despite the very best efforts of council leaders across the country and council officers, who are often the unsung heroes local government, there are crises in housing, in special educational needs and in adult social care. We do not seem to have a plan to fix any of them, yet we seem to be rushing ahead with local government reorganisation and devolution, which to me seems a bit like putting the cart before the horse. Is the best way to fix the crisis in special educational needs or in adult social care, or to truly deliver all the housing we need a different form of local government? Why are these really important issues not part of the mix? Why do we not have a plan to fix them first—before we reorganise local government and trap ourselves in a corner? I am in favour of devolution: it is right to have power closer to the people it affects. I want local communities to be empowered, but this Bill does not deliver that. In fact, although it devolves powers relating to transport and skills—and other things in the Bill are good, too—the local government reorganisation that goes with those measures means that this legislation does the exact opposite of delivering devolution. Let us take Essex as an example. I choose Essex because I represent the constituency of Chelmsford in the very heart of Essex, because I used to be an Essex county councillor and because Essex is in the first wave of reorganisation. Essex will not benefit from the scrapping of first past the post, so my constituents will not benefit from their votes truly being represented. There is a proposal to replace Essex county council plus the district councils with either three, four or five unitaries. If we include the other existing unitaries plus Essex county council, we are talking about 15 councils in total. Replacing them with possibly three unitaries would be the exact opposite of devolution; it would take power away from the people and make the councillors elected to represent the people further away from them.