Patrick Hurley MP: speeches

The criminals on the high street move quickly, but the Government response has tended to be too slow over many years. When will the current pilots finish, how will success be judged, and when will all towns in Britain be able to say that they benefit from what works?

7. What assessment her Department has made of the effectiveness of the high streets organised crime unit.

It will have been very important to place that on the record once the right hon. Gentleman gets home this evening, I imagine. The Government’s aim to reduce premature deaths from heart disease and stroke by 25% over the next decade is welcome, ambitious and absolutely necessary. Cardiovascular disease remains one of the biggest public health challenges that this country faces. Across the country more than 8 million people live with cardiovascular disease. As has been mentioned, despite decades of progress, we now see a worrying reversal. Premature deaths are rising again for the first time in over half a century. One thing I have personally been doing to reduce my chances of being a victim of cardiovascular disease is walking more. During the recent Makerfield by-election, I was very lucky—not just to be part of the wonderful campaign to return a new Member to this House but to undertake almost half-a-million steps around the streets of Wigan over the course of 17 punishing days. I am celebrating not only a new Member for Makerfield but having lost four pounds. For those of us who represent communities in the north-west, the challenges around cardiovascular disease are particularly acute. Health inequalities remain stark. People living in some of our most deprived communities are significantly more likely to develop cardiovascular disease and more than twice as likely to die prematurely from it. Behind every one of those statistics is a family changed forever. There is good news, though: many of those deaths are preventable. Up to 80% of premature deaths from cardiovascular disease can be prevented and 70% of cases are linked to modifiable risk factors such as smoking, obesity, poor diet and inactivity. That is why prevention should be at the heart of the Government’s approach. We need to continue to drive down smoking rates, to make healthy food more accessible and to design our communities and the places where people live around cycling, walking and physical activity. We need to recognise—it is a cliché but only because it is true—that prevention is better and simply cheaper than cure. It keeps people healthier and more independent for longer, and allows people to fully participate in social life. Early diagnosis is equally important. Millions of people are currently living undiagnosed with high blood pressure. We know that identifying and treating conditions such as hypertension, high cholesterol and the like earlier can prevent thousands of heart attacks and strokes. I particularly welcome the Government’s commitment to neighbourhood health services. Taking screening and checks into communities, making better use of pharmacies, using data more intelligently and increasingly using AI technologies are all real opportunities to narrow the health inequalities that can scar our communities. We need to stop treating conditions in isolation. So many people with cardiovascular disease are also living with other long-term health conditions. Patients do not just experience heart disease, diabetes, kidney disease or obesity separately; they experience them together. Our health system must increasingly treat the person rather than the condition. Finally, while prevention is crucial, we cannot ignore access to treatment. There are long waits for cardiac care, and there are increasing and continuing pressures on ambulance response times, meaning that too many people are still waiting too long for an emergency response. The forthcoming modern service framework for cardiovascular disease represents a significant opportunity—it must be ambitious. It should be focused on prevention and early intervention, tackle inequalities head on and ensure that everyone, regardless of where they live, can access timely, high-quality care. If we get this right, we will not only save lives but reduce pressure on the NHS, strengthen our economy and create a fairer, healthier country. Even without a bat-phone of my own, I look forward to supporting the Government in delivering their ambition.

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairship, Dame Siobhain. I congratulate my near-neighbour and hon. Friend the Member for South Ribble (Mr Foster) on securing this important debate. I wish him well. I also congratulate the right hon. Member for Rayleigh and Wickford (Mr Francois) on achieving the childhood ambition of having his very own bat-phone. I am, as they say, well jel.

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairship, Ms Vaz. Our local high streets are the beating heart of our towns and our country, but they have faced profound challenges in recent years. We have seen the rise of online retail, changing consumer habits and years of under-investment in our town centres, and the tax system and business rates have not kept pace with that. In my view, the answer to all that is not simply to recreate the high streets of 30 or 40 years ago. The successful town centre or high street of the future will look different. We need to work to combine retail with culture, hospitality, housing, leisure, health services and other aspects of community activity. In my constituency, we are trying to do just that: restoring our iconic seaside pier, investing in public services, supporting creative and cultural sectors—including the Warehouse Arts Centre, which opened just last week—bringing vacant upper floors above retail units back into use as homes, and improving the aesthetics of the town. However, as well as good intentions, we need—my hon. Friend the Member for Great Grimsby and Cleethorpes (Melanie Onn) mentioned the trading standards officer in Dudley—the confidence and determination to enforce our will. Across the country, our constituents are increasingly raising concerns that premises appear to be operating outside the law. Legitimate businesses, which employ local people and contribute positively to their communities, should not have to compete with enterprises involved in illicit tobacco, counterfeit goods, money laundering or other criminal activity. To combat that, we need stronger partnership working between local authorities, trading standards, His Majesty’s Revenue and Customs, the police and every other enforcement agency, and we need to ensure that they all have the resources that they need to act swiftly. Visible enforcement matters because it helps to restore confidence among residents, visitors and responsible businesses alike. Alongside enforcement, I want to suggest a more ambitious approach to regeneration and renewal, through what I have previously described as renovation zones. Those would be specifically designated areas, typically focused on existing town centres, in which Government could use a package of fiscal incentives, planning flexibilities and public investment to encourage the refurbishment, repurposing and reoccupation of existing buildings, with the aim of increasing population density, economic activity and civic life. Many of our traditional town centres contain beautiful historic buildings with vacant upper floors and underused premises. Renovation zones would provide targeted incentives to encourage the refurbishment and repurposing of those buildings. Rather than endless outward expansion with out-of-town retail parks, we could be focusing on repairing, restoring and repopulating the places that we already have. If we combine robust enforcement against unlawful storefronts with a bold programme of renewal and reinvestment, our high streets can once again become thriving civic centres at the heart of community life.

First, I pay tribute to you, Sir Desmond, for your exemplary chairmanship, Sir Desmond. I also thank Members from across the House for their valued contributions. With your indulgence, Sir Desmond, I will touch on funding, a topic raised by several Members, through an anecdote about how I paid my Open University fees. When I studied at the OU, modules were around £700 each. Even that was too expensive for me. It was not until I realised that I could pay for my modules using Tesco Clubcard vouchers that I finally took the plunge and enrolled. The choice was this: every few months, a booklet from Tesco would come through the post, and I would have the option of getting 50% off a Pizza Express bill, or free cinema tickets, or potentially transforming my life through higher education. Given the context, it was no choice at all—it was obvious what I should do. Funding is never easy, but we need to redouble our efforts to ensure that the principle the OU was founded on—that education should be affordable and accessible to all—holds true not just for the last 60 years, but for the next 60 years. Question put and agreed to. Resolved, That this House has considered the impact of the University of the Air White Paper on lifelong learning opportunities.

I agree entirely, and will make similar points later in my speech. The hon. Gentleman and I are very much on the same page.

I am more than happy to commend Baroness Jennie Lee, and I am more than happy to celebrate the success of my hon. Friend and of the countless thousands of others who have studied around the real lives we all lead. One reason why the Open University works is precisely because it understands something that many higher education institutions still struggle with: life is not linear. People do not all move neatly from school to university to career to retirement in a straight line. Our lives are messier than that. People leave school without confidence, drift into jobs and later discover different ambitions. They become parents, care for relatives, lose jobs, or their health changes. Sometimes, at 35, 45 or 55, they simply decide that they want to try something new. The original White Paper understood that. It explicitly talked about flexibility, recognising that some learners would move quickly and others slowly, depending on the realities of their lives. The Open University says something very simple to people in those circumstances: “It is not too late. It is never too late.” I should declare an interest, because I would not be standing here in Westminster Hall this afternoon without the Open University. I did not come through the conventional route into higher education. I left school without much expectation that university was really for people like me. For most of my life, I worked in fairly ordinary, fairly low-paid jobs. For instance, I sold “Magic Tree” air-fresheners to petrol stations. I spent a decade working in a call centre for an insurance company. I spent a few soul-destroying months working for a debt collector, before I could take no more and quit to go back on the dole. Like many people, I found that without qualifications there were doors that simply remained shut, no matter how hard I tried. The Open University changed all that for me, although not in some dramatic overnight fashion like we might see in a television drama. It was hard work. It meant studying in the evenings, at weekends, on the bus to and from work—and, to be honest, probably sometimes during work if the boss was not looking. I was doing assignments when other members of the family were watching television or going out and getting on with their lives. But it made something possible for me that would otherwise not have been possible: it gave me the ability to learn around my life. From speaking to other OU students over the years, I know that my story is far from unusual. There are hundreds of thousands of us out there who have rebuilt confidence, changed career, retrained or simply proved something to ourselves, because somebody, somewhere, 60 years ago had the foresight to build an institution flexible enough to meet people where they already are. Something about all this is deeply embedded in the labour movement. The Open University sits in a much longer tradition of working-class people organising to educate ourselves and improve our circumstances. Long before most people had access to university, we had mechanics’ institutes, miners’ libraries, mutual improvement societies, trade union reading rooms and university extension programmes. We had the Workers’ Educational Association. Working-class people have always valued education, hard work and making something of ourselves. The nonsense about a lack of aspiration that we sometimes hear from the assembled ranks of the privileged has never been true. The problem was never aspiration; the problem was access. In many ways, the “University of the Air” was the modern expression of that Victorian-era working-class tradition, and the belief that education should not stop, even when life gets complicated. That approach matters now more than ever. We live in a country where people are likely to work for longer. They change careers more often. They need to retrain repeatedly. We are also living through profound economic change, with automation, artificial intelligence, changing labour markets and an ageing population. We simply cannot operate on the assumption that education happens only once, in our late teens or early 20s, and then stops. Frankly, that never made sense, and it certainly does not make sense any more. If we are serious about economic growth, improving productivity and helping people back into good work, lifelong learning has to move from being a worthy aspiration to being something much closer to the centre of how we think about our economy. Since being elected to Parliament, I have spent a lot of time working in the areas of employment, skills and economic inactivity, and I think we sometimes underestimate the role education plays in building people’s confidence as much as their competence. Often, people are not just missing qualifications; they are missing the confidence that they are capable of more. Adult education changes that. It changed it for me. To be frank, I have forgotten quite a lot of the stuff that I was actually taught during my time at the Open University. I sometimes need a primer on the exact details of the theoretical framework underpinning the long-run Phillips curve. When I re-read my master’s thesis a few years ago, I surprised myself with how much I agreed with my conclusions on the intersection between liberty and unequal power relations. But I will never forget that moment back in December 2010, when I got my undergraduate result. It felt like validation. It was a confidence boost that has never left me. In among the successes and the congratulations, we should be honest about the challenges—

Definitely. If anything, it is even more important in 2026, with all the challenges we see around us. As I said, we should be honest about the challenges. Despite the success of institutions like the Open University, adult participation in higher education has fallen over the last decade. Too often, the system still feels like it is designed around the traditional undergraduate who left school at 18, rather than the parents in their 30s or 40s, the worker retraining after redundancy or the person managing long-term ill health while trying to rebuild their future. Yet mature students are not some small minority: more than a third of undergraduate entrants are mature learners. They are already a major part of our higher education system, whether we recognise it fully or not. That is why I welcome the broad direction of travel on lifelong learning and the more flexible provision the Government are pursuing. The principle is right—people should be able to access education throughout their lives and in a way that fits around their work and family—but it remains true that implementation and delivery matter as well. If lifelong learning is genuinely to continue to work, people need a system they can understand and easily navigate. The funding regime needs to feel straightforward and fair. Flexible provision has to be properly supported. Employers need to be part of the conversation. And, frankly, we need many more people just to know that these opportunities exist, because too many adults still assume that higher education is simply not for people like them. I ask the Minister to reflect on the role that institutions such as the Open University can play in regions like mine. One of its great strengths is that people do not have to leave their communities to access the opportunities available to them. That matters in places that have too often watched talent drain away, like the region I am from. Somebody in Southport or St Helens, in Birkenhead or Bootle, should not necessarily have to move away from their home town to improve their prospects. The Open University allows people to build skills while remaining rooted in the places that they love and that they want to contribute to. That strikes me as important, not just educationally but economically and socially. I am proud that this Labour Government are acting in a way that is true to the founding vision of the Open University. The lifelong learning entitlement represents a major step forward. It is transforming the student finance system to support flexible, modular learning across people’s lives. For the first time, individuals will be able to access funding both for traditional degrees and for shorter courses, as well as retraining and skills development, when they need it throughout their careers. It is fitting that this reform builds directly on the principles pioneered by the Open University almost 60 years ago. The OU’s expertise in modular, flexible provision will be vital in making the lifelong learning entitlement a success, but we must do more. We must ensure that part-time provision is properly funded and properly supported, we must raise awareness so that more people know these opportunities exist, and we must ensure that lifelong learning is embedded across Government—yes, in education policy, but also in economic, employment and regional growth strategies as well. As we mark 60 years since the White Paper, we should all do two things. First, we should celebrate one of the most genuinely radical and successful achievements of not just Harold Wilson’s Government but every Labour Government: an institution built on the belief that intelligence is not confined to one class, one place or one stage of life. Secondly, we should remember that the argument Jennie Lee made in 1966 is not yet finished. The central question remains exactly the same as it ever was: what do we do with potential that has not yet had its chance? For millions of people, the Open University has represented confidence, dignity and a second opportunity. I know that, because in my case it changed the direction of my life. For that reason, if no other, I believe that the vision behind the “University of the Air” deserves not simply our admiration but our continued support.

I beg to move, That this House has considered the impact of the University of the Air White Paper on lifelong learning opportunities. It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Sir Desmond. I am grateful for the opportunity to lead this debate marking the 60th anniversary of the White Paper that led to the founding of the Open University, originally called the “University of the Air”. It is worth pausing on that phrase for a moment, because 60 years later it still sounds faintly otherworldly, even with all our electronic gizmos and gadgets and the information whizzing around us constantly. A “University of the Air” meant higher education broadcast directly into people’s homes. It meant learning being made available not just to those who had always had privilege, not just to the young or the affluent, and not only to those who followed a conventional academic route, but, crucially, to ordinary working people fitting study around jobs, families and the realities of their lives. Sixty years on, what once sounded ambitious, perhaps even eccentric to some, instead now looks visionary. That is because it was visionary. It did not begin as some sort of administrative reform dreamt up in Whitehall; first and foremost, it was a political project. Harold Wilson first floated the idea in 1963, after seeing the potential of television and broadcasting to widen access to education in ways that had not previously seemed possible. But the person who really drove the project forward was his Minister, Jennie Lee. There are not many White Papers that leave behind institutions that still change lives six decades later, but this one did, because Jennie Lee understood something important: there has always been a mismatch in this country—potential is spread far more widely and far more equally than opportunity. In the mid-60s, the assumption was still that higher education belonged to a relatively narrow section of society.

Funding is a huge issue here. The modular basis for the Open University has been a real boon to people who find themselves unable, for whatever reason, to study in a traditional format, but funding is still a key concern. Back in the ’60s, university was for young people. It was thought to be for young people, usually at least middle class, studying full time and following a fairly prescribed path. The thinking went that if someone missed their opportunity at 18 or 21, that was that—they had had their chance. But Jennie Lee and the Wilson Government challenged that assumption. They believed that education ought not to be reserved for those lucky enough to travel a conventional route through life, and that people should have second chances—and third chances if they need them, and fourth chances too. Crucially, she insisted that there should be no lowering of standards and no second-class offer for those who had missed out the first time round. Perhaps the most radical thing of all was that the Open University would be genuinely open. The White Paper made it clear that people should be able to study irrespective of their previous educational qualifications. In other words, someone would not be shut out just because they had not done their A-levels. On all those points, the Government at the time were absolutely right, because the Open University has become one of the great success stories of modern Britain. Today, it is the largest university in the country, with around 125,000 students. Nearly a quarter of all part-time higher education students in this country study at the OU. It reaches every constituency, including my own, Southport, where around 135 people are currently studying through it. This is not some sort of niche institution sitting at the margins of education policy but one of the central pillars of lifelong learning in this country.

9. What progress his Department has made on a new victims code.

In my constituency, an acknowledged victim of violent crime is being alleged to be contributorily negligent in the civil courts. That is retraumatising, and appears to be contrary to natural justice. Will the Minister meet me and my constituents to discuss this further, and see what measures can be put in place to address concerns about how the civil law system deals with such cases?

T4. The shadow Secretary of State has recently claimed that the Government could save getting on for £2 billion from the welfare bill by bringing in face-to-face assessments. I find this ironic because the Conservatives were the ones who reduced face-to-face assessments to almost zero when they were in government. Can my right hon. Friend therefore set out what steps he is taking to clear up the mess that they left behind?

Q3. In contrast with the preoccupations of the Leader of the Opposition, my constituents are more concerned with the NHS and waiting lists. Thanks to this Government, across England, waiting lists are coming down. In my part of the country, waiting lists have fallen by 13,000 in the past year alone. After years of Tory failure, we are getting the NHS back on its feet. Will the Prime Minister share with me what further plans we have to get waiting lists down even more, and to make sure that we once again have a health service to be proud of?

Q9. I thank the Prime Minister for his words in relation to the horrific attack in my constituency, and for the work that the Government are doing as a result. The families affected do not want their lives to be defined by the attack, and we must not allow my great town to be defined by it either. That is why I am asking for the Prime Minister’s help to ensure that my town’s best days lie ahead. My council is helping to bring empty town centre properties back into residential use. It is a much-needed corrective after years of decline and neglect under the previous Government, but more needs to be done. Does the Prime Minister agree that our town centres need place-based funding, and will he back my bid for Southport to be included in the next round of Pride in Place support?

T10. What more can the Government do to ensure that social enterprises delivering NHS services get the same support as internal NHS trusts, and play a bigger role in NHS reform?

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairship, Sir John. My hon. Friend the Member for Leigh and Atherton (Jo Platt) said that ownership matters. She is spot on. Ownership affects who makes decisions and who benefits from those decisions. For too long, we have had too little ownership of commercial and community assets by local people, and too much by remote organisations with no real stake in the places they operate in. Before coming to this place, I worked for years in what is called the social enterprise sector. I have never been keen on calling it a sector. One of my old mates once said to me, “Sectors are where movements go to die.” I think social enterprise is better understood as a movement. It is defined not by business structures, but by an underlying philosophy that business should work in the interests of communities and that wealth should circulate locally rather than being extracted. I will devote the rest of my speech to the new Office for the Impact Economy, which sits in the Cabinet Office. It is a positive development that shows that there is an understanding that tackling social and economic challenges requires taking a different approach. We already have a good example of the Office for the Impact Economy’s approach in the better futures fund, which currently sits in DCMS. That fund is bringing together public, private and social investment to support early intervention, and it pays for results rather than just for activity. Rather than having the Office for the Impact Economy reinvent the wheel, there is an opportunity to build on the success of the better futures fund. The Office for the Impact Economy would be better placed to take on responsibility for the existing fund from DCMS and further develop it as a cross-Government programme. The approach that sits behind the better futures fund should not be limited to one programme affecting young people, because the same model can be applied to a much wider set of complex social issues, including homelessness, street drinking, library services, outreach and high street regeneration. In all those areas, we are not suffering from a lack of effort; we are suffering from over a decade of underfunding and from a system that is often too short-term and too tied to the wrong outcomes and outputs. The better futures approach allows for longer-term investment, focuses on prevention and gives organisations the space that they need to deliver outcomes that work. If the Office for the Impact Economy can take the better futures fund model and apply it more widely to new problems, it could play a significant role in supporting social enterprises and community businesses to tackle some of the most complex problems facing our communities. We all want economic growth. We all want growth that is felt across the country. But we need ownership of that growth. We need control and investment to be more closely connected to our communities, where people live. That is where the social enterprise movement has an important role to play.

I neglected to declare an interest in my capacity as the chair of the all-party parliamentary group on the social, co-operative and community economy. Does my hon. Friend agree that all Members at this debate should attend the annual general meeting of the all-party group on Wednesday 25 March at 5.30 pm? Sadly, it will not be in a community pub, but in Room N in Portcullis House.

Under the previous Government, as the Secretary of State mentioned in his statement, youth employment never reached pre-financial crash levels in any single year, so the country had suffered a long period of stagnation. Crucially, some young people, unlike a bloke my age, have never known what an active Government can do to get them into good work. Will the Secretary of State confirm that this targeted package of support is precisely what the young people of this country need in 2026, and that it can finally turn the tables on years of Tory decline?

4. What steps he is taking to increase air defence support to Ukraine.

The Prime Minister’s leadership on Ukraine has been exemplary. Does the Minister agree that that leadership has helped to secure US commitments on security for Ukraine, and that this demonstrates the importance of the US-UK defence relationship to international security?

Given the Government’s commitment to growing the co-operative sector, will the Minister commit to working across Government, specifically with the Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government, so that high street rental auctions actively prioritise community-owned and co-operative models, and ensure that the Office for the Impact Economy is promoting these economies appropriately?

7. What steps he is taking through the Office for the Impact Economy to help increase the size of the co-operative sector.

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Sir Roger. In the interests of time, and given your advice, I have cut a huge chunk from my speech, in the hope that we can get more colleagues in. I wish to commend two charities in my constituency, and then make two requests of the Minister. First, I commend Greta and the team at the Light for Life charity. I want to place on record my thanks to them—they are in Parliament today, and when the debate is over, I will go to see them. Light for Life provides support to people experiencing homelessness, at the most vulnerable point in their lives. It provides food and essential supplies and, perhaps more importantly, respect and connection to those in real difficulty. I also want to recognise Richard and the team at Compassion Acts, with its food bank provision and financial and monetary advice to families; in the past, it has provided school uniform support to children who need it the most. These are the sorts of small charities that are, as the right hon. Member for Chingford and Woodford Green (Sir Iain Duncan Smith) mentioned, the backbone of our communities. We would be much worse off without them. There are some practical ideas that would, I hope, make a positive difference to the charities sector. One is to unlock unclaimed gift aid and match-funding mechanisms, which could incentivise and increase philanthropic giving, especially if targeted and supported directly for the smaller charities sector. Another proposal is to establish an evidence fund, maybe also financed from unclaimed gift aid, which would help small charities to demonstrate impact and compete more fairly for grants and contracts against the big boys—the larger charities that we all know and that overwhelm our inboxes. I would be grateful if the Minister could address two questions. Does the Department view match funding as a practical tool to increase giving to small and medium-sized charities? Secondly, what steps can be taken to ensure that small charities can engage meaningfully in tendering grant applications and consultations?

The hon. Member for Tunbridge Wells (Mike Martin) talked about poisoning the well of politics, and that was a great example of making a partisan point when it was unnecessary to do so. The alternative vote would also allow voters to express their genuine preferences. It would strengthen the mandate on which we are all elected to this place. It would have completely transformed in a positive way the two by-elections and the by-election campaigns that we have seen in this Parliament. Instead of appealing to voters to keep the worst candidate out of office, which happened in one of those by-elections, we would have an appeal to voters on a more progressive and positive basis. As a way of getting to that position, I want to express my support for the proposal to establish a national commission on electoral reform. A commission would allow the evidence to be examined properly. It would allow the public to engage seriously with the options available to them and would allow any future decisions to be made on the basis of broad consensus. The Labour movement was founded on the principle that the working class should have a meaningful voice in the decisions that impact on our lives. That principle remains just as important today as it was when my party was founded. Ensuring that our electoral system reflects the realities of modern Britain and commands the confidence of those who we represent is part of honouring the tradition of my party and movement. As I say, this Bill contains many welcome measures, but we should also be willing to recognise that strengthening democracy is an ongoing task. Supporting a national commission on electoral reform and giving serious consideration to reforms such as the alternative vote would be a measured, responsible and sensible step in that direction. I hope that this House will approach that question in the same spirit of democratic renewal that has served our country so well in the past.

There is much in the Bill to welcome. Extending participation, improving voter registration and strengthening the integrity of our elections are all steps in the right direction, but in the time available, I want to concentrate on one thing that this Bill could do but does not. While it improves aspects of participation, it does not address the way that votes are translated into representation in this House. The electoral system we have was not designed for the political landscape we see today. When the modern party system was taking shape a hundred or so years ago, the assumption was that British politics would continue, as it had previously, in a two-party framework. As we all know, that is not what we have today. The country has changed; our politics has changed. Our politics has become more fragmented, and our democracy —our democratic system—must be able to change with it to accommodate that changed reality. It is increasingly common for Members of this House to be elected without majority support in our own constituencies. It is increasingly common for voters to feel compelled to vote tactically, rather than with their hearts, and to vote against the outcome they do not, rather than the one they do, want. As a result, it is increasingly common for people to question whether their vote is meaningful in any sense at all.

The hon. Member makes a valid point, and I hope the House listens. It is not healthy for our democracy to be like this. I am not suggesting that individual Members lack legitimacy, but that the system itself is losing the confidence of the people we represent. It is for those reasons that there is a strong case for seriously considering alternatives to the first-past-the-post system. The alternative vote, for instance, would retain the constituency link, local accountability and the principle that each area elects its own representative, but it would also ensure that those elected to this place do so with a majority of support from our voters in our constituencies and not merely a plurality.

I beg to move, That this House has considered place-based employment support programmes. It is a pleasure to serve under your chairship, Dr Murrison. I am very pleased to have secured this debate. Discussions of employment policy can sometimes feel very abstract in this place; we talk about things like rates, targets and programmes, but for the people we represent, employment can be intensely personal. It is about confidence, dignity, routine and feeling that they have something to contribute. I know all that from personal experience. The depression that I fell into in the mid-’90s, at the end of the Tories’ previous disastrous spell in government when I could not get a job, had a long-lasting effect on my life. Growing up in what was then and by many measures still is one of the poorest boroughs in the country, the pressure to find a job—any job, to be honest—was immense, but the availability of jobs did not match that pressure. The local factory had closed down in 1991. My home town had barely any industry left to speak of, and most of the low-paid, temporary jobs I could find were in the next town along. It was almost a two-hour walk away for a lad who wanted to work but could not afford the bus fare to get to the factory. That is why I want to make the case today for place-based employment support—support that is rooted in communities, shaped by local need and delivered by people who understand the realities of the lives that they are working with. In my Southport constituency, I see it time and again: the people furthest from the labour market are not those who do not want to work, but people with caring responsibilities, health issues or gaps in their work history, or people who, for whatever reason, just cannot get a break. In my local authority area alone, that equates to over 26,000 people. What they need is not another box-ticking exercise, but someone who knows their area and knows what the local jobs are, and has the time to treat them as a person. I want to put on the record my thanks for the work of several place-based employment support programmes across the north of England. The Big Onion in Southport does things differently, and that is precisely why it is effective. Its work is rooted in trust. It helps people to rebuild confidence, develop skills and, in many cases, explore things such as self-employment or community enterprise as a route back into work. It does not rush people. Its approach recognises that, for many people, the first step towards employment is simply believing that they have something to offer. That kind of progress does not always show up immediately in headline figures, but it is essential if we want to make sustainable outcomes for the long term. Zink is a charity based in Buxton that started out as a food bank but, once it investigated the drivers of local food bank demand, soon branched out into offering employment support and debt advice. Its most innovative programme, microjobs, offers small, paid roles tailored to people who are far from the jobs market—often people who have been affected by homelessness or past substance abuse. Three quarters of those with a microjob subsequently move into part-time or full-time work within six months.

That is one in a long line of things that place-based employment initiatives can do well, so I thank the hon. Member for his intervention. The Recruitment Junction, which works up in the north-east, mainly in Newcastle, places people with criminal convictions into paid work. It works with local employers to identify skills shortages and then identifies suitable candidates, meets them and helps them to renew their qualifications, write their CVs and prepare for interviews. So far, it has placed almost 900 people with criminal convictions into paid work, with a 66% retention rate. Fewer than 5% of those that it places reoffend, compared with around 24% nationally. I also want to commend the work of Transform Lives Company. Its model deliberately breaks away from what many people expect employment support to look like. It is welcoming, informal and feels safe, and for many participants in its schemes, that alone is transformative. People who go to Transform Lives Company are supported not just with job search, but with things like confidence, wellbeing and life skills. They are listened to, rather than lectured at. As a result, people who would never normally engage with employment services do so willingly. I think that should make us stop and think about how our national system is experienced on the ground.

I agree wholeheartedly with my hon. Friend. Not only can we scale and roll out those programmes, but we can do peer-to-peer learning, so that the best of what works in one part of the country might be applied elsewhere. I hope the Minister will reflect on some of what I have mentioned this afternoon and on how future employment policy can better embed place-based delivery of these schemes, giving local providers the certainty they need and ensuring that employment support is something people feel genuinely helped by, not just processed through.

Indeed. I promise Members that I did not give my hon. Friend advance sight of my speech, but I will be talking about JobsPlus in due course. It is an amazing system and an amazing scheme. I have touched on some of my own experiences as a young man, but it is worth going back to them, because I want to put Members in the shoes of someone who would have really benefited from one of these schemes, had they been running back when I was in my late teens and early 20s. Many families have funny anecdotes about things that children have said, and mine is no different. Perhaps unwisely, I am going to share the funny anecdote that my family tell about something that they say I said back in around 1982, when I was four or five years old—of course, they teased me about it for years afterwards. Apparently, I asked my parents one day why they watched the news on the telly. In my childhood brain, this made no sense at all. My mum was a dinner lady and my dad worked nights in the local car factory 6 or 7 miles away. I had got it into my head as a little kid that the TV news was only for people who did not have jobs, but my mum and dad had jobs, so what were they doing watching the TV news? It was only about 20 years later that it dawned on me that it was not that TV news in the early 1980s was not for people who did not have jobs, but that it felt like it was only about people who did not have jobs. Every night on the 6 o’clock news, the headlines were about the unemployment figures—the latest round of lay-offs in some critical industry or other, the factory closures, the countless thousands being put on the sick as a way of keeping the official number of jobseekers off the balance sheet. I grew up in that context in Knowsley, a local authority area that had been drawn up a decade earlier in such a way as to exclude all sixth-form provision. This was an area that was being written off. I was a poorly qualified, unskilled lad in his late teens, living in a town with few opportunities, and suffering with my mental health because I could not see a way out. By way of contrast, these days my city region is benefiting from the award-winning Cradle to Career scheme, which provides holistic mental health and wellbeing support and focuses on the underlying causes of youth crime and antisocial behaviour. Just as important as the metrics of success that make the headlines in the press are the testimonies of the people whose lives have been turned around. To return to my broader point, many of the approaches that I have described echo the work done in recent years on fundamentally rethinking employment support. That work has made a compelling case for a more wraparound employment service that links employment with skills, health, housing and local economic conditions, and gives frontline staff the flexibility to respond to individual circumstances. As my hon. Friend the Member for Leyton and Wanstead (Mr Bailey) said, we have seen that in things such as JobsPlus, which has demonstrated that embedding employment support directly in social housing communities can reach people who have been economically inactive for years. Early evidence shows people do not just move into work, but gain improvements in their confidence, wellbeing, readiness and resilience—the things that actually make employment sustainable for people.

I thank you, Dr Murrison, for your exemplary chairing of the debate. I also thank hon. Members who have contributed to the debate. What has come through really clearly is that employment policy works when it starts with the reality of people’s lives and that, for people furthest from the labour market, progress works best when the support that they are given is human and rooted in place. The message that I hope the Minister will take away is simple: the systems that we have in place centrally matter, but they cannot do all of this alone. Place-based delivery, person-centred support and genuine partnership are all essential if we are serious about tackling the scourge of inactivity. Crucially, funding, and the certainty of funding, is also massively important. I know that the Government will reflect on how future policy can embed the approaches we have talked about this afternoon. I thank everybody for their contributions to the debate. Question put and agreed to. Resolved, That this House has considered place-based employment support programmes.

That pinpoints exactly why place-based schemes are so important. What is useful and necessary for my part of the country will not be useful elsewhere. That difference can have a positive impact on local people’s lives. I have talked about the good things that JobsPlus can do, but despite that evidence, too many of the programmes that I have mentioned today exist in a state of uncertainty. Short-term funding and delayed decisions are forcing providers to plan for winding down even when their outcomes are improving. That is not a sensible way to run employment policy, and we risk losing exactly the sort of expertise and relationships that we should be encouraging and building on. If we are serious about increasing employment and tackling inactivity, we also need to be serious about how the support that is needed is delivered. Central systems have their place, but they cannot do everything; we also need long-term backing for place-based approaches and proper partnership with community organisations. Collectively, we need the confidence to move away from one-size-fits-all solutions. More than 9 million working-age people in the UK are economically inactive, and long-term sickness is the single largest driver of inactivity among 16 to 64-year-olds. In Southport and across the country, organisations such as The Big Onion and Transform Lives Company, and schemes such as Cradle to Career, are already doing the work that we say we want to see. The question is whether national policy is willing to learn from them and support them properly.

T1. If she will make a statement on her departmental responsibilities.

As you will know, Mr Speaker, Southport is a lovely seaside resort and one of the nicest places to visit in the whole of the country, so what recent discussions has the Minister had with United Utilities about reducing sewage discharges, which affect Southport and the wider north-west coast?

Farmers in my constituency report that watercourses are not being sufficiently maintained, there is not enough investment in drainage infrastructure, and there is a limited ability to deal with changing rainfall patterns and rising water tables. They tell me that the creation of an internal drainage board could help with all that. I know that work has been done to establish new IDBs through a statutory instrument, so will the Minister tell us the current status of that work, and will she please expedite it being laid before the House?

9. What steps she has taken to help protect communities vulnerable to flooding.

I take this opportunity to commend the outstanding work of the team behind Coopers bar in Southport for all the work they do to support the grassroots music scene in the town. They are now further strengthening their contribution by expanding their offering, with a new venue on West Street due to open later in the spring. Will the Leader of the House make time for a debate on the importance of grassroots music venues to our towns across the country, so that the contributions of places like Coopers can be properly recognised?

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Ms Lewell. I want to keep this simple: the issue today is whether or not the Government should change the settlement rules for people who are already here. I wish to add my voice to the chorus who are saying that they should not. The Government can change the system for the future—that is fine; Governments do that all the time—but they should not change the rules for people who have already come here under one set of conditions and are now being told, part way through, that the deal has changed. A lot of the people affected are doing the jobs that this country relies on. Rhey are in hospitals. They are in care homes. They are in kitchens and warehouses. They came here legally. They were told that if they worked for five years, paid the taxes and followed the rules, they could apply to settle, so they made decisions on that basis. Now they are being told that it will not be five years after all. It might be 10; it might be 15. That is a whole extra chunk of someone’s life left in limbo. In the interests of time, I will cut my speech short. None of this has to be this way. If the Government want a 10-year route for people coming to the UK in future, I am fine with that. That is one thing. People can make the choice to come to this country knowing that those are the rules, but the people who have already come here on a five-year deal should have that deal honoured. I am asking the Government to draw a clear line on this issue. New rules for new arrivals are fine, but do not move the goalposts for the people who are already here doing their bit for this country.

What my hon. Friend is talking about reminds me of an issue that affects my constituents. The line between Liverpool and Preston crosses the line between Southport and Manchester. Up until the 1960s, the two lines were linked by two curves at the town of Burscough, just outside my constituency. For 60 years, there has been a campaign to get the curves reopened and to reinstall the commuter link between Southport and Ormskirk, and also between Southport and Preston, which would add huge amounts of GVA to the local area and create an economic powerhouse for the north-west. The cost of rebuilding and reopening the Burscough curves has been estimated at just £35 million. Does my hon. Friend agree that that would be £35 million pounds very well spent?

7. What steps she is taking with Cabinet colleagues to help reduce inequalities experienced by children in poverty.

Earlier this week, I visited the Bishop David Sheppard school in my constituency and saw at first hand the difference that breakfast clubs are making to children from disadvantaged backgrounds. Will the Minister explain how the Government’s commitment to expanding breakfast clubs will tackle child poverty and reduce inequalities across the country?

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Sir Alec, and I thank my hon. Friend the Member for North Ayrshire and Arran (Irene Campbell) for securing the debate. I pay tribute to the campaigners, who are with us today, for the opportunity to raise this issue, which is of deep concern to many of my constituents, as well as to people across the northern parishes and indeed the whole country. Across all our communities, rescue centres play an extraordinary role: they step in when animals are abandoned or neglected, or when they can simply no longer be cared for. They do so largely through the dedication of volunteers, through donations and though good will, and their work is often unseen but invaluable. However, unlike kennels and breeders, animal rescue centres in England currently operate without a clear, consistent national licensing framework. There are proposals that would address that gap, using the model that already exists under other legislation. That would not create a new system from scratch, but extend a familiar and well-understood framework to a sector that is currently insufficiently regulated. We know that that approach can work, because it works elsewhere. As has been mentioned, Scotland already has licensed animal shelters, and I am reliably informed that Wales is committed to introducing legislation too. That means that England is now the only part of Great Britain without a formal system of oversight. Introducing such a system would simply bring England into line with best practice across the rest of the country. There is strong support for that across the rescue and veterinary community. The RSPCA and Dogs Trust have publicly welcomed the discussion about licensing, and colleagues across the House have also expressed their support. This is an issue on which there is genuine cross-party and evidence-based agreement, focused solely on improving animal welfare. Across Southport and west Lancashire, we are fortunate to have several rescue organisations that do excellent work. I visited one of those, the Woodlands Animal Sanctuary, only a couple of weeks ago. It provides a safe and caring environment for animals during some of the most vulnerable periods of their lives. It already operates to high standards and would have nothing to fear from proportionate regulation. However, not all rescue centres are able to meet the same standards. Many of them, despite the best intentions, are run from spare rooms or garden sheds. They are driven by compassion, but lack the facilities, training or support necessary to guarantee the best outcomes for animals. Without sufficient formal oversight, conditions can vary widely; in the most extreme cases, that has led to the tragic consequences we have seen across the country. At a time when the cost of living crisis is forcing more families to make heartbreaking decisions about their pets, the pressure on rescue centres is growing. That makes it even more important that animals are placed in environments that are safe, suitable and properly supported. This is not about burdening good organisations with too much regulation; it is about giving them recognition, consistency and reassurance, while ensuring that every rescued animal receives the care it deserves. I hope that today’s debate can be a constructive step towards achieving that shared goal, and I look forward to hearing the Minister’s comments.

Will the Minister join me in recognising the work of the Big Onion, which provides skills training, employment support and related services in my Southport constituency? It has supported more than 1,400 young people into careers across the wider borough. Will the Minister also set out what further support the Department can give to community organisations like that, and how its success can be shared across the whole youth hub programme?

3. What steps he is taking to support the roll-out of youth hubs.

10. What steps her Department is taking to help support co-operative live music venues.

Southport does not need to apply to be the UK town of culture because we have a fantastic year of culture coming up this year anyway—Members should check out southport2026.com for more details. As part of building a legacy off our year of culture, I am meeting music industry professionals next week to discuss the live music scene. Grassroots music venues are vital to nurturing new talent, but too many venues in this country are closing because of soaring costs. Can the Minister outline whether music venues should have their own sector-specific support package so that we can protect live music for the future?

Those people voted in good faith and they were lied to by people like him—

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Sir Edward. The petition presents itself as the voice of democratic urgency. In truth, it is something with which we are far more familiar, and something far less noble: it is nothing more than the collective stamping of feet, accompanied by the online equivalent of the call and response, “What do we want? And when do we want it?” We have all encountered this impulse before—or at least those of us who are parents have. It is an impulse pandered to by the Tory MPs who are present: the impulse of the toddler. But a democracy cannot be run like a nursery. This great country of ours, which they repeatedly let down over 14 years of decline, cannot be governed like one either. However loudly certain voices and views might be expressed, or however much they are featured on GB News or shared on Facebook late at night after half a bottle of wine, the truth is that we do not get something simply because we want it.

I thank the right hon. Gentleman for his intervention. Back in 1983, when he was the Leader of the Opposition — [Interruption.] Members may remember Michael Foot—the right hon. Gentleman will never be the Leader of the Opposition. Michael Foot thought he was storming to victory back in 1983. “Look at this,” he said to John Golding. “I’ve got a rally here. There’s a thousand people cheering me on.” “But Michael,” John replied, “there were 122,000 outside saying you’re crackers.” A million people have signed the petition, but how many people voted in the general election? Well over a million people. This Parliament was elected in a general election held under rules that were well known in advance, and those rules include a parliamentary term. Some Members might not like it, but it is true. The rules do not include a rolling plebiscite triggered whenever a sufficiently large group of people becomes bored, frustrated or impatient—or someone has shared a video clip with them on WhatsApp.

I acknowledge that a million people want the Government to change course. The petitioners who have put their names to the petition say that the people want change, but they are not the majority of people in this country. There are tens and tens of millions of people in this country and only 1 million people signed the petition. Here’s the news: the people actually got change in 2024. Eighteen months ago, we got a Government who explicitly said they would not just go and put sticking plasters on the gaping wounds of the previous 14 years. We got a Government who explicitly said it would take a decade of national renewal. That is what we went to the people with 18 months ago, and that is what they were happy to vote for. We said it would take a decade to fix the country’s problems and the mess the Conservatives left us in. The people who want change now are the very same people who want to go back to the years of stagnation and decline under the Conservatives—the years of austerity under Eric Pickles, George Osborne and Michael Gove, and, of course, the self-harming referendum that has done this country no favours whatsoever.

It looks like Reform MPs turn out only when there is something in it for them. We should be honest about what the petition represents. It is not a considered proposal for the better governance of this country. We can tell that by the way Opposition Members are giggling behind their hands on the other side of the room. The petition is not accompanied by a constitutional argument for changing this place to make it better, nor by any sort of legislative necessity. It is simply an expression of dissatisfaction at how long it has taken the new Government to fix the problems that were left behind after 14 years of chaos, division and decline caused by the Conservative party. There were years of economic stagnation, a referendum of such consequential proportions that the economy has barely grown since 2016, and a Tory Government who were more concerned with looking after themselves than with looking after the most vulnerable in this country.

If the hon. Member knows how to get growth and bring up the GDP of the country, why has the economy been stagnating since 2010? Why did he not do anything about it?

They were lied to inadvertently.

Will the hon. Member give way?

If the hon. Gentleman is genuinely concerned about the rights of the children of this country, will he support cracking down hard on Elon Musk and X?

It doesn’t look like it. If adults behaved in their working lives the way the petition urges Parliament to behave—abandoning responsibility at the first sight of trouble, and demanding resets whenever outcomes failed to please them—we would call it irresponsible and childish. We would not reward it. Democracy requires more than just knee-jerk, reflexive wanting. To indulge every demand for an immediate election is not to respect the voters, but to infantilise them. The House should do better than that.

I will withdraw it, but does the right hon. Gentleman respect the vote in 1975 on the exact same thing—staying in the European Community, as it was—which was overturned 41 years later? In every Parliament, at every moment, some people want change and others do not. Some want more spending and others do not. Some want radical reform and others want stability. The fact of merely wanting something to happen does not constitute a constitutional imperative. If it did, the Government would be paralysed. We would lurch endlessly from one election to the next, just like we did at the end of the last decade, incapable of governing because the Government were perpetually campaigning. That is evidence not of a democracy that works, but of a democracy that is failing, just like it failed in 2017 and 2019, and just like it failed when the Conservative party was partying while members of the royal family were dying. An election is not a comfort blanket to be demanded whenever politics becomes difficult or the previous Government’s chickens come home to roost. There is a tendency in debates such as this to treat an election as though it is some kind of harmless release valve. It is not. A general election is disruptive, expensive and all-consuming. It stalls legislation, freezes decision making and turns Parliament in on itself. That is necessary at the right moment, but it is not something to be done after 18 months simply because people have run out of patience.

As the Minister knows, my constituents Marie Cunningham and Grace Foulds were killed by a driver who had been told several times that his eyesight fell far below the legal standard to drive. Eyecare professionals are not currently required to inform the DVLA if someone’s vision is so poor that they cannot safely get behind the wheel. Will the Minister consider mandating eyecare professionals to report directly to the DVLA all drivers with insufficient visual acuity and an inadequate field of vision, no matter their age?

It is a pleasure to serve, Ms Furniss. I want to tell a story about my own background and how it relates to the concept of culture-led growth. I grew up in the ’70s and ’80s in the north-west of England in a town called Prescot, about 15 miles or so from my Southport constituency that was dominated for decades by the factory site of an industrial cable manufacturer. The town adopted the cable factory almost as a part of its identity. Ask anyone for miles around, and they would say, “Oh, Prescot—that’s where they make the cables.” The town’s football club is still called Prescot Cables. When I was a little boy, I used to make Lego models of the machinery that I could see through the factory gates that I passed on my way to school. The factory hooter, telling the workers when their shift was open, could be heard all over the town, and on new year’s eve it would blow especially at midnight to bring in the new year. The importance of that place to the town cannot be overstated. Then they closed the factory down. Hundreds of well-paid jobs were gone. The next generation of lads growing up would not be making Lego models of the factory any more. There is nothing special about that story; it is one that is repeated everywhere. But there is a positive element, because over the last decade the town has been transformed through culture. There has long been a rumour—probably untroubled by fact—that in the 1590s William Shakespeare visited Prescot to escape the plague. Based on that rumour, 20 years ago a small group of cultural practitioners decided to build an Elizabethan-style, 500-capacity theatre on the site of a big old bus stop in the town. People laughed; the council leader actually said, “When I announced the plan in the council chamber, quite a few people started laughing”. They are not laughing now, because there is indeed a playhouse on the site of that old bus stop, training up young people in the creative industries, the arts and performance. The £40 million capital investment that was brought in was only the start of the story, though, because the theatre is attracting people back into the town. It has a positive multiplier effect. The jobs are coming back; cafés are opening where there used to be bookmakers; a community arts organisation is now going into schools to inspire children into a career in the creative industries. It would not surprise me if some of those children started building Lego models of the playhouse. Here is my point: the destiny of a town is not set in stone. It can be changed. Commitment to cultural infrastructure can reverse a downward slide. Change can happen off the back of cultural improvement. My hometown proves that, but we have also done similarly in my new home in Southport since I was elected. We have a year of culture in 2026. There will be an incredible sound and light installation taking over the town, turning it into a giant rainbow. There will be an outdoor ballroom in April, with 150 years of music and dance played out, and our favourite works of fiction are coming to life on the streets of the town in October—check out Southport2026.com for more details. We know that that is what a town of culture can do. It will allow the kids of today to look back in wonder in 50 years’ time, and to tell their grandchildren that they were there.

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mr Efford. Less Survivable Cancers Awareness Week is an important marker in the calendar, but I want to talk about another important marker when it comes to these cancers—one that is important for me and my family anyway—because this year marks 20 years since I was made unavoidably aware of the devastation of oesophageal cancer. In May of that year, my father developed the classic symptoms: difficulty swallowing, feeling like food was getting stuck, heartburn and weight loss. He was diagnosed in August and died on 23 December: from becoming symptomatic to losing his life was just seven months. The rapidity of the decline was overwhelming. Barely had he been diagnosed than he was given a terminal diagnosis. I must admit, though, that I was not giving my father my full attention during that time. In almost any other circumstances I would have been a much more dutiful son, but my own focus was elsewhere that year. On 1 August 2006, my wife Susan also became symptomatic with oesophageal cancer. She was diagnosed on 11 September and died on 14 November. The speed with which I read that sentence reflects the speed with which Sue died. There was barely any chance to understand what was happening, to seek help or for the family to manage. That is not unusual with these sorts of diseases. It is the sort of story that thousands of us know. Crucially, for my Southport constituency, it is also a story that disproportionately impacts people from the north-west and from north Wales. For my family, there was not any long fight or slow decline—only shock, confusion, urgent decisions and death. That is what a less survivable cancer looks like. May I make a clear ask of the Minister today? I am asking for a personal commitment, and a commitment across Government, to drive up survival rates for all these less survivable cancers, but most urgently—for my personal history and for the geographical distribution that shows that my part of the country has higher levels than elsewhere in the UK—for oesophageal cancer. That could mean things such as early diagnosis, recognising that one size fits all does not work. It could mean fast-track treatment pathways once suspicion is raised. Above all else, it should include serious investment in experimental and pre-symptomatic techniques, finding ways to detect cancers before symptoms even appear. These are difficult cancers to deal with, and that is why they need targeted action. I am here today because two people I loved did not get the help they needed, so I urge the Government to help other families avoid that same fate.

In relation to the changes, announced at the end of last year, to indefinite leave to remain, my constituent Dr Matthew Hewitt advises on an issue relevant to his family and many other families across the country: that the information being put out by the Government is ambiguous as to whether or not the shorter five-year route will remain for those currently on partner visas, or whether the baseline changes to 10 years will apply to those currently on those partner visas. I would be grateful for some clarity on that, please.

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mr Vickers. I thank the hon. Member for Harrow East (Bob Blackman) for securing the debate. The latest annual rough sleeping snapshot has recorded thousands of people sleeping rough—just 2% below the highest level ever recorded. I am afraid to say that it is not getting better quickly enough. Monthly data still showed a 5% rise in rough sleeping between last June and this June. Temporary accommodation has already reached record highs in the recent period. At the very moment when demand for housing is soaring, there is still not enough support for the people who need it most. Nearly half of the homelessness services that we have across the country are now reported to be at risk of closure, and the number of bed spaces available has fallen by 43% over the last 17 years. As with so much that has gone wrong in this country over the last couple of decades, the root cause of all this is the underfunding and public sector cuts that we saw under the previous Government, led by a short-termist, narrow focus that wilfully ignored the tried and tested ways for economies to get out of the growth doom loop that we have been in. What we need to do is stop storing up more problems in years to come and start addressing things like the homelessness emergency head-on. That means ensuring that services are properly funded to provide safe, year-round bed spaces. It means making sure that new regulations on supported accommodation do not unintentionally punish good providers. It means reversing Tory Government decisions that actively drive homelessness, most notably the freeze to the local housing allowance and the benefit cap—things that make it almost impossible for many households to access the stable housing that they need. In addition, we need cross-departmental working. Ending homelessness cannot be the responsibility of just one single Department. Decisions in health, justice and welfare, immigration—Departments across the board—all shape who becomes homeless and who does not. This is not the sort of thing that might get the pulses racing, but we need to ensure shared accountability and a shared delivery agenda across Government, not just here in Westminster and Whitehall but through the devolved layers of government, especially at the new strategic authority level. We all come into politics for good reasons. The moral case for action is clear, as is the financial case. In that vein, I want to highlight the importance, from an efficiency perspective, of Housing First. The Housing First model has consistently demonstrated its effectiveness, here and internationally. It is based on a simple principle: first and foremost providing people with a stable home, then wrapping support around them. It prioritises dignity, choice and long-term stability, and by dealing with the root causes of social issues, it helps the state save money. The Government’s own evaluation of the three national Housing First pilots confirms what frontline service providers have long known: the model delivers good value for money, achieves remarkable tenancy sustainment rates, reduces rough sleeping, and leads to improvements across health, wellbeing and wider metrics. Crucially, it works for people with the most complex needs—those who have been systematically failed by traditional models of accommodation. Housing First can help us break the cycle of homelessness, crisis care and retraumatisation, which leads to more homelessness. When properly funded and scaled, it can prevent rough sleeping, reduce demand on the NHS and the criminal justice system, and help people to rebuild their lives for good. If we are serious about combating homelessness, in particular rough sleeping, we should protect and expand Housing First. That requires long-term, ringfenced funding, and a national commitment to scaling provision and to ensuring that it is embedded in the wider homelessness strategy for Government. I thank the Chair and colleagues for their attention, and I look forward to hearing the Minister’s comments.

Housing First is a tried and tested, proven intervention to reach those who most need our help, so will the Minister expand on what plans she has to roll out Housing First, especially in the Liverpool city region, to ensure that we work effectively across state agencies and that we support people experiencing homelessness into stable, long-term housing?

2. If he will take steps through the planned homelessness strategy to increase Housing First provision.

I welcome the UK’s leadership on the issue of Russian sovereign assets. What further conversations is the Foreign Secretary having with her international counterparts to accelerate that work and ensure that Russia pays for its illegal war?

3. What steps her Department is taking to support Ukraine.

T4. I was pleased that the Minister give an update earlier on the work of the Infected Blood Compensation Authority, but the process is still taking too long. May I press the Minister to undertake work specifically to expedite the timescales in which compensation is expected to be paid?

Q15. Well over 1,000 youth clubs have closed in this country since 2010, having a huge negative impact on our young people. This is despite the fact that youth clubs have a long positive history of helping young people to mature in a healthy fashion. In particular, Phab clubs help disabled and non-disabled people to build friendships in an inclusive environment. The Phab charity is here in Parliament later today to gain support for its work. Will the Prime Minister commend its work and consider how best to support the youth club movement to help the next generation of young people grow into well-adjusted adults?

6. What assessment he has made of the potential impact of devolution on economic growth.

I am pleased to see that the Government are pressing ahead with their commitment to implement new strategic authorities. May I press the Minister to consider how those new strategic authorities can grow their local economies by providing support for things like community businesses and social enterprises in town centres, helping to regenerate and renovate the neglected high streets we see across the country?

First, I welcome the move to consider cumulative impact when it comes to policing the issues discussed today. It is a hugely positive move, and I hope it can be applied to static protests as well as marches. In the aftermath of the horrific attack on the synagogue earlier this month, the Centre for Countering Digital Hate undertook research that showed the shocking, but these days sadly not surprising, number of calls for further violence against Jews on the X social media platform. Does the Home Secretary agree that those advocating online for the death of Jews and for synagogues to be burnt down are exactly the sort of content that the Online Safety Act 2023 is supposed to address? Does she also agree that it is utterly reprehensible for anyone to give positive publicity to those on social media calling for people to be killed and for buildings to be burnt down?