Marie Rimmer MP: speeches

Speeches

• 6 Nov 2024 · Uyghur and Turkic Muslims: Forced Labour in China · Hansard source

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  It is a pleasure to work under your chairmanship for the first time, Mr Dowd. I thank my hon. Friend the Member for East Renfrewshire (Blair McDougall) for securing this essential debate. Now that we have a Labour Government, we have an opportunity to review our trade and diplomatic relations with nations, not least with China. We know that many manufactured goods exported from China have used forced labour by Uyghur and Turkic Muslims, not least in the solar, electric vehicle, cotton and seafood industries. Absent from the last Parliament was a human rights approach to trade. We have an opportunity to reset our trade policies and international relations and to ensure that countries that exploit labour know the consequences. We must not stand by when Uyghur and Turkic Muslims are exposed to slave labour, torture and re-education programmes. As the Minister knows, I have been challenging the UK’s approach to trade with China in the light of the harvesting of organs and the use of forced labour; I sought to amend the Medicines and Medical Devices Act 2021 and the Procurement Act 2023. Over the past few years, UK legislation has fallen behind developments in the supply chain. Our laws urgently need to be enhanced to protect human rights. Such crimes must be held against the standards set in international law, and where found wanting, sanctions imposed. I call on our Government to clean up the supply chain and ensure that China is held to account for the abuses perpetrated. Britian has been a soft touch and now we need to be in touch with the reality of these atrocities. The evidence is there—from submissions to The Hague to inside reports—that these crimes are being committed. Today it is estimated that 40% of the UK’s solar industry and 45% of the world’s solar-grade polysilicon supply are connected to the Uyghur region of China. That means that 97% of the world’s solar panels could contain polysilicon made in the Uyghur region of China, which has credibly been reported as being at risk of association with Uyghur forced labour. As Labour progresses with its green energy sprint, it is vital that clean energy means clean procurement. Similar breaches have been exposed in the batteries for electrical vehicles. Will the Minister introduce a presumptive ban on imports from Xinjiang, akin to the US Uyghur Forced Labor Prevention Act, so that unless a business provides clear and convincing evidence that goods sourced in Xinjiang were not made with forced labour, they will be prohibited? We need to further review our modern slavery legislation. Section 54 of the Modern Slavery Act 2015 needs to be more robust. Can we please review it so that companies and their supply chains can be held to account? Should companies be found in breach of cleaning up their supply chains, significant penalties should be applied to the perpetrators. We need a serious trade framework making it explicitly clear that the UK will cease all trade if there are traces of forced or slave labour. The reported abuse of Uyghur and Turkic Muslims is a significant breach of the values of our country and our Government, and we must seek to lead the way to ensure that our trade restrictions become freedoms for the Uyghur and Turkic Muslims. It has been less than 16 hours since I sat and listened to two Falun Gong people—a woman and a man—in Room G off Westminster Hall last night. One had been imprisoned in Xinjiang for over 20 years—taken in and brought out, taken in and brought out, for years, and tortured. She is now here in this country. I listened to her. It was harrowing. It was horrifying. A younger man was also there; he had been in a number of times and escaped—got out. I have met a doctor who escaped and is now living in this country. He did not know what the scar he had was until he was taken into hospital for something while over here. It was found that part of a kidney and part of a lung had been extracted, and there was no point in taking those from him. He was a prisoner. They were all Falun Gong, and what is happening to Uyghurs now is what has happened to Falun Gong. Since we started looking at this situation and raising things in the UK, the Office of the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights concluded in 2022 that violations in the region “may constitute international crimes, in particular crimes against humanity.” The UK Parliament voted on 22 April 2021 to recognise those atrocities as genocide. Since then, Beijing has renamed hundreds of villages and towns, continuing the effort to subsume and eradicate any Uyghur culture. New regulations are in force that further restrict religious practice. Volkswagen and SHEIN have come under heavy pressure for continuing to source from the Uyghur region, with attendant risk of supply chain slavery. Many internment camps have been abandoned since 2023. Information from the region is scarce, but it would be accurate to suggest that persecution has not ceased. Rather, there appears to be a move away from internment in labour camps towards larger numbers imprisoned—one in 26 Uyghurs. The extraction of organs in organ harvesting happens at age 28. The three organs survive when taken from these young men while they are alive, because it is most successful if they are fresh and taken from live bodies. That is what happens in organ harvesting. In April 2022 the Health and Care Act came into force, introducing significant reforms to the administration and delivery of health and care services in England. Section 47 of the Act mandates a comprehensive review by the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care to assess the potential risks of slavery and human trafficking within the NHS chain. The recent review undertaken by NHS England and Supply Chain Coordination Ltd scrutinised 1,361 suppliers. It encompassed 600,000 products, including approximately 30,000 cotton-based items. The review revealed that 21% of UK health procurement is categorised as being at high risk of involvement with slavery. An estimated 40% of the UK solar industry is credibly reported to be at risk of being tainted by Uyghur forced labour. We have inadequate laws on public procurement, and they need to be sorted out. Falun Gong is near the end. The hounding of these people is international; it is even in this country. A woman was left splayed on the ground outside our British Museum. No one went near her and no police came—nothing. We are having further investigations into that. We have had police in “stations” in Manchester. This is all about controlling different categories of Muslims. There may be slight changes, but we can all practise our religion or practise none if we so wish. What steps will the Minister and our Government take to ensure that Great Britain cleans itself up? How will we ensure that people can live in other countries and not be persecuted for cheap labour? All this is about keeping the Communist party in China, along with the Communist party in Russia. We are in a dreadful situation in our world, and Great Britain really must step up. Our Government cannot allow us to drift along, which is what will happen if we do not step up soon.

• 5 Nov 2024 · Income Tax (Charge) · Hansard source

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  No. It is good that, in the short term, a Labour Government will target additional grant funding at the councils that are most in need, but that needs to be the start of a process that will reverse years of financial decline. For too long, local council funding formulas have worked against underprivileged communities, and the areas that need funds the most often do not receive their fair share. Sadly, that creates a downward spiral, with an ever-increasing percentage of local government funding being spent on social care. This is not sustainable. As I have said, 73% of our council’s budget is spent on social care. Moreover, the 48 members of the Special Interest Group of Municipal Authorities are unable to invest in their local areas in the same way as their counterparts because of the funding formulas. One in four households in England live in a SIGOMA council area. At present, social care services are a postcode lottery, and that needs to be addressed. We need a methodology that takes actual needs into consideration, and ensures that the funding follows. However, I applaud the Chancellor for providing £250 million for children’s social care and £600 million for adults.

• 5 Nov 2024 · Income Tax (Charge) · Hansard source

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  This Budget will deliver to communities such as mine. May I begin by welcoming the mineworkers’ pension scheme resolution? It means that £1.5 billion of miners’ pension payments to their fund will be distributed among 112,000 former miners and their families. It is absolutely right that an injustice has been corrected, for those people have waited far too long. It is also shameful that the last Government failed to budget for the resolution of the Post Office Horizon and infected blood scandals, and I applaud our Chancellor for correcting that now. I urge the pensioners who will not receive the winter fuel allowance—those who are just missing out—to apply for universal credit; in St Helens, £6.5 million remains unclaimed. I regret that we have been unable to remove the two-child cap, or deal justice to the WASPI women. Let me now turn to the issue of local authority funding for adult and children’s social care. Local councils bore the brunt of austerity; successive Government cuts since 2010 have left them in dire straits, which disproportionately affects the people who are most likely to access social care. There have been increasing pressures to find savings, which has not only cut services and jobs but seriously limited the ability to invest in cost-effective preventive services. Some 73% of the budget of St Helens borough council is spent on adult and children’s social care. I welcome the Chancellor’s 3.2% real-terms increase in local government funding, including the £600 million to support social care—

• 29 Oct 2024 · Living Standards · Hansard source

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  5. What steps she plans to take to help improve living standards.

• 29 Oct 2024 · Living Standards · Hansard source

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  The bottom 50% of the population owned less than 5% of wealth in 2021, while the top 10% stacked up 57% of it—up from 52.5% in 1995. In our communities, the less well-off are struggling with energy prices and other costs. What will the Government do to ensure that the gap closes?

• 28 Oct 2024 · China: Human Rights and Sanctions · Hansard source

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  I am honoured to have met Sebastien Lai and his legal team, who are fighting for the release of his father, Jimmy Lai. Jimmy is 76 and a diabetic, and there are serious concerns about his ill health in solitary confinement. Jimmy is a man of faith. He is a Roman Catholic who is being denied Holy Communion—how very cruel that is at his stage of life and in his condition. His crime is standing up for freedom and democracy. Sebastien has been doing all he can, but he needs assistance and respectfully requests that senior figures in Government get his father, a British citizen, released. Will the Foreign Secretary commit to meeting Jimmy Lai’s family and will he ask the Chancellor to do the same, ahead of her visit to China next year?

• 17 Jul 2024 · Debate on the Address · Hansard source

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  It is a pleasure to follow the right hon. Member for Islington North (Jeremy Corbyn). May I congratulate all Members who have been returned to the House of Commons, and in particularly I congratulate and welcome all the new Members. I wish them every success and happiness in their time in the House. The Humble Address was introduced by my hon. Friend the Member for Bootle (Peter Dowd), a great friend of mine, and seconded by my hon. Friend the Member for Vauxhall and Camberwell Green (Florence Eshalomi). They are both warm, kind people—probably the two kindest I know in the House—and their speeches were very warm, very humorous and very interesting. That was the highlight of the day, in my view. I must thank, in particular, my constituents in St Helens South and Whiston for returning me once again. It is a great honour to represent the town in which I was born, and in which I hope to die, and to represent those great people who have worked so hard during their lives. For too long, social care and the needs of elderly and vulnerable patients have not been adequately considered, but social care is just as important as our national health service. Indeed, the NHS has suffered greatly from the lack of appropriate and necessary recognition and consideration of social care within Government. We have heard time and again about record waiting lists, patients being treated in hospital corridors, and ambulances carrying patients having to queue for hours outside A&E. According to a communication from the North West Ambulance Service, 30-odd ambulances had been stuck in Whiston hospital car park. The hospital had already turned a corridor into a ward and was doing everything it could, but the ambulances were still stuck in the car park. This is simply because hospitals are over capacity—and Whiston has been well over 100% capacity on many occasions. It is a very popular and very good hospital, but it is overstretched. Elderly and chronically sick people are not being given the dignity that they deserve. At times, unsafe discharges have occurred in various hospitals, and that needs to change. There is a new term now: it is not “bed-blocking”, but “accommodation not clinically needed”. Social care must be fixed and properly financed, and it must be truly affordable for people to use. The pressure that the NHS is under will only be fixed if social care is fixed as well. Because of the wonders of modern medicine, people are living longer, but that often brings with it multiple complex needs. Our care system has not kept up with these changes. Families care, and they also need support. Care staff cannot leave a sick person alone waiting for an ambulance. Often they wait for hours, which has a knock-on effect on shift patterns and, ultimately, on other patients who are waiting for the care and support that they need. Elderly and vulnerable patients should not be left waiting for food, medicine and personal care. The NHS and the care sector need to be better integrated, in order to stop situations like that arising. Care homes and nursing homes are also closing, so, again, there is a lack of capacity leading to unsafe discharges. The sector is in crisis, and patients are suffering. When it comes to adult social care reform, priority must be given to treating patients at home where they feel comfortable, with their families around them and with their neighbours popping in. That is essential, both to protect hospital bed capacity and to give elderly and disabled people the dignity they deserve and the ability to stay in the homes they love in familiar surroundings. Most of the care, and even some of the medical and clinical treatments, can be given at home—I have witnessed this—and that can free up NHS bed capacity for those who need the beds to receive treatment that they cannot receive at home. The current system of relying on local authorities whose budgets have been cut for more than a decade is not good enough. Even with the additional social care levy, local authorities are struggling to cope. The levy is based on council tax levels, so the areas with the lowest returns will receive a pittance. It is in those areas that more people need care and support. According to the Local Government Association, 57% of council tax already goes on social care. It is not sustainable, because there is less and less money, and more and more people. We live longer now, and we will continue to live longer in the long term, so the problem will only continue to get worse. Social care should be financed nationally, and it should follow the needs of patients. We cannot give a quota of money when there are hundreds of people in one borough, and perhaps 100 in another borough, needing support; it needs to follow the needs of the patient. One of the sector’s major problems is hiring and retaining care workers, who do an incredibly difficult job. They are absolute angels, who look after our elderly relatives and loved ones with love and compassion. Social care should be promoted as a valued service, and professionals in the sector deserve recognition and respect, yet the pay and terms and conditions need to match the duties we ask of them. The whole sector needs a rework to ensure that it pays fairly and offers progression, so that staff can afford to stay in the job that they love and want to do. They should be valued. Labour has promised, rightly, to set up a national care service, thereby finally putting care on a par with the NHS, because it needs to be a modern healthcare system. There needs to be sector of social and healthcare professions. The reforms need to look at the funding model, at-home treatment, staffing issues and, crucially, the integration with the NHS.