Peter Prinsley MP: speeches 2025

Speeches

• 20 May 2025 · Spending Review: Cross-departmental Planning · Hansard source

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  8. What steps she is taking with Cabinet colleagues to ensure cross-departmental planning in the development of the spending review.

• 19 May 2025 · Mental Health Bill [Lords] · Hansard source

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  Does my right hon. Friend agree that while we are seeing record levels of mental health problems in our young people, investment in community services for people with mental health problems must be a priority?

• 7 May 2025 · Educational Opportunities in Semi-rural Areas · Hansard source

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  Thank you, Sir Edward. That is very kind. Far too often, people who leave the academic track at 16 are not provided with an alternative. Apprenticeships and skills education were neglected by our predecessors, so I am glad that in Bury St Edmunds and Stowmarket we have some fantastic businesses, such as British Sugar and Greene King, providing high quality apprenticeships. We also have excellent technical education providers such as Nikos Savvas, principal of the outstanding Abbeygate sixth-form college in Bury St Edmunds and CEO of the Eastern Education Group, who has been visionary in championing the value of effective technical skills, extending all the way from early years to adulthood. It has never been more important to have a proper system of technical education. We will soon see a wave of major infrastructure projects in the east of England, and we will need thousands of workers. We must ensure that we are educating people quickly enough to fill those jobs. Anglian Water reservoirs, offshore wind farms, East West Rail, Sizewell C—the success of these vital projects depends on a constant supply of technically trained people. The Eastern Education Group has suggested a formal network of “further excellence” technical colleges, a suggestion that I strongly commend to the Government. I recently visited Hinkley Point C, the model for Sizewell C, and met outstanding nuclear technicians who started their careers with apprenticeships. They went straight into well-paid jobs and will eventually operate nuclear power plants. What matters most, they explained to me, was being a SQEP—a suitably qualified and experienced person. Whatever your academic background, it is important simply that you can do the job, so let us SQEP up our society and invest in technical education and apprenticeships across the country, especially in rural areas where it is so sorely needed. We will train the generation that will rebuild Britain.

• 6 May 2025 · Eye Care: 10-year Health Plan · Hansard source

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  The president of the Royal College of Ophthalmologists has stated that the widespread outsourcing of NHS cataract surgery to private, for-profit providers risks the integrity of hospital eye surgery departments meaning that there will be few services to treat patients with preventable blindness. How can we reassure the public that such services will be maintained?

• 6 May 2025 · Victory in Europe and Victory over Japan: 80th Anniversary · Hansard source

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  As I was born in 1958, my childhood was surrounded by people who had fought in world war two, but as a child it all seemed so long ago. My father was an RAF doctor serving in the middle east and in East Anglia. The fatality rate of the air crews was quite appalling, not least because of all those killed as the planes crashed. I remember stories my dad told us of crawling into stricken planes to extract wounded pilots. Like many who fought in the war, he spoke about it only in his greatest old age, but now that I have grandchildren of my own, it no longer seems so long ago. What tricks time and memory play on all of us. Suffolk was on the frontline defending our country. Our airfields were key to the liberation of Europe. The brave men of the United States air force flew bombing raids from Rougham deep into Europe, and the incredible fighter ace and double amputee Wing Commander Douglas Bader flew from RAF Honington. Vanishingly few of that generation are among us now, but I was delighted to send my congratulations to one of them—Jim Grant, from Stowmarket—on his 100th birthday last year. Jim signed up to the Royal Marines in 1943 and served until 1946. He was present at D-day, firing for the troops at Sword, Juno and Gold beaches. I salute his service. We must also never forget the thousands of extraordinary ordinary citizens who made this contribution to the people’s war for freedom. In Suffolk, we received thousands of volunteers for the women’s land army from all over the country to milk cows, pull potatoes and drive tractors. They were determined and indomitable, and alongside the home guard and the ARP wardens they made a huge contribution to our victory. Many in the House will find it quite unbelievable that war has returned to Europe. As we speak, rockets and drones are being flung at cities, and civilians hide in air raid shelters. Those who start wars do not respect the lessons of history, which, as the great songwriter said, are simply blowing in the wind. They must not be allowed to win. I therefore welcome the Government’s choice to increase defence spending and applaud the commitment to go further—2.5% is really not enough. Eighty years ago, Mr Churchill addressed the Commons from the other place, this Chamber having been hollowed out by a direct bomb strike. On the same day, he reminded us that Britons were the first “to draw the sword against tyranny.” We cannot forget that. It has now fallen to us to safeguard the peace that his generation won, and we must put aside our political differences.

• 29 Apr 2025 · Palestinian Authority Prime Minister Visit · Hansard source

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  After 570 days, 59 hostages remain. Does the Minister agree that their unconditional release is a key to the ceasefire? What did Prime Minister Mustafa have to say about that yesterday?

• 24 Apr 2025 · EU Trading Relationship · Hansard source

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  Yesterday, I visited Hinkley Point C, the largest building site in Europe, an international project built through close co-operation with European partners, and a powerful example of how trade and co-operation with Europe is essential to our success. “Big Carl” was at work. The largest crane in the world, manufactured by Sarens in Belgium and imported to Britain because it is the only crane capable of doing the job, Big Carl is just one example of why a smooth trading relationship is essential. British businesses thrive by selling into the European market and rely on importing specialised goods that only Europe provides. Back home, in Bury St Edmunds and Stowmarket, we can see how vital the relationship is. We have one of the largest centres for paint and coating production in the country. PPG Industries runs a major manufacturing facility in Stowmarket with 350 people, mixing paints and coatings shipped around the world, and AkzoNobel, a Dutch paint company, employs 150 people. Those two companies have nearly 500 people out of the industry’s national workforce of 1,400, and they are deeply entwined with the EU. Under the previous Government, they faced sharp increases in costs due to the barriers, they have had to contend with diverging chemical rules, and they face logistical headaches when importing raw materials. But these are large companies; imagine how much harder it is for small businesses. Beautiful Beers specialises in selling fantastic Belgian beers imported from the continent. Its owner, René, faces a bureaucratic nightmare. He is doing it alone and struggling. I have heard the same story from businesses all over the place. Since Brexit, getting goods through customs has become a major hurdle, which we need to sort out with UK-EU customs co-operation. The previous Government left businesses and the country in a mess and Bury St Edmunds in the worst possible situation, so I am really glad that this Government are beginning to sort things out.

• 7 Apr 2025 · Road Maintenance · Hansard source

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  People in Bury St Edmunds and Stowmarket must navigate pockmarked and pimpled streets—how depressing and frustrating! People are forced to accept a fear of damage or even injury as a precondition of using our roads, and they are locked in extended battles for compensation with the council and their insurers. We all know about this problem. Only 36% of local roads in the east of England are in good structural condition. People talk about the effects of potholes on motorists, and quite rightly—they are dangerous, damaging to cars and a daily irritant for many of us. However, it is not just car owners who are affected by our roads, and many people know a horror story. It is no surprise to me, having sat in this debate, that my son, a student at Keele University in Stoke-on-Trent, was involved in a horrendous bicycle crash as he came down a steep hill and went head over heels when his front wheel landed in a pothole. Cyclists know all about potholes. The evidence suggests that between 2017 and 2023, one person per week was killed or seriously injured while cycling, so potholes cause deaths. This is a trend that has not shown any sign of abating. Bus drivers and taxi operators cannot do their job safely when the roads underneath them simply do not work, and our emergency services cannot help us if they are expected to use crumbling roads. I have heard of paramedics whose ambulances have been damaged, to the point of being undriveable, by hitting a pothole on the way to a call-out. Better, smoother roads will support our local economies, improve transport and, most importantly, limit the number of accidents, so it is wonderful to hear that the Government are at last doing something after more than a decade in which our local roads were simply ignored under the Tories. In Suffolk, the effect of the decline in highway spending—last year, it was down by almost 25% compared with 2015—can be easily seen, but that is already changing. Potholes are getting fixed more quickly, because our local authorities are getting a much-needed injection of cash from this Labour Government. In Suffolk, they are getting an extra £11.7 million this year for that purpose. This Labour Government are taking this issue seriously and delivering for the people of Bury St Edmunds and Stowmarket, and I am glad to see that they are not simply papering over the cracks. They will use the latest tech to ensure that public money is spent as effectively as possible on lasting repairs so that our roads do not split up again. Brilliant new pothole-filling machines and surfacing technologies will save us money, and it was great to hear about the advances in technology from my hon. Friend the Member for Stoke-on-Trent South (Dr Gardner). Ministers have taken the decisive action that the previous Government put off for too long, and I hope the rest of the House can join me in congratulating them on that.

• 2 Apr 2025 · Universities: Funding and Employment · Hansard source

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  It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mr Vickers. I should like to speak this afternoon about the vital but vulnerable role of clinical academics. These are the people who combine frontline work in the hospitals with teaching and research at the universities. They are essential to the success of life sciences, and central to the training of the future NHS workforce. Clinical academics are employed by the NHS and higher education institutions jointly. Their pay follows the NHS consultant contract, which was updated last year after national negotiations. Universities, however, were not part of those negotiations, and are now required to implement that contract without having received any additional funding. The result is deeply worrying. I understand that 20 out of 26 medical schools may be preparing to offer redundancy to clinical academics because they simply cannot afford them. That would be a disaster. We cannot afford to lose the very people who train the future NHS staff and carry out the medical research that underpins all the innovation in our health service. As the Government rightly expand the number of medical school places, we will depend even more on clinical academics to educate the next generation of doctors. Their numbers are declining. Clinical academics now make up just 5.7% of the consultant workforce—down from 8.6% in 2011. Over the last decade or so we have seen a 6% fall in medically qualified researchers, and a 24% decline at the senior lecturer level. We are marching towards a cliff edge. More than a third of clinical academics are over the age of 55 and approaching retirement, so universities need to provide incentives to get younger clinical academics to come. We did solve this problem previously. When the consultant contract changed in 2003, the then Department of Health provided £15 million to support the medical schools with the implementation of the consultant clinical academic contract. That funding was later embedded in the baseline grants to the universities. That is a model for solving this problem. Unless we act now, we will lose this vital workforce altogether at the very moment when we need them most, and we simply will not be able to run our medical schools.

• 1 Apr 2025 · Product Regulation and Metrology Bill [Lords] · Hansard source

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  I welcome this Bill, which will address the alarming proliferation of unsafe products in online marketplaces. I would like to talk particularly about the hazards of unsafe toys, which are increasingly being sold online. As a very recently retired ear, nose and throat surgeon—yesterday actually—I know the very real harm that these dangerous toys cause. I have operated on young children who inhaled small components from unsafe toys, detachable parts or parts that were unsafely secured and were a choking hazard, and ribbon or string that exceeded the legal limits, creating strangulation hazards. These are frightening life-threatening situations that no family should have to put up with. Those are not isolated incidents. A Which? investigation found that over 90% of toys purchased from some online marketplaces were unfit for sale in the UK. Shockingly, these toys falsely displayed UK and European safety marks, misleading parents into believing that they were buying something safe for their children. The tragedy is that in many of these cases the sellers simply disappear, vanishing from the platform, and the families are left with no way to seek redress from the harm caused. That is why we must act. I am glad that the Bill will give the Government the opportunity to address this issue. It will give them the power to regulate new and emerging business models and marketplaces, which previous laws did not allow.

• 1 Apr 2025 · Product Regulation and Metrology Bill [Lords] · Hansard source

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  I thank the hon. Member for her intervention. I would point out the particular danger of button batteries—something that is well known to ENT surgeons—which cause perforation of the oesophagus and the trachea by a chemical reaction. In the last two years, 95% of consumers have purchased from online platforms, with approximately 23 million monthly transactions in UK. We certainly need strong accountability for these marketplaces. Without that, dangerous items will continue to resurface, putting children at risk. I urge the House to ensure that the Bill puts more pressure on the sellers of unsafe toys, forcing them to take responsibility for their actions.

• 24 Mar 2025 · Planning and Infrastructure Bill · Hansard source

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  Imagine an English village, if you still can—old houses around a village green, with a little school, a pub or two, a post office, a row of shops, and an ancient church with a creaking gate and some crooked headstones with fading bouquets shaded by ancient oaks. It may be a place where old maids hike to Holy Communion through the mists of the autumn morning. That sort of village is disappearing. Anyone who visits now will find the pub shut for want of drinkers, the shops empty, and the vicar gone—only the fading bouquets remain. There is no doctor’s surgery and no bus route. It has isolated, elderly residents; not a child in sight, as if the Pied Piper had been to visit, and ageing parents with none of their family nearby to help. Like so many problems in this country, housing lies at the centre. The houses in this sort of village are occupied by commuters with big cars lurking in the driveway, or by retired folk whose children have long since moved away. For the lowest-paid people, housing is more expensive in the countryside than in every urban area except London, with the cheapest housing costing nine times the average income of the lowest-paid quartile. Therefore, as the Government construct 1.5 million houses, let us think long and hard about where we will put them. This Bill, together with the changes that the Government have made to the national planning policy framework, will do much to loosen restrictions on house building. The designation of land as grey belt is good for those in suburban green belts, but more can be done to earmark land for housing deep in the countryside. We ought to encourage more house building at small scale on the edge of villages. For hundreds of years, that was the model of expansion across all of England. It has produced our prettiest villages, where progressively newer buildings radiate outwards from a historical core. That is the sort of development that preserves the character of a village. It is the most popular form of development in the countryside, and the Campaign to Protect Rural England has put its name to a call for small-scale affordable housing on the edge of villages. We already have places set aside on the peripheries of towns and villages across the country for delivering such community-scale housing. They are called small rural exception sites. Currently, they allow affordable housing to be granted for local development on small sites not usually granted planning permission. Although those are intended to promote the construction of affordable homes, most of the plots are undeveloped. Minor changes to the national planning guidance are needed to allow for proper development. That will help us to get a lot more use out of such sites, spurring reasonably sized considerate development and ending the pattern of relocation that causes family ties to fragment. Construction will energise a village’s economy, giving work to local firms that are well placed to deliver housing quickly and efficiently. This Government can regenerate rural England. This is surely our generation’s chance, so let us grasp it.

• 18 Mar 2025 · Nuclear Power · Hansard source

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  Small modular reactors, as the Minister says, will play an important part in delivering clean, cheap and secure energy across this country. However, current rules require that any reactor must apply for regulatory justification, as if nuclear power was an entirely new practice instead of an existing one. That delays reactors getting online and lowering energy bills for people across the country, including in Bury St Edmunds and Stowmarket, by up to two years. Will the Secretary of State consider working with his Cabinet colleagues to simplify the system and recognise that nuclear energy technology is an existing practice, thereby accelerating the deployment of small modular reactors?

• 18 Mar 2025 · Nuclear Power · Hansard source

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  17. What steps he is taking to support the nuclear power sector.

• 11 Mar 2025 · Israeli-Palestinian Peace: International Fund · Hansard source

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  It is a great honour to serve under your chairmanship, Mr Twigg. Decades of violence and displacement in Israel and Palestine have created psychological scars that will take generations to heal. For Israelis, the collective trauma of 7 October is still all too painful. Magen Inon is an Israeli peace activist whose parents were killed on 7 October, and he writes that “it feels as if a flash flood of blood engulfs the landscape and my grief is one small branch caught in the current. Everyone I know from my childhood has a horror story to tell.” Palestinians are reeling from the terrible destruction and loss of life in the Gaza strip, tying into a wider historical experience of displacement. This cannot be described as post-traumatic stress, because the trauma is ongoing. Gaza does not have “pre” and “post”. The effects of trauma on peacebuilding cannot be overstated. Traumatised populations are likely to support violent and armed extremist groups. Trauma leads to a siege mentality and increased anger, and trauma means a continual drain on grassroots pressure for the ending of the conflict. It is vital that peacebuilding initiatives help to end these cycles of trauma and introduce a path towards healing and lasting peace. The newly proposed international fund will help us to do that, and it is critical that we build momentum for it today. Civil organisations in Israel and Palestine are already working with people who are terribly traumatised, while living with their own personal traumas under the harsh daily realities they face. Each day, organisations such as Combatants for Peace, the Middle East Children’s Institute and the Holy Land Trust tackle the profound scars left by the cycles of war. The unified fund will deliver resource and support to make these small-scale initiatives society-wide, to eradicate psychological drivers of conflict, and to pave the way to healing. I will close with Magen Inon’s words: “Our shared future is based on the belief that all human beings are equal, and deserving of respect and safety. This is how I was raised and how I am raising my own children. In the long term, and even if it’s very far away, the only real future is that of hope and peace.”

• 6 Mar 2025 · Relations with the EU · Hansard source

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  Palmerston said that this country has no eternal allies and no perpetual enemies, only interests which are eternal and perpetual. Does the Minister agree that it is in our eternal interests for there to be security in Europe and a sovereign Ukraine? Will he congratulate the Prime Minister on his statesmanship and leadership at this dangerous moment?

• 6 Mar 2025 · Relations with the EU · Hansard source

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  8. What steps he is taking to improve relations with the European Union.

• 24 Feb 2025 · Counter-terrorism · Hansard source

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  Sadly, the misappropriation of religious belief to justify acts of terror and intimidation has become familiar across the world. We have seen the minds of too many of our young people corrupted by online pedlars of hate, so what action are this Government taking to tackle radicalisation at a time when xenophobia and intolerance are being promoted for political purposes?

• 24 Feb 2025 · Counter-terrorism · Hansard source

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  9. What steps her Department is taking with international partners to counter the threat of terrorism.

• 12 Feb 2025 · Data (Use and Access) Bill [Lords] · Hansard source

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  Well, the Minister’s mother-in-law might not be. I do not think it is such a leap of the imagination to let everybody access their medical information in this way. As we heard from the hon. Member for North Norfolk (Steff Aquarone), who has gone for a cup of tea, other countries such as Estonia do this. I urge us to think carefully. One record, one patient—it would simplify so much of our healthcare, and this Bill is the opportunity to do it. I was heartened to hear that my right hon. Friend the Health Secretary supports such a proposal. It will be the future of healthcare, so let us simply make it happen.

• 12 Feb 2025 · Data (Use and Access) Bill [Lords] · Hansard source

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  It is a pleasure to follow my medical colleague, the hon. Member for Sleaford and North Hykeham (Dr Johnson), in this debate. This is a wide-ranging Bill, but I would like to talk this afternoon about the role of data access in healthcare, and what I think is a transformative proposal for the patient passport. NHS IT and case records are chaotic. I know about this chaos from my own clinics, where I spend—or waste—too much time looking at PDF readers; we also have dictaphones, and we even still have fax machines. Half the consultation can easily be spent opening up websites and computer programs for all sorts of different things. The standard of information kept by different hospitals varies quite widely and IT interoperability is often very poor, so that if I transfer a patient from one hospital where I work to another hospital where I work, the other people in the hospital cannot easily work out what is going on with the patient. Sometimes we are unable to treat the patient because we are unable to access their medical record. Imagine an elderly lady lying on a trolley in a hospital corridor at 3 o’clock in the morning, unable to give a full account of her medical history. If we cannot access her file, how will we best treat her? That is not an imaginary situation; it is an actual situation that is probably happening in our hospitals today. I therefore welcome the measures in the Bill that will standardise information and improve the flow of data between hospitals. Actually, I am pleased that West Suffolk hospital, in my constituency, has very good IT standards, and I hope the Bill will allow more hospitals around the country to follow its example. However, I urge the Government to look further when considering reform to medical data. Here is what I think may be a transformative proposal: we should give ownership of the medical record directly to the patient. Let us make the clinicians ask the patient to see the record, and not the other way around. Nine out of 10 Britons want better access to their medical records, and we should simply listen to them. Let us create a patient passport that has all the patient’s medical data on it. It would be transformative. People organise their lives on their phones, so let us put the passport there. We could just expand the NHS app to become a digital front door for the health service. People are happy to bank on their phones, send emails on their phones and book flights on their phones—

• 5 Feb 2025 · Closure of High Street Services: Rural Areas · Hansard source

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  I thank my hon. Friend the Member for Scarborough and Whitby (Alison Hume) for that. It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Ms Furniss. Stowmarket’s high street is called Ipswich Street. It is the central artery of the town, running through Stowmarket from the historic marketplace. Only a few years ago, it was a busy street, bustling with commercial activity. People came to Stowmarket from nearby villages to go shopping. Many of them went on to visit other attractions, such as the amazing Food Museum—which I recently visited—and the John Peel Centre for Creative Arts. However, stores started to close, one after another, and six shopfronts now lie completely empty. It is a familiar scene up and down the country: high streets disfigured, with vacant shops sticking out like missing teeth. That has a terrible effect on local communities. As the stores close, the town centre becomes trapped in a vicious circle: few people want to go shopping, the high street is full of boarded-up shops, footfall declines and more stores close. We have heard about that in this debate. My colleagues will be familiar with the problem of banks vacating the high streets—indeed, we now have more food banks than actual banks in this country. Other shops follow the banks in shutting their doors. The town centre loses the café and the pub that both performed a vital service as focal points for the community. The Government must find a way to mitigate the effect of these stores closing. Times change, commercial life and society have changed, but let us preserve the high street.

• 4 Feb 2025 · National Cancer Plan · Hansard source

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  Does the Minister agree that the move from analogue to digital will be key to cancer research, especially in the field of rare cancers such as the brain tumours that we have been hearing about?

• 4 Feb 2025 · Topical Questions · Hansard source

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  T8. Looking around the car park in Parliament, I noticed that we had only two charging ports, both occupied. By supporting the installation of more charging ports in Parliament and other workplaces across the country, we can encourage more people to make the environmentally friendly switch to electric vehicles. What measures are the Government taking to promote the installation of charging ports in workplaces?

• 4 Feb 2025 · Clean Power by 2030 · Hansard source

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  Energy projects in East Anglia will be crucial for generating the clean, cheap power that this country needs to grow, from wind and solar farms to nuclear power stations, including the much-needed Sizewell C. These projects will bring high-skilled jobs to East Anglia, including in my constituency of Bury St Edmunds and Stowmarket. What action are the Government taking to ensure that the infrastructure improvements to connect these projects to the grid will not be hamstrung by the planning process?