Paul Waugh MP: speeches

Speeches

• 20 Jun 2025 · Terminally Ill Adults (End of Life) Bill · Hansard source

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  Will the right hon. Gentleman give way?

• 13 Jun 2025 · Terminally Ill Adults (End of Life) Bill · Hansard source

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  I agree with the right hon. Gentleman, and there is a wider point here about the Henry VIII powers in the Bill. This would be the third such power added to the Bill since Second Reading. At that stage, it had none. The Attorney General, Lord Hermer, has said that “excessive reliance” on Henry VIII powers “upsets the proper balance between Parliament and the executive”, and he is right. Away from matters of constitutional principle, I am especially concerned about the practical impact of such a power, which would allow a future Secretary of State to change the law as set out in the Suicide Act 1961. This is the Act that contains the offence of encouraging or assisting a suicide. Ministers have confirmed that the Bill leaves the offence in place in all cases except where a medical practitioner assists a person to die under its provisions. We must surely therefore not hand the power to a future Secretary of State to weaken or even abolish that offence without the need for primary legislation. My amendment specifies that the Suicide Act cannot be amended in that way. I hope that my hon. Friend the Member for Spen Valley recognises that my amendment does not seek to undo or undermine her new clause, but rather to build on it and to ensure that the ban she intends to deliver does not collapse around the loophole at its heart.

• 13 Jun 2025 · Terminally Ill Adults (End of Life) Bill · Hansard source

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  I completely agree with my hon. Friend. The dangers of what is happening in America provide a real lesson for us here. As the hon. Member for Reigate (Rebecca Paul) put it, conversations about assisted dying should happen in person—between the relevant doctor and the patient. They should not be prompted by a TV ad, or something seen on a bus. My hon. Friend the Member for Bexleyheath and Crayford (Daniel Francis) spoke very movingly about the way that IVF services have been commercialised, leaving people who are, as he says, “already on their knees” vulnerable to exploitation, so that someone else can profit. I am certain that nobody in this House believes that passing this Bill into law should mean the rise of a similarly aggressive market for assisted death, but it is our role—indeed our responsibility—to deal not only in intended consequences, but in unintended ones, too. The real risk in the drafting of new clause 14 is that it allows exceptions that are not specified in the Bill. A future Secretary of State will be empowered not only to make the necessary regulations, but to amend them at any time; and a future Secretary of State, who does not share the concerns of this House, would have the ability to draw the exceptions so widely as to make the ban worthless. There are a number of similar advertising bans already in place on tobacco products, surrogacy and the latest cancer drugs being marketed to the public. In every case, the legislation sets out the exceptions, leaving no room for doubt as to how Parliament intended to protect the public. Why should the services that this Bill would legalise not be subject to that same legal clarity? Do people who have less time to live not deserve all the protection we have the power to give them from a death they do not truly want? I cannot believe that this Parliament would be content to have that power taken out of its hands, and the rights of our most vulnerable constituents left for someone else to decide on some other day. My amendment therefore sets out that exceptions to the advertising ban should be limited to cases where a person has requested information and where the materials are intended for health professionals and not for their patients. New clause 14 would allow a future Secretary of State to make provisions that would usually have to go through the House in legislation. It is not at all clear to me why that power is needed to introduce a ban on advertising.

• 13 Jun 2025 · Terminally Ill Adults (End of Life) Bill · Hansard source

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  The point of my amendment is to make sure that a future Secretary of State would have to come before the House with primary legislation. Report stage is not about the principles of the Bill. It is not about whether a Member may, in principle, support the idea of assisted dying, as Mr Speaker will point out to everybody who strays from the amendments. It is about the individual Bill before us today. We have to ask: what will it mean in the real world for our very real constituents?

• 13 Jun 2025 · Terminally Ill Adults (End of Life) Bill · Hansard source

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  I will not; I am short of time. Just how strong are the Bill’s safeguards? We are not commentators; we are legislators. Our job is to scrutinise, to test and to test again the Bills that come to this place. I spent 26 years up there in the Press Gallery writing about politics, but the big difference between them and us is that we have a vote in this place. With that vote, particularly a free vote, comes responsibility, and there is no greater responsibility than protecting the vulnerable from feeling they have to end their life. That is why I tabled the amendment. I am not driven by religion, though I do not believe that those with religious faiths should be denigrated or patronised, as they have been during the passage of the Bill. It is worth saying that some of those who passionately support assisted dying have a faith—a devout faith—that their world view is the right one. I am driven instead by my duty as a legislator to get this Bill right, and by what I see as my moral duty to protect the most vulnerable in society. I believe that my duty is to protect those who do not have celebrity names or campaign groups behind them—the people who do not get heard, who do not want to be a bother, who do not want to make a fuss, and who feel at the end of their lives that they are a burden on their family but may never say so. I worry about the unheard, the unseen, the ignored and the marginalised. Most of all, I worry about the heartbreaking modesty of that phrase we often hear from older people: “I don’t want to be any trouble, love.” We need, for their sakes, to make sure that the safeguards in the Bill are the strongest they can possibly be.

• 13 Jun 2025 · Terminally Ill Adults (End of Life) Bill · Hansard source

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  I rise to speak in support of the amendment in my name, which seeks to strengthen new clause 14 tabled by my hon. Friend the Member for Spen Valley (Kim Leadbeater). Why do we want to restrict advertising about assisted dying? It is not just because such adverts could appear crass or insensitive, or because we worry that private companies could profiteer from death, but because advertisers know that they influence choices. The issue of choice, whether it is informed choice, skewed choice, self-coercion or coercive control, as has already been mentioned, is, in many ways, at the heart of the Bill and whether its safeguards are sufficient. My brother works in advertising and he knows its power. It is why companies spend billions of pounds on it, why Google is the giant that it is, why we see lots of adverts at Westminster tube station trying to influence every single one of us, and why X is full of ads. Advertising works because we human beings are suggestible, and prone to messaging, visual cues and hints. Older people are bombarded with adverts for everything from stairlifts to care homes. One person’s advert, though, is another person’s public information campaign. It is not impossible to imagine a future Secretary of State, who passionately believes in the merits of assisted dying, authorising such a campaign. It could be a Government-approved plotline in a soap opera, or an ad read out by a podcaster that ever so subtly sounds like a news item, or even their own opinion. Many in this House rightly try to protect teenagers from online harms, but the online harm of an ad for a website about assisted dying shared on TikTok could be a reality without the tighter safeguards in my amendment.

• 20 Mar 2025 · Business of the House · Hansard source

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  May I pass on my own personal condolences to the shadow Leader of the House? He and I have known each other ever since he entered this House. He made a fitting and moving tribute to his late father. Every family in Rochdale, including mine, has a relative or friend who has benefited from the superb end of life care provided by Springhill hospice. I want to pass on the hospice’s thanks to the Government for providing £111,000 in new funding just this month as part of a £100 million investment in hospices across the country. Will the Leader of the House join me in congratulating the Greater Manchester hospices provider collaborative, which visited Parliament this week to show the NHS just how much innovation and expertise hospices can provide to the palliative care movement?

• 7 Jan 2025 · Northern Gaza · Hansard source

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  Thank you for granting this urgent question, Mr Speaker. One of the most appalling aspects of this conflict has been Israel’s reckless disregard not just for civilian life but for that of medical practitioners and patients. Kamal Adwan hospital, the last major facility in northern Gaza, is now out of service, as Members have said. Patients have been moved to the nearby but non-functional and partially destroyed Indonesian hospital, and are unable to receive care because of a lack of necessary equipment and supplies. Will the Minister confirm that Israel’s actions have clearly breached international law, and that a consequence of that will be the continued suspension of weapons sales to Israel when it comes to Gaza?

• 18 Dec 2024 · Winter Preparedness · Hansard source

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  One of the main reasons I became a politician was the fact that my wife is a midwife. She would come home night after night complaining bitterly about staff shortages on the wards. Can the Minister reassure me that maternity services will receive all the funds they need over the winter, and will she join me in thanking all those maternity staff who work so hard over Christmas, over the new year, and all year round?

• 3 Dec 2024 · National Insurance Contributions (Secondary Class 1 Contributions) Bill · Hansard source

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  I am, indeed, coming to exactly that point, because this is set in the context of what the Tories left behind. The clear trajectory of their last Budget was to squeeze day-to-day public spending to just 1% above inflation every year until 2029. That carried dire implications for every unprotected Department—up to £20 billion of cuts a year. The Resolution Foundation calculated that that would be the equivalent of three quarters of the cuts of the austerity years—austerity 2.0. Sadly, there is no evidence that the former Chief Secretary to the Treasury, the right hon. Member for Sevenoaks (Laura Trott), left her own note for her successor. If she had, it surely would have read, “I’m afraid to tell you there is no money for public services.” If the Conservatives had won the last election, what would that have meant in practice? My right hon. Friend the Health Secretary revealed that when he took office, he was told that the NHS was facing such large deficits it would have to cut 20,000 appointments and operations a week. Thanks in part to the national insurance rises in the Bill, he can now deliver on our manifesto commitment to provide 40,000 extra appointments every week, with our investment in mental health services treating an extra 380,000 patients.

• 3 Dec 2024 · National Insurance Contributions (Secondary Class 1 Contributions) Bill · Hansard source

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  The hon. Gentleman refers to the history of the Tory party on national insurance. Can he tell us why he and his party voted for the health and social care levy, which put up national insurance for employees not so long ago?

• 3 Dec 2024 · National Insurance Contributions (Secondary Class 1 Contributions) Bill · Hansard source

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  The Heath Secretary said that he will address that in due course, and I am sure that he will before April, as my hon. Friend the Member for Ealing North (James Murray) set out. The hon. Member for Hinckley and Bosworth (Dr Evans) may want to answer the question I put to the Conservative Front Bench. If they are so opposed in principle to national insurance rises, why did they support the health and social care levy in 2021? The hon. Member voted for it, as did the hon. Member for South Shropshire (Stuart Anderson) and the right hon. Member for Beverley and Holderness (Graham Stuart)—why? They cannot tell me why because they know they are being inconsistent.

• 19 Nov 2024 · Occupied Palestinian Territories: Humanitarian Situation · Hansard source

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  It is a pleasure to see you in the Chair, Sir Roger. I thank my hon. Friend the Member for Glasgow West (Patricia Ferguson) for securing this vital and urgent debate. I will start by telling the story of Mohammed, a new-born baby in northern Gaza. Just a few hours after Mohammed was born, he and his mother, Raghad, had to be transferred to a new hospital amid fears for their safety. On the way, their ambulance was hit by an Israeli missile. The paramedics survived and tried to save the mother and baby, but they were hit by a second missile. Twenty hours later, Mohammed was found as the only survivor. Sky News reported that he was cradled in his dead mother’s arms. Sadly, Mohammed’s story is not a one-off. On 8 November, the Office of the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights published its report on verifiable deaths in Gaza—deaths with three independent sources to corroborate them. The UN found that close to 70% of the fatalities were children and women.

• 5 Nov 2024 · Income Tax (Charge) · Hansard source

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  I thank the right hon. Gentleman on the Tory Benches, which are singularly understaffed right now. But it is the almost criminal levels of understaffing in our NHS that affects most of our constituents. He is an honourable gentleman, so does he not feel a sense of shame that, every single day in our NHS, midwives, doctors and nurses cannot fill their staff rotas? They cannot do the job that they want to do and that we need them to do.

• 4 Nov 2024 · Income Tax (Charge) · Hansard source

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  It is clear that a lot of Tories do not like this Budget, but that is not because it raises taxes—because after all, they themselves raised taxes to a post-war high. Why do they not like it? They do not like it because this Budget exposes their model of a low-pay, low-investment economy—a model that has totally failed. It failed to produce anything other than anaemic growth, dire productivity and broken public services. Among the few mea culpas uttered by those on the Opposition Benches in the last few days was the admission that the last Government had indeed “wasted huge amounts of money”, but just as damning are the huge amounts of talent and potential that they wasted. Under this Budget, people who want to work will get the work, the pay and the dignity they deserve. The Tories let down parents who have been held back by a lack of affordable, costed childcare. They let down young people on the minimum wage—I am delighted that the minimum wage is now rising to £10 an hour for 18 to 20-year-olds. They let down people in work on universal credit, people struggling to feed their families. In Rochdale, the number of children in relative poverty rose from 45% in 2022 to a staggering 49% in 2023. Most damning of all, however, is the spiralling economic inactivity that the Conservatives presided over: a record 2.8 million people locked out of work due to long-term sickness. That is just one reason why the £22 billion this Budget directs to the NHS is desperately needed. By grinding down our public services, the last Government piled cost upon cost for ordinary people. Think of the number of people forced to spend thousands of pounds going private for a hip or knee op, an operation they should have had for free on the NHS. Think of the thousands of pounds-worth of damage to cars caused by potholes on roads left to rot. Think of those forced to fork out for a taxi to get to work, to the shops or to hospital because their local bus has not turned up or the train has been cancelled. Think of all the experienced talent leaving the NHS, our schools and our police forces because their pay was cut in real terms and they face crippling staff shortages on a daily basis. Those are the people to whom we owe a debt of gratitude and investment. The new Leader of the Opposition claimed yesterday that partygate had been “overblown”, yet the defining image of partygate was low-paid cleaners and security staff in No. 10 having to clean up the vomit, the broken bottles and the wine stains left behind by an entitled few. This Government now have to clean up the financial mess that the Tories have left behind and fix the public services that they broke.

• 21 Oct 2024 · Employment Rights Bill · Hansard source

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  The Deputy Prime Minister referenced the extra help for working parents that the Bill will introduce. Does she agree that that stands in stark contrast to the suggestion of some on the Conservative Benches that maternity pay has “gone too far”?