Melanie Ward MP: speeches

Speeches

• 2 Jun 2026 · Preparedness for National Emergencies · Hansard source

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  It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mrs Barker. I congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for Dunfermline and Dollar (Graeme Downie) on securing this debate. Before I was elected to this House, I served as a humanitarian aid worker and spent time in a number of war zones, so I know the importance of preparedness for emergencies and for scenarios that one hopes will never happen. In a country like ours, the role of the state is crucial in this. As my hon. Friend set out, foreign aggressors threaten our country, along with a whole range of new and emerging threats. My hon. Friend also spoke about Storm Éowyn, and we know that, as the rate of climate change increases, the effect of such storms will be exacerbated. When Storm Éowyn hit my constituency, more than 15,000 people across Fife lost power in freezing conditions, and it brought to light flaws in the preparedness for the storm at many different levels, including failures in the priority services register. People’s phone batteries ran out and they had no signal or way of contacting anyone. There were also failures in how the Scottish Government and local authorities planned to get resources to vulnerable communities, including those in areas served by independent distribution network operators, such as Fordell Gardens in my constituency, which was completely left out. It took me more than a year of follow-up to get any kind of action on that issue. We need more joined-up thinking to prepare for such events in future, but we must also be prepared for the international threats that we face. I have to say that we lag behind our European allies in this kind of national preparedness. Our peers such as Sweden and Finland are much further ahead than we are, because of the threats that they have faced historically from Russia. We have the new strategic defence review and the resilience action plan, but we must speed up that work so they are not just frameworks on a shelf but the culture of our country, where individuals, communities and agencies work together to prepare for the threats that we may face in future.

• 15 Apr 2026 · Energy Profits Levy · Hansard source

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  The ExxonMobil plant at Mossmorran in my constituency has now ceased production, after the company said last year that it had not made a profit for five years. News that our UK Labour Government have made £9 million available to support the affected workforce and find a future for the site has been warmly welcomed by my constituents, especially in Cowdenbeath. Does the Secretary of State agree that it is in the interests of the people of Fife for the Scottish and UK Governments to work together to utilise all available funding and find a viable future that brings jobs back to the site?

• 18 Mar 2026 · Fuel Duty · Hansard source

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  I thank the hon. Lady for giving way—I thought I would give her some further relief from the interventions from the manosphere on the Conservative Benches. She is talking about the importance of investing in clean energy to make our country more resilient and to do the right thing for the planet. Does she agree that doing that is often more cost effective for families as well? Just last week, I met with Fife Communities Climate Action Network in my constituency to talk about some of its great work to encourage and support insulation of people’s homes, for example. Does she agree that that is positive and that investing in clean energy—

• 18 Mar 2026 · Fuel Duty · Hansard source

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  Does the hon. Member for Brighton Pavilion (Siân Berry) agree that investing in clean, green, home-grown energy is the way to ensure that we have energy security for our country in the future?

• 29 Jan 2026 · Business of the House · Hansard source

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  After beaches in Burntisland and Kinghorn recently had their water quality downgraded, many of my constituents will be angry that Scottish Government-owned Scottish Water are hiking bills by almost 10%. Both beaches were closed for periods last summer due to pollution, and people became sick from exposure to it. That is particularly galling after the chief executive of Scottish Water was handed a £50,000 pay increase. Does the Leader of the House agree that it is long past time for the SNP Scottish Government to get a grip and to clean up our coasts? Will he make time for a debate on water quality?

• 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?

• 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 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.

• 4 Sept 2025 · Business of the House · Hansard source

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  At the peak of summer this year, at the height of tourism season, beaches in Kinghorn and Burntisland were closed because sewage spills made the water unsafe to enter. My constituents have been let down by the SNP Government’s failure to invest in our sewerage network and by publicly owned Scottish Water, whose chief executive said—astonishingly—that concerns should not be overblown. Does the Leader of the House agree that clean water is the least that the people of Fife deserve, and will she make time for a debate on this subject?