Melanie Ward MP: speeches

Speeches

• 2 Dec 2025 · Budget Resolutions · Hansard source

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  Will my hon. Friend join me in recognising the work of charities such as Kirkcaldy Foodbank and Kirkcaldy YMCA, which joined me in Parliament earlier this year to call on the then Secretary of State for Work and Pensions, who they met, to lift the two-child cap? They underlined the need for this cruel policy to be scrapped. Indeed, Kirkcaldy Foodbank has fed 833 children so far this year, and it has welcomed the lifting of the cap. Will my hon. Friend join me in recognising that lifting the two-child cap was the only possible step to ensure that child poverty levels go down, instead of up?

• 2 Dec 2025 · Budget Resolutions · Hansard source

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  Will the hon. Member give way?

• 2 Dec 2025 · Budget Resolutions · Hansard source

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  On the BCSSS move, will my hon. Friend join me in recognising the 290 people in my constituency who will benefit and in paying tribute to Billy Ogg from Kingseat in my constituency who has done so much work campaigning for the change alongside many other former coal board staff?

• 2 Dec 2025 · Budget Resolutions · Hansard source

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  The hon. Member says that he has not heard much from Scottish Labour MPs about the Chancellor, so let me take this chance to put on record my thanks, and the thanks of my constituents, to the Chancellor for ensuring that this Budget gave £20 million to Kirkcaldy to begin the renewal of our town, after almost two decades of his party’s rule in Scotland.

• 18 Nov 2025 · ExxonMobil: Mossmorran · Hansard source

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  This is devastating news for all the workers at the ExxonMobil Fife ethylene plant in Mossmorran, many of whom are my constituents. ExxonMobil must now be fully transparent and give proper clarity for the sake of all those affected. This company made £25 billion in profits last year, yet over the course of multiple meetings with Ministers in recent months it failed to come up with any viable proposals to secure the plant and the jobs. In contrast, I have today met with representatives of Shell, which runs the adjacent Fife natural gas liquids plant, and it has confirmed that the jobs there are secure for the foreseeable future. I am also in regular contact with trade union colleagues. Earlier today, both Fife council and I called for a new taskforce to be set up to explore future options for the plant and provide proper support to the workforce. Will the UK Government give full support and engagement to such a taskforce?

• 18 Nov 2025 · Topical Questions · Hansard source

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  Today’s news that ExxonMobil is to close the Fife ethylene plant in Mossmoran is a devastating blow to many of my constituents. I am furious that contract workers appear to have been locked out of the site this morning. News reaching me suggests that ExxonMobil staff, many of whom have decades of service, have been told that they will lose their jobs but have no idea of the redundancy package they will receive. That follows months of attempts to engage with ExxonMobil in good faith, during which it was not forthcoming about its intentions or about what the Government can do to save the plant and the jobs. ExxonMobil continues to ignore my requests for clarity. Will the Government do all that they can to support a future for the plant and its workers? Will the Minister join me in calling on ExxonMobil to share vital information at this incredibly—

• 4 Nov 2025 · Supporting High Streets · Hansard source

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  Does the Minister agree that it will be infuriating to many of my constituents to hear the right hon. Member for Chingford and Woodford Green (Sir Iain Duncan Smith) describe what the Labour Government are doing as “peripheral”? That presumably includes the growth mission fund, which is making a multimillion-pound investment in my high street in Kirkcaldy. The high street was left in a state of decline after 14 years of Conservative government.

• 22 Oct 2025 · Scottish Independence Referendum · Hansard source

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  The SNP’s renewed chatter on independence is understandable, because it wants to distract from its abysmal record of running down our public services. Given that its plans for defence in an independent Scotland include giving up the nuclear deterrent and replacing it with little more than a Scottish navy comprising the Waverley and the Vital Spark, does the Secretary of State agree that Vladimir Putin will be rubbing his hands with glee at the SNP’s latest outbursts?

• 22 Oct 2025 · Devolution in Scotland · Hansard source

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  Hon. Members may be aware that in May the people of Scotland sent 37 Scottish Labour MPs to this place—and a diverse bunch we are. It probably ages me to note that when my hon. Friend the Member for Falkirk (Euan Stainbank) speaks shortly, he may talk about the referendum, and he will mean the one in 2014, when he was just too young to vote, whereas when I talk about the referendum, I mean the one in 1997, for which I was just too young to vote. Of course, that 1997 referendum asked whether there should be a Scottish Parliament and if it should have tax-varying powers. At the time, I remember feeling that if I had been old enough to do so I would have voted yes to both. It was a long-held Labour manifesto commitment to bring decision making on hugely important issues—our health, education, community safety and economy—into the hands of the Scottish people. I still remember being in the car with my mum the day after the vote, listening to the news coverage and feeling excited that the result had been “yes, yes”. It felt like such a huge opportunity for all of us. In his speech at the opening of the Scottish Parliament in 1999, Scotland’s then First Minister, the late great Donald Dewar, said that the Scottish Parliament was “first a hope, then a belief, then a promise. Now” it is “a reality.” The question today is whether the SNP Scottish Government are using the reality of those significant powers they hold, together with record levels of funding —an extra £5.2 billion this year alone—to make the greatest possible difference to the lives of our people. I believe the answer is clearly no, whether through incompetence or by design. The Labour-led Scottish executives, as they were when the Scottish Parliament was first formed, took bold decisions: banning smoking in public places, the fresh talent initiative and action on sectarianism—something that too often is overlooked in Scotland. They took action and, crucially, delivered results, and we need far more of that in our politics in Scotland. Today’s reality for many in my constituency, and across Fife and Scotland as a whole, has been bitterly disappointing after almost two decades of SNP division, diversion and failure. One in six Scots languish in pain on NHS waiting lists—over 40,000 of them in Fife. Indeed, more people are waiting over two years for NHS treatment in Glasgow alone than they are in the whole of England. A third of ambulances wait at hospitals for more than an hour while the patients in them wait for a bed. Last winter, medics at my local hospital, the Victoria hospital in Kirkcaldy, had to set up a makeshift ward outside the hospital, because the queues of ambulances were so great. SNP Members may not think that that matters—they may think it is a record to be proud of—but that is not what my constituents feel at all.

• 22 Oct 2025 · Devolution in Scotland · Hansard source

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  I thank the hon. Member for giving way. Does he accept the fact that PIP is devolved in Scotland?

• 22 Oct 2025 · Devolution in Scotland · Hansard source

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  With reference to the previous intervention, I wonder what my hon. Friend, who knows so much about the NHS in Scotland, makes of the fact that the Scottish Government’s target for cancer treatment —that 95% of patients are treated within 62 days of an urgent referral—has not been met since 2012.

• 22 Oct 2025 · Devolution in Scotland · Hansard source

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  I thank the hon. Member; I have seen the work she has been doing on this issue. It is essential that the special intensive care treatment available for premature and sick babies at the Victoria hospital does not change in any way. I wish the Scottish Government would get on and act to put at rest the concerns that our constituents no doubt share about that.

• 22 Oct 2025 · Devolution in Scotland · Hansard source

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  My hon. Friend makes an important point about something we see too frequently across Scotland: our people being forced to opt in to private healthcare because they cannot get treatment under the SNP’s NHS. That is completely unacceptable. I know that similar waits exist for assessments for autism and for mental health support. There is a crisis across Fife and the Scottish Government are refusing to give NHS Fife the support needed to try to make a difference. The problems do not just exist in our health system; sadly, they also exist in our education system. Our educational outcomes in Scotland worsened this year, with the gap in attainment between the richest and poorest students growing, including in Fife; that happened after Nicola Sturgeon said that eradicating that attainment gap was the priority on which she wanted her record as First Minister to be judged. As my hon. Friend the Member for Glasgow West (Patricia Ferguson) said earlier, Scottish Government failure on the targets they set for themselves is a hallmark of their time in office. The same Nicola Sturgeon proclaims her love of literature at book festivals, yet she was part of successive Governments who have presided over the closure of almost 100 libraries in Scotland. On skills, we saw the UK Government having to step in recently to save a welding skills centre because the SNP Government refused to do so. The SNP Government’s indifference and often opposition to the highly skilled, highly paid jobs that the defence industry provides across Scotland and in constituencies such as mine has meant young workers missing out on the opportunity of a secure, highly paid job. It is also deeply irresponsible at such a dangerous time in the world, with Russian aggression in Europe right on our doorstep. All those cuts stack up, while the bill to the taxpayer for SNP waste becomes ever more eye-watering: nearly £1 billion spent on Barlinnie prison, almost double the original cost; more than £400 million or four times the original estimate spent on two ferries, with one ferry still not in service eight years later; and let us not forget the costly shambles that was the deposit return scheme, flunked by the SNP and the Greens and described by the SNP’s leader in Westminster, the right hon. Member for Aberdeen South (Stephen Flynn), as a “self-inflicted wound”. The purpose of devolution is supposed to be to take action in Scotland on Scotland’s problems, and to help to make our nation the best it can be. Yet too often that is not the reality under this Scottish Government, as a couple of examples from my own constituency show. At the peak of summer this year, when many businesses in Kinghorn and Burntisland were looking forward to making the most of tourism season, because we are blessed by beautiful beaches, the beaches were closed because sewage spills made the water unsafe to swim. Some of my constituents became physically sick because they had swum among sewage, yet the chief executive of publicly owned Scottish Water said over the summer that the concerns of my constituents “should not be overblown”. This issue has a real social and economic impact on people in my constituency, not to mention a health impact. It is the direct result of the SNP’s failure to invest in our sewerage network and in regular water-quality monitoring. I wrote to the Scottish Cabinet Secretary for Climate Action and Energy in August and received a response that began with a comparison between Scottish and English bathing waters. We are familiar with that: if we raise a problem in Scotland, we hear, “Well, it is worse in England.” Even if that were true, that is exactly why this Labour Government are taking tough measures to crack down on polluting water companies. Yet water quality is another devolved issue, creating significant problems that the SNP Scottish Government seem completely disinterested in solving.

• 22 Oct 2025 · Devolution in Scotland · Hansard source

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  I can feel the horror that the hon. Member feels for what his constituents have been put through because of that downgrade.

• 22 Oct 2025 · Devolution in Scotland · Hansard source

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  My hon. Friend rightly mentions the crucial role that further education plays, both in our communities and in our economy. Does he recognise that the reality is that, in my area, Fife colleges are receiving real-terms cuts from the SNP Scottish Government, whereas colleges in Edinburgh, Glasgow and Aberdeen are receiving increases? Those areas are having their funding increased, whereas Fife is having its funding cut.

• 22 Oct 2025 · Devolution in Scotland · Hansard source

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  I completely agree with my hon. Friend. The experience of dog owners in his seat has also been raised with me locally. In Kinghorn, some of my residents were promised action from Scottish Water five years ago, and nothing has happened. There is no justifiable explanation for that. Another serious example is that of antisocial behaviour. Across Fife, this seems to be a growing problem. Just last week, some of my constituents were left terrified by appalling disorder involving up to 50 young people in Cowdenbeath. A police officer was assaulted, and residents in Cowdenbeath have said that they are scared to go out at night. I know my local police are doing their best to get on top of the issue and have a plan to try to deal with disorder that might take place over the Hallowe’en period, which residents are worried about. I have raised the issue with the local police inspector and discussed it with him, but the disorder was not an isolated incident. Surely it cannot be just a coincidence that this comes as police numbers across Scotland last year fell to their lowest since 2008. It is increasingly clear that more devolved action is needed in Scotland to tackle the problem of antisocial behaviour, because it makes lives miserable. We have to ask why it is not being taken seriously and why more is not being done about it by the Scottish Government. I must say something about the number of tragic drug deaths in Scotland, which last year was the highest in Europe for the seventh year in a row. The National Records of Scotland has said that the total number of people dying from drug misuse in Scotland was more than 10,000 over the past decade. Drug deaths in Fife last year were almost double what they were in 2010, each one of them a tragic waste of life. I has a meeting recently with some of the residents of Linktown in Kirkcaldy, who have a particular problem with that issue. Residents are deeply worried; they told me about families in which mothers had had four children, but only one child now remained alive because of the scale of drug deaths and the problem that we have. That is one example of why it is so frustrating to hear the SNP continuing to chunter on about independence and trying to distract from the very real problems across our communities, rather than getting on and solving them. We were told that the referendum on Scottish independence was a once-in-a-generation referendum, and the Scottish people gave their verdict very clearly. There are so many issues that the SNP’s mismanagement, neglect and under-investment have caused over the last almost two decades, yet the SNP continues to show almost no interest in fixing them and tackling the problems that it already has the powers to solve. It is long past time that the SNP took devolution seriously and used it to improve the lives of our people.

• 16 Oct 2025 · Business of the House · Hansard source

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  As I have said before, the fact that the railway stations at Burntisland, Cowdenbeath and Kinghorn are not fully accessible causes many of my constituents a great deal of trouble. In June, Network Rail told me that it would have the first stage of a feasibility study into how to make Burntisland station accessible complete by the end of the summer. Despite repeated requests, it still has not given me a date by which that will happen. Does the Leader of the House agree that Network Rail needs to make this a priority, and will he make time for a debate on accessible transport?

• 14 Oct 2025 · Middle East · Hansard source

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  The emotional scenes in recent days in Palestine and Israel are proof that only politics and never violence can bring security to the people of the region. Accountability for the heinous killing that has taken place must be part of the future, too. As someone who, as an aid worker, stood in a hospital in Gaza last year, I know that the UK can play a key role in rebuilding Gaza’s decimated health system. Will the Prime Minister meet me to discuss this? And will he convey the thanks of those on the Government Benches to the National Security Adviser, who has played a truly vital role in making the ceasefire happen? Not for the first time, the Leader of the Opposition has no idea what she is talking about—and her Back Benchers know it as well.

• 13 Oct 2025 · Security Update: Official Secrets Act Case · Hansard source

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  I thank the Minister for his absolute clarity today. Will he provide further details of the measures he has announced today and how they will protect parliamentarians, councillors and those in public life across the UK from foreign interference?

• 13 Oct 2025 · Manchester Terrorism Attack · Hansard source

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  My condolences and solidarity and those of my constituents are with the Jewish community in Manchester in the wake of this terrible terrorist attack. The Home Secretary mentioned regulators. Regulators such as Ofcom have a hugely important role in tackling antisemitism, not least online harm and hatred, as raised by the Antisemitism Policy Trust. Can she give an assurance that the Government have a plan to ensure that regulators are playing their full role in addressing the poison of antisemitism?

• 10 Sept 2025 · Engagements · Hansard source

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  Q2. After almost two decades of the SNP—

• 10 Sept 2025 · Engagements · Hansard source

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  Thank you, Mr Speaker. After almost two decades of the SNP and 14 years of the Tories, Kirkcaldy High Street has been in a state of decline. That is why the Chancellor was right to prioritise Kirkcaldy for multimillion-pound regeneration funding from the new growth mission fund, to build on the enormous potential of our town and its beautiful sea front. Does the Prime Minister agree that investment over decline is key for this Labour Government, and will he ask the new Business Secretary to meet me to discuss the funding?

• 10 Sept 2025 · Occupied Palestinian Territories: Humanitarian Access · Hansard source

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  I beg to move, That this House has considered humanitarian access to the Occupied Palestinian Territories. It is a pleasure to serve under your chairship, Mr Stringer. We meet today almost two years in to the devastating war on Gaza. Over 63,000 Palestinians have been directly killed—44% of them women and children.

• 10 Sept 2025 · Occupied Palestinian Territories: Humanitarian Access · Hansard source

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  I completely agree with my hon. Friend, who does hugely important work on this topic. Journalists, aid workers and others being able to see and report on what is taking place is massively important, and there are undoubtedly horrific attempts to stop that. Bombing a hospital to kill a journalist is absolutely disgraceful. There were 940 incidents of attacks on healthcare in Gaza in 2024, more than the total number of health attacks in Ukraine and Sudan put together for that same year. The corresponding figure for the west bank and East Jerusalem is 418 in one year. I want to give an example of what we mean when we talk about aid workers being attacked. On 18 January 2024, an Israeli F-16 fired a 1,000-lb smart bomb that struck a Medical Aid for Palestinians and International Rescue Committee compound housing aid workers in Gaza’s supposed safe zone of al-Mawasi. It almost killed my then colleagues, including four British doctors. We had to evacuate the doctors, disrupting a lifesaving emergency medical programme, and Palestinian colleagues were traumatised and terrified. The Israeli military knew who that compound belonged to. I know that because it was personally confirmed to me, as the then chief executive officer of Medical Aid for Palestinians, on 22 December 2023 by the British Embassy in Israel that the IDF knew of our location and had marked it as a humanitarian site. That should have protected us. The IDF knew, too, that our staff were there, having come back to rest from the hospital the previous evening, their movement having been logged properly through the supposed deconfliction system. After bombing us, the Israeli regime provided six different explanations to the then US and UK Governments and to me for why they had bombed our compound. Those explanations, sometimes provided by and to the very highest levels of Government, ranged from the Israeli military being unaware of what had happened to denying involvement; accepting responsibility for the strike, which had been attempting to hit a target adjacent to our compound, despite the fact that the compound was not close to any other building, which was one of the reasons we selected it; accepting responsibility for the strike and asserting that it was a mistake caused by a defective tail fin on the missile that was fired; and accepting responsibility and advising that what hit the MAP-IRC compound was a piece of aircraft fuselage that had been discharged by the pilot of the Israeli fighter jet. The variety of responses was both farcical and frightening. I think it is reasonable to assume that someone cannot just get in an Israeli fighter jet, take it for a fly and fire at whatever they like. The targets, as we are often told, are very carefully selected. I highlight, too, the targeted drone attack on the World Central Kitchen convoy—also in a supposedly deconflicted zone—that killed seven aid workers on 1 April last year, the week before I was last in Gaza. That concluded with a hurried internal Israeli investigation where no one was held accountable for murdering humanitarians. On 3 August, just last month, the Israeli military attacked the headquarters of the Palestine Red Crescent Society in Gaza, killing one of its staff in a building that also was known to the Israelis and clearly marked. Their military told the BBC that they were “reviewing the claim” of the PRCS. Evidence shows that United Nations Relief and Works Agency staff have been killed, faced abuse and been detained on a regular basis, and subjected to sleep deprivation, beatings and attacks by dogs. Time and again, the Israeli military attack aid workers then refuse to properly investigate what happened. The only conclusion we can reach is that they are doing this deliberately—these are war crimes.

• 10 Sept 2025 · Occupied Palestinian Territories: Humanitarian Access · Hansard source

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  I absolutely agree that it is time to take the historic step of recognising a state of Palestine. I have some questions for the Minister, but first I want to put one more thing on the record; it points to one of the reasons why the Israeli Government do not want people to see what is taking place. An aid worker who I know very well—a very experienced aid worker in Gaza—told me about a situation that he witnessed in the north of Gaza, in Gaza City, after an Israeli siege of the main hospital there. After the siege, he was one of the first people to enter the compound of the hospital. He told me that what they saw were the remains of many half-buried bodies. In all but one case, it was impossible even to identify the sex of the dead body. The only person they could identify was an old man who had his wrists bound. This aid worker told me, too, that there was a huge pile of clothes in the compound of the hospital and that when the aid workers entered the compound, many of the people who lived around about the hospital came in and began sifting through the pile of clothes. Because they could not identify the bodies of any of the dead people, the relatives were looking through the pile of clothes to see whether they could identify any of the clothes that had belonged to their loved ones, which would mean their loved ones might be among the dead. This is why we need proper justice, investigations and accountability for what is happening in Gaza. Does the Minister agree that it is time for an independent investigation into these incidents and others like them? Will the Government support full accountability for these and other war crimes against aid workers, and will he personally take up the case of the MAP-IRC compound bombing with the Israeli Government? Can he share what the Government have done to stop the new restrictions on aid agencies? Will the Government make it clear to Israel that if it proceeds and aid agencies are denied access, it will pay a price for doing this? Finally, I know that the Minister will not commit to this today, but will he agree to go away and examine expanding the UK sanctions regime to cover all those involved in violations of IHL? The Government have rightly sanctioned violent settlers in the west bank, but they should also target those instructing the blockade of aid and involved in the targeting of aid workers in Gaza, for example. Will the Minister agree to look into that and write to me about it? What happens in Gaza does not stay in Gaza. In June, a British aid worker was killed in a drone strike in Ukraine. In Sudan, refugee camps are being continuously targeted, with children and aid workers being killed. Only 10 days ago, the Houthis in Yemen arrested 19 UN staff, adding to dozens of UN staff already arbitrarily detained since 2024. Last year was the worst year on record for attacks on healthcare, and this trend is worsening. Such attacks violate international law, and the more they are allowed to continue with impunity, the more they incentivise malign actors in other conflicts to do the same. Accountability is essential.