Martin Rhodes MP: speeches

Speeches

• 2 Jul 2026 · Air Pollution · Hansard source

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  It is a pleasure to serve under your chairship, Mr Efford. I congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for Brent West (Barry Gardiner) on securing this important debate. Clean air is not simply an issue about health and the environment, but a moral imperative of our time. It is a challenge that requires urgency, with current legislation and frameworks lagging behind the science, alongside more joined-up thinking and action across agencies, Government Departments and devolved Administrations. I hope that the Minister can say something about the work that his Department is doing with others to take the issue forward. Clean air is an environmental, health and social justice issue. Poor air quality is an environmental challenge. Many of our wild plants and much of our natural environment cannot tolerate high pollution levels, which can devastate grasslands, peatlands and moorlands, leading to a loss of pollinators and significantly harming biodiversity. That matters on a bigger scale, because the ecosystems that we depend on for air, water and a liveable planet are being damaged. Poor air quality is a public health issue. It shortens lives and contributes to between 30,000 and 40,000 premature deaths every year. It increases the risk of diseases such as dementia, lung cancer, cardiovascular disease and diabetes. It affects all of us, but particularly the young, the old, pregnant women and their unborn children. That brings me to air quality as a social justice issue. Clean air is an equity issue: those more likely to have underlying conditions are also more likely to live in environments that worsen them. The areas most exposed to pollution are often the poorest, where proximity to traffic and poor housing often go hand in hand. That is why tackling the root causes is essential. Interventions can make a real difference. Air pollution was once widely associated with transport, but strategies—most notably, the shift away from diesel and the uptake of electric vehicles—have reduced transport’s impact. Alongside national action, local strategies matter. As has been mentioned, London’s ULEZ reduced NO 2 levels by 40% before lockdown, and, since the clean air zone was introduced in Bradford, it is reported that GP visits for cardiovascular and respiratory problems have reduced by 25%. However, success in one area should not obscure challenges elsewhere. Wood burning affects air quality inside homes. There must be a focus on air quality indoors, where we spend up to 80% to 90% of our time, as much as a focus on air quality outdoors and on how we protect buildings such as schools, hospitals and community facilities. Yes, we need more ambitious targets and a stronger framework, but, just as importantly, we must secure buy-in from local communities. Although national targets set direction, local needs are best addressed locally. That means empowering not only local authorities, important though that is, but communities themselves. Clean air cannot be delivered from the top down alone; alongside funding, we need expertise and partnerships so that residents, schools and community organisations can lead change. Community-led initiatives, such as local monitoring, clean transport and neighbourhood campaigns, would make the pollution issue visible, and give people a real stake in improving it. I hope that the Minister can say something about the involvement of communities in taking forward the important measures that are required. Public engagement must be at the heart of our efforts. Clean air should be seen as essential to everyday health. By raising awareness, and giving people the opportunity to shape solutions, we can turn an invisible scourge into a shared priority. With national ambition and local action, we can become a world leader in air quality again.

• 4 Jun 2026 · Pride Month · Hansard source

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  This time last year, in the debate on Pride Month in this House, I told the story of one of my constituents who had served in the military and had been dismissed because of his sexuality. He was treated at that time with a casual brutality. One positive thing about the debate was that a large number of Members wanted to speak, and with a desire to accommodate everyone—understandably—a time limit on contributions was introduced, so unfortunately I had to hurriedly reduce my seven or eight-minute speech to three minutes to fit the time limit. The next morning, having thought about this, I resolved to contact the constituent to apologise, because I felt that in the limited time available I had not done justice to his story. However, when I opened my emails to find his contact details, I saw there was an email from him. I opened it and the email was thanking me for telling his story. That indicates why Pride is so important: it is about stories being told, voices heard, lives recognised. It is about our community of communities being seen and heard. It is about being recognised and celebrated for who we are, not just kindly tolerated. Every year during Pride Month, we seem to get into the debate about whether Pride is a celebration or a protest. My contribution to those discussions has usually been along similar lines to those used by the Minister in her opening contribution: it is both a celebration and a protest. But now I think it is perhaps something else: Pride is indeed a place. Pride is a place where people can be their authentic selves without judgment or fear. Pride, above all else, should be a place free from shame—that shame we are so often taught from an early age, the shame felt at being who we are, that feeling that we are not quite who we should be. At best, it is the casual assumption by others that we are something we are not. At worst, it is name calling, mockery, rejection and hate. That shame is reinforced by social norms and assumptions. Pride is that place where people do not have to justify who they are. Yes, Pride can be a public place, a place of declaration, but Pride can be a private place, too—a private place where people find calm in knowing who they are, shedding shame and being themselves. No one should be expected to have to declare repeatedly who they are on request. No one should be challenged on a regular basis to justify who they are. We need to find ways as a society to offer protection to all, but that do not infringe on the privacy of all. We need to find ways of ensuring that all feel safe and are treated with dignity. That may not be straightforward, but it should not be impossible. I welcome what this Government have done to equalise the law so that hate crimes towards LGBT+ people attract the same severity of sentence as other forms of hate crime, and I commend the work of my hon. Friend the Member for North Warwickshire and Bedworth (Rachel Taylor) in advocating so effectively with others for that change. I welcome the Government’s commitment to a fully inclusive ban on conversion practices. No one should be allowed to be systematically abused because of their gender identity or their sexuality. I hope that across this House we can support legislation to bring that into force. There are times when I have celebrated progress, times when I have been frustrated by the pace of progress and times when I have been worried by barriers to progress. The truth now is that I have all those feelings in this debate. I can see progress to be celebrated; I can feel some frustration that some things are taking longer than I had hoped for; and I can see opportunities for progress that I feel are being missed. That is why this Pride Month it is all the more important for me to be in that place we call Pride and to share that place with others. I recognise that Pride does not mean that there will not be those who will mock and name call, threaten and abuse. There will be those who seek to roll back progress and to restrict rights. There will be those who seek to divide us. Our place of Pride is not some fabulous rainbow-glittered ghetto; our Pride is everywhere: on every train and every bus, in every pub and every café, in every factory and every office, in every supermarket and every petrol station, in every food bank and every restaurant, in every sports grounds and every cinema. This month we mark Pride Month, but every month, every week and every day when we live without shame, it is Pride—in place of fear, peace; in place of hate, love; in place of shame; Pride.