Paulette Hamilton MP: speeches 2025

Speeches

• 10 Dec 2025 · Resident Doctors: Industrial Action · Hansard source

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  I have always been a massive advocate for all medical and nursing staff, and I absolutely understand what a difficult job our healthcare workers do, but given that flu is running rampant across the country and most NHS staff—including resident doctors, but also nurses and other staff—are suffering at this moment, will the Secretary of State join me in urging the leadership of the BMA and the doctors to see sense and put patients first at this difficult time?

• 8 Dec 2025 · Restriction of Jury Trials · Hansard source

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  Jury trials allow ordinary citizens to participate in the justice system—which many groups simply do not trust—ensuring community representation and transparency. Can the Minister explain how citizen involvement can be continued, so that we do not see additional miscarriages of justice as a result of influence from personal bias or external pressures that can potentially lead to unfair outcomes?

• 8 Dec 2025 · Support into Work: Health Conditions · Hansard source

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  A constituent of mine with severe health needs recently told me that she gained employment only after she was able to learn to drive and then secure a car through the Motability scheme. Can the Minister set out what further steps the Department is taking to ensure that disabled people with health needs receive the support they need to gain access to work and to take part fully in the things they enjoy?

• 8 Dec 2025 · Support into Work: Health Conditions · Hansard source

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  12. What steps he is taking to support people with health conditions into work.

• 8 Dec 2025 · Maccabi Tel Aviv FC: Away Fans Ban · Hansard source

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  As someone who has had the pleasure of working with the chief constable, I can say that he is a very considered man. Having said that, as an MP who represents the adjoining constituency, I was given absolutely no information about what was going on. Can the Minister assure the House that lessons will be learned and the appropriate actions will be taken to ensure that this does not happen again?

• 2 Dec 2025 · Budget Resolutions · Hansard source

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  I welcome last week’s Budget, which finally, after 14 years of Tory neglect, puts the people of Birmingham Erdington first. On our NHS, I was delighted to hear that the Chancellor announced further efforts to shorten NHS waiting lists, including an upgrade to Stockland Green primary care centre in Birmingham Erdington. Bringing care back into the community was always a priority for me when I worked in the NHS, and I am thrilled to see a Labour Government finally deliver it. In addition, more than 6,000 children in Birmingham Erdington will now receive access to the crucial funds they need to thrive through the lifting of the two-child benefit cap. Growing up in poverty seriously harms a child’s life chances. They are less likely to work as an adult and earn around 25% less by the age of 30 than their peers, making us all poorer in the long run. Wages have risen more in the first year of this Government than in the first decade under the Conservatives, whose austerity measures put so many into the poverty trap. When coupled with freezing train fares and prescription charges, this will lower living costs and make everyday life better for so many. Another consistent area of concern for my constituents is energy bills. Taking levies off energy bills will save families £150 on average next year, and that figure rises to £300 for many of the most vulnerable households. This is exactly the kind of direct action that people have been crying out for. This Labour Government’s mission is to renew our economy and our communities; I am pleased to see that promise being kept, and will continue holding the Government to account and fighting for a better future for everyone in Erdington, Kingstanding, Castle Vale and south Oscott. I support this Budget wholeheartedly.

• 17 Nov 2025 · Asylum Policy · Hansard source

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  I agree with the Government that we desperately need to tackle illegal migration. I hear that on the doorsteps, and I see it in my mail each week in Birmingham Erdington. How quickly after the changes come into force will the Government ensure that safe and legal routes are in place? That will be key to stopping the boats. How will the Government deal with those who claim to be minors but are clearly not? That is another massive issue.

• 23 Oct 2025 · Black History Month · Hansard source

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  Will the Minister outline what steps she is taking to ensure that equality and opportunity are at the heart of this Government’s five missions?

• 23 Oct 2025 · Black History Month · Hansard source

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  Madam Deputy Speaker, will the Minister give way?

• 22 Oct 2025 · Mental Health and Hoarding · Hansard source

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  Again, my hon. Friend raises a valuable point. The issue of financing is vital, but I will discuss that more as I go on. Hoarding disorder is a widespread condition affecting between 2% and 5% of the population, which equates to approximately 1.2 million to 3 million people in Britain. Let me be absolutely clear: hoarding is not a lifestyle choice, or a matter of laziness. It is a complex mental health condition, deeply rooted in emotional distress and underlying trauma, often stemming from adverse childhood experiences. For hoarders, it can result in unsafe living conditions, social isolation and a diminished ability to manage day-to-day responsibilities. If left untreated, it has a huge cost for families, the NHS, housing providers and emergency services. On top of that, hoarding is a long-term condition with few effective treatment options, meaning that behaviours are often left unresolved. My professional experience showed me the heartbreaking reality of individuals drowning in clutter, their mental health deteriorating and their relationships broken. Dealing with hoarding can be very time-consuming and expensive. Providing support falls disproportionately to ill-equipped local authorities and overstretched third-sector organisations, such as Birmingham’s Clouds End CIC, led by the inspirational Heather Matuozzo. The challenges can be broken down into four key areas. The first area is public health and safety. Hoarding does not just hurt individuals, but has knock-on effects on the entire community. The hazardous living conditions that it creates, from severe fire risks and blocked escape routes to unsanitary and unsafe housing, pose a direct danger not only to the individual, but to their neighbours and the brave professionals, firefighters, social workers and others who are called in to intervene. The second challenge has to do with public awareness and education. We cannot combat what we do not understand. We urgently need to educate our communities, and our frontline professionals working in social care, housing, health and the emergency services, to recognise hoarding as a mental health issue, so that we can reduce stigma and promote more compassionate and effective intervention. The third challenge has to do with mental health and support gaps. Mental health services and treatments that address hoarding specifically remain scarce and underfunded. Many people affected feel reluctant to seek help because of stigma, lack of awareness, or fear of eviction or other legal consequences. Closing this support gap is not optional; it is essential. The final challenge concerns the legal and housing implications. Housing providers can be faced with challenging legal situations in which tenants’ hoarding behaviours lead to breaches of tenancy agreements or safety policies. Unfortunately, these cases are too often handled through eviction or legal action, rather than support being provided, so that the root causes of the problem can be addressed. We need policies that balance legal responsibilities with compassionate mental health support. As a society, we have a responsibility to support those living with hoarding disorder. In Birmingham, the number of people needing support has risen exponentially since the covid pandemic, and the story is the same across the country, as Members have highlighted. The seriousness and scale of this issue demands a co-ordinated national response, led by Government. We need a national strategy to bring consistency, reduce risk and improve lives. The current legal framework is simply not fit for purpose. The Care Act 2014 recognises that people who hoard may be considered vulnerable or entitled to advocacy. However, there are no national guidelines for the agencies that encounter hoarding in their work. Without guidance, responses to hoarding will remain inconsistent and ineffective. In the absence of national guidelines, agencies are forced to rely on outdated legislation, such as the Public Health Act 1936, which refers to “filthy or verminous premises”. Under these powers, a person can be forced to clear their property, even if they own it. If they cannot afford clearance, it is undertaken on their behalf and charged to the property. This approach is deeply flawed. It treats hoarding purely as a practical or environmental issue, rather than recognising that these are vulnerable human beings in need of help. Failing to recognise hoarding as a mental health condition risks traumatising individuals, worsening hoarding behaviours and, in the most extreme cases, contributing to suicidal thoughts. The human impact should not be understated. Lack of proper support and compassion leads to further trauma, distress and a greater risk of re-accumulation. National guidelines would provide clarity on what constitutes appropriate and effective practice, a consistent framework for agencies across the UK, a balance between addressing practical risks and meeting underlying mental health needs, and clear routes for advice, support and specialist referral. That brings me to my central ask of Ministers. We need a co-ordinated national strategy for hoarding disorder. Although the Care Act 2014 provides a foundation by recognising vulnerability, the absence of specific national guidelines leads to a postcode lottery of care, and to inconsistent and often ineffective intervention. A national framework would provide clarity, consistency and compassion by balancing risk management with mental health support and establishing clear pathways for specialist help. I was proud that the Labour manifesto committed to recruiting 8,500 extra mental health staff, and to delivering a transformative 10-year plan for mental health. It is essential that those welcome initiatives explicitly include and address hoarding disorder.

• 22 Oct 2025 · Mental Health and Hoarding · Hansard source

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  I am grateful for the opportunity to lead this debate on a subject that, to the best of my knowledge, has never been discussed on the Floor of the House before. I often speak of my 25 years as an NHS nurse because that experience has fundamentally shaped my understanding of the hidden struggles within our communities, and it is from that perspective that I raise the urgent and often misunderstood issue of hoarding disorder. Many years ago, as a district nurse serving the Kingstanding community—the same community that I am now proud to represent in Parliament—I entered homes where extreme clutter was not an anomaly but a visible sign of a deep, unaddressed need. Today, we have a name for it. In 2018, hoarding disorder was formally recognised in Britain as a distinct mental health condition. It is defined by persistent difficulty in discarding or parting with possessions, regardless of value, leading to cluttered living spaces and significant distress or impairment in daily life.

• 22 Oct 2025 · Mental Health and Hoarding · Hansard source

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  My hon. Friend makes an absolutely brilliant point. Yes, that should be part of the holistic model, but there is no model in place at the moment. It is like the wild, wild west—everybody is just doing as they see fit. That is why I secured this debate. I urge the Government to prioritise the development of national guidelines, in order to equip all frontline workers with the tools to identify and address hoarding compassionately and effectively; to ensure a truly integrated, multi-agency approach that brings together mental health services, social care, housing and emergency responders; and to invest in research and data collection, so we can properly understand the scale, causes and economic impact of hoarding in the UK, and ensure that our policies are evidence-based and our resources are allocated wisely. In my nursing career, we were taught that prevention is always better than cure. That holds true for hoarding. Early intervention is more humane and more cost-effective than crisis response. This issue has remained in the shadows for too long. We have a duty to bring it into the light, to replace judgment with understanding, and to offer a hand up to the millions of our citizens who live with this devastating condition. I look forward to hearing in the Minister’s response how the Government intend to lead this vital change.

• 22 Oct 2025 · Mental Health and Hoarding · Hansard source

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  My hon. Friend raises a valuable point. I will come on to that later in my speech, but I absolutely agree that hoarding disrupts people’s lives.

• 22 Oct 2025 · Mental Health and Hoarding · Hansard source

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  The hon. Member is right, but this is not just about a solution. A number of people in our society are living with a mental health condition, and it needs to be treated. At the moment, there are no strategies in place, but I will answer his question as I go on. I thank him for his contribution.

• 16 Oct 2025 · Health and Social Care Committee · Hansard source

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  Mental health is something that I have been interested in for years. During the inquiry we did not specifically focus on mental health, but it came up through some of the personal statements a number of times. I absolutely agree with my hon. Friend that mental health should have parity of esteem with physical health. Without good mental health, there is no health.

• 16 Oct 2025 · Health and Social Care Committee · Hansard source

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  I absolutely agree with the hon. Member. The ringfenced funding was removed. The Committee was told through its inquiry that the funding can still be used—it is just in other parts of the budget. But if we do not have that funding ringfenced, it will not be prioritised. That means that women will continue to suffer in maternity services. I absolutely agree with the hon. Member.

• 16 Oct 2025 · Health and Social Care Committee · Hansard source

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  I thank the hon. Member, who is a member of the Committee—I love him to bits. He has been absolutely brilliant throughout, and I absolutely agree with him. I press the Government to look a little more carefully at some of the things that have been put forward regarding workforce, because some of them are simple things that would make a massive difference for maternity services.

• 16 Oct 2025 · Health and Social Care Committee · Hansard source

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  Thank you, Mr Betts. It is an honour to serve under your chairmanship. I wish to make a statement on the recent publication of the Health and Social Care Committee’s report on black maternal health. I speak on behalf of the Committee, which I formally thank for all its hard work and dedication to this inquiry. I also wish to speak for the black mothers whose lives have been forever changed by failings in maternity healthcare, although I note that many of the issues raised with the Committee affect all women who use maternity services. I thank all those who gave evidence, written or oral, to this inquiry, and I extend my deepest sympathies to anyone affected by maternal health failings. The voices of black women are at the heart of this report, and I thank them in particular for their powerful and often painful testimonies. Despite repeated policy commitments and public concerns from multiple Governments, black patients still receive poorer-quality maternity care and support. The support they receive often fails to meet their emotional and cultural needs, which has led to black mothers in England being more than twice as likely to die during childbirth than white mothers. The figure for 2014 to 2016 was almost five times higher, which appears to show that there has been progress in this area, but I stress that the reduction is partly due to worsening outcomes for other groups, not improvements for black women. Our report follows a comprehensive inquiry that identified three key areas where action is urgently needed: culture, leadership and racism. Racism is one of the core drivers of poor maternal healthcare for black women, and it must therefore be tackled urgently and effectively. Black women suffer stereotyping, bias and racist assumptions during childbirth, as was made explicitly clear to us throughout our inquiry. The testimonies we heard were harrowing. Let me share some examples. First, women suffer due to the “strong black woman” trope. During active labour, one woman was denied pain relief and given only paracetamol—her baby was born 10 minutes later. Another woman was told that she could handle the pain despite losing a concerning amount of blood. We also heard of a midwife who chose to blame an African pelvis for slow labour, rather than check for complications. Another mother was told that she was making noise when she pleaded for help during childbirth, having been ignored by staff. Another experienced racism in its purest form, being told, “This isn’t Africa, you know,” when she had family members visiting. We also heard of a black woman receiving no breastfeeding help or support from white midwives, which changed only when a black student midwife came on shift. A report from Five X More described similar experiences. Racism in the NHS not only harms patients; it affects healthcare professionals from minority ethnic backgrounds who encounter and experience the same discrimination and structural barriers, just in a different context. That, alongside the host of other evidence that we received, led us to call for mandatory cultural competency and anti-racism training in the NHS. Currently, where it does exist, it is optional or limited in scope. We also call for leadership to be held accountable for creating inclusive and anti-racist environments, as we have heard that NHS trusts can refuse even to acknowledge that racism exists in their services. When we spoke to the Minister, Baroness Merron, she agreed that greater accountability is needed. That is welcome, and we will continue to hold her and the wider Government to account on this issue. The second key area for improvement is the workforce. The NHS currently faces a shortfall of 2,500 midwives. On top of that, 74% of midwives cite unrealistic workloads, and 87% report unsafe staffing levels. Those shortages directly impact the quality and continuity of care that all mothers receive. It is essential that there are firm commitments in the upcoming workforce plan to deliver safe staffing levels for maternity services. We also know the importance of continuity of care to both midwives and mothers in building trust, tailoring support and spotting warning signs early. That used to be a national target, but it was abandoned three years ago due to workforce pressures. We call for that target to be reinstated in the upcoming plan. Workforce diversity is also paramount. We have heard that, despite almost a third of the workforce coming from minority ethnic backgrounds, that is true of only 12.7% of senior NHS managers, and 95% of midwife educators are white. The plan must therefore include specific targets to diversify maternity leadership and education, backed by robust monitoring. The third area is data. Without complete data, disparities in maternal outcomes cannot be accurately identified, let alone improved. That is particularly relevant in two areas. First, the current frameworks for monitoring maternal morbidity do not have the same scope or rigour as those for baby deaths or maternal mortality. Successive Governments have discussed implementing a maternal morbidity indicator to track and measure non-fatal complications such as sepsis, eclampsia and postpartum haemorrhage, but progress has been shockingly slow. Developments must be accelerated on that measure, and there must be a clear timetable for implementation. Secondly, too many ethnicity entries in the maternity services dataset are recorded as “unknown” or “not stated”. In a 2022 example from the Shrewsbury and Telford hospital, more than 9,000 missing ethnicity background details were identified. Better data is crucial to improving results for those with the lowest outcomes in maternity health: black women. The upcoming workforce plan must also include support and training for effective data collection. The final area I would like to discuss is funding. All the issues relating to maternity care that I have spoken about today simply cannot be fixed without adequate funding, yet the maternity service development fund has recently been cut from £95 million to £2 million, which is deeply concerning. Although the NHS said that the money is still available and has just been moved elsewhere in the budget, we are concerned that, without ringfenced funding, maternity services will be deprioritised and will continue to cause harm to all mothers. We therefore call on the Government to restore the dedicated, ringfenced funding for the maternity service development fund to its previous amount. Since 2019, the NHS has faced a £27.7 billion bill for maternity negligence. That exceeds the total maternity budget for the same period by almost £10 billion. I know there are funding pressures across the NHS, but that clearly shows that greater investment here would have the potential to more than pay for itself. Since we launched the inquiry, the Government have announced a rapid national investigation into maternity and neonatal services, which is welcome. Addressing the racial disparities in maternal outcomes must be one of the core aims of the investigation, and I hope to see it as a prominent feature in the investigation’s work.

• 16 Oct 2025 · Health and Social Care Committee · Hansard source

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  I thank the hon. Member for his question—he knows what I am going to say. Yes, I do agree with him. I became chair of the APPG on black health because I feel passionately that there needs to be more equality in this area.

• 16 Oct 2025 · Health and Social Care Committee · Hansard source

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  That is a really important question, and the answer is yes. We were absolutely disappointed not to see it. Several members of the Committee highlighted that it was not there.

• 16 Oct 2025 · Health and Social Care Committee · Hansard source

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  I thank my hon. Friend, who is a brilliant member of the Committee, including during the inquiry. She is absolutely right. The issue of cultural change applies to everybody. We need to look at cultural change within maternity services, not just for black women but for all women. If we are to get the improvements in maternity care that we need, we need to look at how we can develop both the cultural awareness training and, more so, people’s mindsets, because of how they think within that system.

• 16 Oct 2025 · Health and Social Care Committee · Hansard source

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  To be brief, we do need to look at data. It is crucial that the rapid review takes on board the data and improves the way that it is collected and used.

• 16 Oct 2025 · Health and Social Care Committee · Hansard source

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  We will of course share this report far and wide. I am hoping that every parliamentarian has had a copy. We will ensure that it gets anywhere that it needs to go. If Members share where it needs to go, we will ensure that it gets there.

• 16 Oct 2025 · Health and Social Care Committee · Hansard source

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  I would like to thank my hon. Friends the Members for Bournemouth East (Tom Hayes) and for Chelsea and Fulham (Ben Coleman). I absolutely agree with what my hon. Friend the Member for Chelsea and Fulham says. In response to my hon. Friend the Member for Bournemouth East, we do not have long enough to go through what needs to be done, but I think the recommendations in the report would be a good start.

• 15 Oct 2025 · Jhoots Pharmacy · Hansard source

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  I thank the Minister for his response. Community pharmacies, such as Lodge pharmacy in Perry Common in my area, play a vital role and offer an excellent service, and that is why I am concerned when places such as Jhoots pharmacy close or, maybe, fold. The winter months are coming, and I am passionate about winter measures. How will we ensure that our pharmacies can offer the winter vaccines needed this year if we lose large chains, such as Jhoots?