Paul Waugh MP: speeches

Speeches

• 14 May 2026 · Business of the House · Hansard source

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  On Sunday, there were scenes of wild celebration among the Dale fans at Wembley, as our beloved club staged a fabulous comeback and won the play-off final to return to the English football league. There were also fantastic civic celebrations at Rochdale town hall, where Jimmy McNulty and his lads could see for themselves just how proud we all were of the team’s heroics, grit and togetherness. Will the Leader of the House join me in congratulating the Dale on a fabulous season, and on proving that our club, like our town, never, ever gives up?

• 20 Apr 2026 · Maternity Commissioner · Hansard source

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  It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Sir Alec. I thank my hon. and learned Friend the Member for Folkestone and Hythe (Tony Vaughan) for leading this debate. I pay tribute to Louise Thompson, Theo Clarke and the other petitioners for raising the profile of the issue of birth trauma and for helping so many other women to share their own experiences and, crucially, to fight for the changes that will prevent others from having to go through the same trauma. I also put on the record my thanks to my hon. Friend the Member for Sherwood Forest (Michelle Welsh), who has done a brilliant job with the all-party parliamentary group on maternity and who explained today, by outlining her own personal experience, just what birth trauma can mean. This debate is fundamentally about how we ensure that women are being heard—genuinely heard—by the national health service. However, it is also about how we raise the levels of care, so that the best care is not an exception but the rule. One of the missions for this Government is restoring trust in maternity care. We know that that trust has been eroded by traumatic experiences, poor standards of care and—even more importantly—women feeling that no one is listening to them. [Christine Jardine in the Chair ] As has already been said, the rise in maternal mortality is seen in the data produced by MBRRACE-UK between 2021 and 2023 compared with that between 2009 and 2011. That is simply unacceptable. What is particularly stark is the increased risk for women from minoritised communities and for those from disadvantaged backgrounds. In 2023, women living in the most deprived areas were dying at almost twice the rate of those in the least deprived areas. Alongside that data, there has also been an increase in obstetric haemorrhage, which I know worries both mums-to-be and health professionals. Women who want a second child need to know the risks of severe bleeding and placenta previa caused by previous caesarean sections, which are well-documented. The NHS is not good enough at not only monitoring maternal deaths and morbidity, but monitoring trends in those areas. It is very good at identifying a trend in stillbirth or maternal death, but it is not so good at spotting trends in postpartum haemorrhage and admissions to intensive therapy units, which need the same attention. The Government have a responsibility to ensure that whatever choice women make, that choice is informed and that the procedures are safe. If women want a home birth, let us make that a real choice; if they want a C-section, let us make that a real choice; and if they want a midwife-led unit or an obstetrician to care for them, let us make that a real choice. I agree with my hon. Friend the Member for Ribble Valley (Maya Ellis), who was absolutely spot on in saying that we should move away from making choice in this area a binary decision between safety and choice. It is time for us to be proactive and not reactive, and to put into place the processes that will protect future mums from negative experiences of maternity care. That is why I am glad that the national maternity and neonatal taskforce, announced by the Government last year, is focused on long-term systemic reform that actually addresses the systematic failures identified by the CQC. The conversation must include midwives who, more than anyone else, want best practice and care for all the mums they work with. It must also ensure that there are oversight, accountability and robust reporting mechanisms that support midwives as well as mums. Not many people know that word “midwife” is middle English. It literally means “with woman”, which is the crucial point. Midwives across the UK are advocating for women, supporting women and sharing their expertise with women all the time. However, that is also why we need to make continuity of care a reality for women, so that midwives can be “with woman” throughout the pregnancy and the birth. There must also be the investment in staffing that is needed to allow for rotas that provide the gold standard of staffing that everyone wants, both for pregnant women and for midwives. Earlier this year, I was proud to host a drop-in event for the Royal College of Midwives with my hon. Friend the Member for Bishop Auckland (Sam Rushworth). I put on the record that my wife is a midwife; in fact, she is one of the main reasons why I am in this building today. I came into politics to change the situation for women who are suffering, but also to help to get more midwives in the profession. It has not been explicitly said today, but let us be honest—the last Government failed to invest in the NHS, including in the right number of midwives. My wife came home night after night saying, “We simply are understaffed. We are chronically understaffed.” She was really worried about the standard of care that would be provided, and about whether it was safe or not. I said that, instead of writing about the maternity crisis, I want to do something about the maternity crisis. That is why I became an MP—to invest real, hard money into the NHS, including in staffing, but also to ensure that we change the procedures and reform the system. It is worth saying that this is not just about staffing. It is also about having the right culture and leadership, and about whether obstetricians and midwives talk to each other and are on the same side and. Crucially, it is about whether women are listened to throughout the process. There has been far too much avoidable trauma for far too many women, as several inquiries have found. For my constituents, Royal Oldham hospital maternity services are often of high quality. I have met senior midwives who are trying to provide innovative solutions to the challenges they face, but let us be honest: there are too many times when women are let down at the Royal Oldham. The CQC survey of patient experience, published in December 2025, found some unacceptably poor levels of care. On labour and birth, the hospital scored much worse than expected compared with other trusts. On staff care and on care in hospital after birth, it was much worse than expected compared with other trusts. On that last measure, it had an appalling score of 5.4 out of 10. It is clear from the debate that a huge amount of work has been undertaken to deliver what we all want: maternity services that are well informed, personalised and safe for all women, regardless of race or background. We owe it to every family to provide maternity services where mums are given a full range of informed choice, backed by medical evidence, where they are genuinely listened to and where compassionate healthcare is at the heart of every birth. There is excellent care in the NHS, and we should say that again and again, but we need to make sure that every area, every trust and every woman has the high quality of care they truly deserve.

• 19 Mar 2026 · Online Harms · Hansard source

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  The Minister for Safeguarding, my hon. Friend the Member for Birmingham Yardley (Jess Phillips), has repeatedly emphasised the need to crack down on and outlaw misogyny, as have many of my colleagues. There is definitely more work to do on that, but it is a key part of our violence against women and girls strategy. It was a pleasure to meet the Smartphone Free Childhood campaign last week—including Zack George, aka Steel from “Gladiators”, whom many Members will also have met—to hear why we need further action to protect our kids from the harm that social media can cause. As the hon. Member for St Neots and Mid Cambridgeshire (Ian Sollom) has already mentioned, harm arises not only from content, but from design features such as algorithmic amplification and endless scroll—features that go beyond a simple age-based ban. We need to help parents who are desperate for support in combating the daily nightmare of wresting back control from their children’s phones and computers. Suicide ideation, self-harm, pornography, animal cruelty, child sex abuse, anti-Muslim hatred and anti-Jewish hatred are all things that we want to protect our youngsters from seeing online, but we feel powerless in the face of the outrage economy. It is time to stop that sense of powerlessness. Like the hon. Member for St Neots and Mid Cambridgeshire, I want to praise the BBC’s recent documentary “Inside the Rage Machine”, which reported whistleblowers claiming that Meta made decisions to allow more harmful content on people’s feeds simply because internal research into its algorithms showed that outrage fuelled engagement and monetisation. A TikTok employee gave the BBC rare access to the company’s internal user complaints dashboards, as well as other evidence of staff being instructed to prioritise several cases involving politicians rather than a series of reports of harmful posts featuring children. I would like to promote the great work that Rochdale borough safeguarding children partnership does to allow parents to access the right tools to protect their children. Other councils across the country are doing similarly great work—solutions are at hand. The Government’s new media literacy action plan should help us all to build resilience against hatred, and the Education Secretary’s recent guidance to schools to be phone free was very welcome indeed. The Government’s consultation on social media is another huge step forward in creating a healthy relationship between children and the internet. We need to test all the options presented in the consultation so that decisions can be truly evidence based and delivery can be rolled out as effectively as possible. We need to balance the upsides of life online for young people—the friendship groups, the specialised help, and the need to protect free speech—against the very clear downsides. Finally, we also need to address the offline issues that are often turbo-charged online. For example, why is it that these guys in the manosphere are so popular in the first place? There is the provocation, the riskiness, the sophisticated editing, the addictive nature of their output, the justification that it is “just jokes”, and the get-rich-quick con merchantry of it all. We need to ask how we can provide alternative role models for our boys and young men. How can we help their mental health? How can we repair their trauma? How can we tackle the lack of fulfilling jobs, careers and housing that is so often at the root of scapegoating—whether that is the scapegoating of women, Jews, Muslims, migrants, or their own lack of opportunities?

• 19 Mar 2026 · Online Harms · Hansard source

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  The latest Louis Theroux documentary for Netflix, “Inside the Manosphere”, was deeply shocking to many of us who watched it. But it was not remotely shocking for the millions of teenagers to whom his subjects are well known. It was not shocking to my three twenty-something sons; it was not shocking to the boys in the playground; it was not shocking to Gen Z or Gen Alpha; and it was not shocking for children in primary schools, let alone in secondary schools. That is why this online harms debate should involve everyone, particularly the young people in whose name and on whose behalf we often make laws in this place. Their synapses are dulled to this stuff and their feeds are full of it, which in turn means that the premium for even more shock is higher. Outrage and extremism are hardwired into this business model. “Inside the Manosphere” exposed that many of these social media influencers are themselves deeply damaged boys, often with a resentment about fathers who were either absent or violent, or both. They project themselves as pro-men, but in doing so they feel the need to project themselves as anti-women. And they are not just anti-women—that is a mild term—but they are virulently, disgustingly misogynistic. They feed off the pornography that, sadly, is seen by all too many of our young boys these days. What also shocked me, however, as my hon. Friend the Member for Heywood and Middleton North (Mrs Blundell) pointed out, was just how casual the antisemitism propagated by many of those in the manosphere was. We saw a chap called Myron Gaines say, “LOUIS IS A DIRTY J-E-W.” Louis Theroux is not Jewish, by the way—not that that matters. At one point, another manosphere influencer, Harrison Sullivan, imitates Louis Theroux and leers that he is “just sat there with his Jew fingers.” Another of the manosphere influencers blames Jews for feminism, homosexuality and even “vibrations that are going to negatively bring you down”. In the conspiracy theory-ridden rabbit hole of the internet, all this is normalised. I thank the Antisemitism Policy Trust for its work in exposing just how much this vile racism has exploded online, and Elon Musk and X share responsibility for much of that. We must take much tougher action against tech giants who are literally profiting from this hatred. Antisemitism is often described as the oldest hatred, but misogyny is just as ancient a hatred. That is why I am proud to be part of a Labour Government who stood up to Grok and Musk when they flouted British laws and put British women and children at risk with those nudification apps. I am equally proud that my party has been calling out Reform—none of whose Members is present today—for its pledge to repeal the Online Safety Act. I would like to know which protections for children Reform MPs would remove and what, if anything, they would put in their place. I would also like to know why George Galloway’s Workers party took £5,000 in political donations at the last general election—an election in which I partook in Rochdale—from Andrew Tate’s brother, Tristan.

• 12 Mar 2026 · Business of the House · Hansard source

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  Rochdale’s BASA football club recently returned from its tour of Bangladesh, where members met street children, blind children and autistic children who were helped by the amazing £20,000 that the club had raised for charity. Will the Leader join me in congratulating Doliz Miah, Saj Miah and all the lads at BASA, as well as their sponsors: the Pavilion, Pandora, Panchi, and Amor restaurants?

• 29 Jan 2026 · Non-league Football · Hansard source

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  I bow to my hon. Friend’s preference when it comes to Hartlepool, not least because Rochdale were recently subjected to an awful defeat at the hands of the Pools, and I was there to witness it. Hopefully that will not prevent us from winning the national league. He makes a powerful case for the community links of non-league clubs. Will he join me in praising the Dale Trust—the supporters trust—and Dale 1907, which do so much for our local community? Will he also join me at the end of the season, when we put the up into “Up the Dale”?

• 29 Jan 2026 · Non-league Football · Hansard source

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  Speaking of clubs that are at the top of their league, Rochdale are at the top of the national league right now. Despite that, we do strongly support the 3UP—and three down—campaign, because although we may well benefit this year from going straight up, we know all too often that clubs can sometimes rack up lots of points but still not go up, as York City did last season even though they were 20 points ahead of Oldham. As a season ticket holder, like my hon. Friend the Member for Hartlepool (Mr Brash), it is really important that we reward the loyalty of fans and footballers who play for clubs such Rochdale, Hearts and Hartlepool. I also want to pay tribute to Ian Henderson, who marked his 41st birthday last weekend with a goal and an assist and who plays for Rochdale as our record goal scorer.

• 29 Jan 2026 · Holocaust Memorial Day · Hansard source

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  My hon. Friend is absolutely right. I encourage all Members of the House to take a trip to Srebrenica to see for themselves the mass graves, the cemetery and the museum. It is incredibly moving. The centre director, Emir, and the head of oral history, Hasan, were encouraged to hear that Rochdale schoolchildren are taught about the Srebrenica genocide as part of their Holocaust education. As the MP for Rochdale, it is my duty to remind everyone in my constituency of the horrors of 7 October, the worst pogrom of Jews since the second world war. It is also my duty to call out the deaths of the men, women and children in Gaza that followed. The need for testimony, evidence and accountability is as important as ever. I signed the Holocaust Educational Trust’s book of commitment in Parliament, which is part of the trust’s ongoing effort to educate children about past and present atrocities across the globe. It is only through education that we can tackle the ignorance that fuels hatred. The responsibility of remembrance does not end with the survivors; it lives on through their children and grandchildren and, of course, through all of us. I will finish with a poem sent to me by Zeeshan Shafqat, a 17-year-old student at Rochdale’s Hopwood Hall college: “In ashes of pain, where names were erased, We stand together now, face to face. Muslim and Jew, hand in hand, Guarding the truth that history demands. Never again, our shared vow remains— To honour the lost, and break hatred’s chains.”

• 3 Dec 2025 · Engagements · Hansard source

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  Q6. As a lifelong Dale fan, I am delighted that Rochdale football club is top of the national league right now. But after 14 years of Tory cuts, sadly my town is also near the top of a league table that people do not want to be in: the child poverty league table. Does the Prime Minister agree that lifting 5,000 kids in Rochdale out of poverty, plus cutting every household’s energy bills by £150 and, crucially, expanding the warm home discount will mean that this Budget is a family Budget that reduces the cost of living for everyone in the country?

• 11 Nov 2025 · BBC Leadership · Hansard source

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  As a former journalist and former member of the Culture, Media and Sport Committee, I know more than most some of the failings of the BBC, but I also recognise some of its great strengths, not least in combating misinformation online. I know many of its journalists personally and many, many of them take ultra seriously their duties to provide fair, impartial and, yes, fearless news coverage. It is the fearlessness that often upsets this House, on either side. Yes, this was a serious error by the “Panorama” team and a correction should have been issued swiftly, but that does not mean that the BBC as an institution should be undermined. There are enemies on the left and the right who want to see the demise of the BBC, and they would rue that day should it ever happen.

• 3 Nov 2025 · Public Office (Accountability) Bill · Hansard source

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  This legislation is all about a fundamental rebalancing of power between the state and the citizens it is meant to protect and serve. We have heard powerfully today from many Members about the Hillsborough families and their enduring quest for the truth. Briefly, I would like to add the nuclear test veterans to that list of campaigners for justice, including my constituent, 88-year-old John Morris. When John was stationed on Christmas Island in 1956, he was told that British troops were building a new runway. In reality, they were testing nuclear weapons, but the weapons that were intended to keep Britain safe from the Soviet threat were far from safe for the men who were out in the south Pacific—they were effectively treated like lab rats, with little or no protection from harm. John is one of 22,000 British troops who were exposed to radiation while on service in the 1950s, and who have campaigned for years about the cancers and other side effects they endured. John’s son Steven died at just four months old from birth defects. For 50 years, John and his wife faced repeated indignities. They were wrongfully questioned on suspicion of having murdered their son, denied information about how and why their son died, and denied John’s own medical records. Finally, a coroner’s report suggesting that Steven’s lungs might not have formed properly was revealed. John himself has had cancer, and has had a blood disorder since he was 26 years old. He sent me a message today: “Great news about the Hillsborough law…for us vets, it’s very positive”, because it will “make our lives much easier” in getting the answers they demand. He is pleased that in September, the Prime Minister agreed to meet him to discuss the issue further, and he is looking forward to that meeting. There is another Rochdale resident whose campaign will, I hope, also benefit from this new legislation: 83-year-old Sylvia Mountain, who used the pregnancy test drug Primodos, which has already been mentioned by some of my hon. Friends. She gave birth to her son Philip in 1963, but Philip died of birth defects just 22 days after he was born. Today is the anniversary of the day her baby died, 62 years ago. Sylvia was told by doctors at the time to stop being “hysterical”, and has been told that no medical records exist to explain her son’s death, but many other women who were prescribed Primodos suffered similar birth defects in their children, as well as stillbirths and miscarriages. Victims of the Primodos test are still waiting for answers. For more than half a century, these families have faced a culture of concealment—of suppressed evidence, misleading official conclusions, and denial of responsibility. John and Sylvia—two Rochdale pensioners in their 80s, whose lives have been overshadowed by tragedy and loss in ways that are very different, but also very similar—personify the decades of injustice that this legislation is intended to prevent from ever happening again. I pay tribute to both of them for their resilience in the face of unspeakable tragedy and suffering, and am proud to have them as my constituents. John and Sylvia want the state to recognise its responsibilities before it is too late for them and others like them. It is in their name, and that of all the other victims of state power and cover-ups, that I welcome this landmark Hillsborough Bill today, a Bill that it has taken this Labour Government to make a reality.