Peter Prinsley MP: speeches

Speeches

• 26 Jun 2025 · BBC World Service Funding · Hansard source

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  I thank the right hon. Member—my recent squash partner—for his intervention, I agree that we must be sure that whatever the BBC says is true; that must be the case. The BBC Arabic service—the language service—disappeared some time ago, and that is to be regretted. In Pakistan, a video falsely claimed to show the aftermath of an Indian airstrike on Pakistani air bases. That went viral—it was viewed over 400,000 times—stoking widespread fear and heightening tensions with India over Kashmir, but actually it was mislabelled footage of the 2020 Beirut port explosion. BBC Verify debunked the claim and calmed the situation. In 2023, a false story spread across the internet that alleged that the newly elected President of Nigeria had forged his university degree. There was anger and unrest until a report by the BBC global disinformation team revealed it to be false, which defused the situation. Those are not isolated stories; they are part of a growing global pattern. The fight is particularly crucial in an era when young people increasingly consume news online. A few weeks ago, I visited a school in my constituency at Bury St Edmunds and asked the children how they got their news. I said, “Do you get your news online?”, and almost every hand went up. Among 12 to 15-year-olds in the UK, only the BBC can compete effectively with the online tech giants. To continue to compete effectively and divert attention from untrustworthy sources, the BBC needs the resources to excel in what a young person recently told me is called the “attention economy”. With appropriate funding for new digital content, the BBC can significantly expand its impact. In recent weeks, our attention has undoubtedly been drawn to the middle east, particularly to Iran, and the power of the BBC’s digital reach is no clearer than through the work of BBC Persian. It recently reached over 32 million users on Instagram in just five days, despite the platform’s having been blocked by the Iranians. People were so desperate to view trusted BBC news that they risked their safety by using virtual private networks, or VPNs, to bypass Iran’s strict internet censors. Some posts achieved more than 12 million views. When Iran restricted internet access, BBC Persian increased broadcasts from eight hours to nearly 24 hours a day and launched an emergency radio service. Despite the fact that there were no reporters on the ground, the team diligently verified information amid severe misinformation campaigns. With adequate funding, the BBC World Service always steps up during global crises, delivering a public good for the benefit of a whole country.

• 26 Jun 2025 · BBC World Service Funding · Hansard source

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  I thank all hon. Members who have come here this afternoon for what I think has been a very interesting debate. It strikes me that there is more or less universal support for what is, I hope, a universal service. I was pleased that there was an increase of £32 million in the grant this year; I do not know whether that has anything to do with an interaction I had with the Chief Secretary to the Treasury at the Labour party conference. I went to an event put on by the BBC and listened to Katya Adler and some of the journalists there, and I was very moved by it, so I stood and asked a question about the £100 million cost of an F-35 jet, which seemed to me to be the same as the funding given by the Foreign Office to the BBC. I stood up and asked, “Do you think that we’d be better off with one more F-35, or should we just look after the BBC?” The Chief Secretary to the Treasury and I were in a coffee queue about an hour later, and he asked me whether I was enjoying the conference. I said, “Well, I was.” I explained about what happened, and he said, “Oh, dear. This conference is working very well, because you’ve just been to the BBC and they’ve just told you their story. Now, you’ve just told me that, and now I shall have to give them some more money.” I am hoping that Parliament continues to work in that way, but I agree that we need to have a long-term funding solution for what is one of our most precious resources. I thank everyone very much for coming this afternoon.

• 26 Jun 2025 · BBC World Service Funding · Hansard source

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  I absolutely agree. I first got into this subject when I met World Service refugee correspondents from BBC Persian and BBC News Russian at the Labour party conference. I so admired what they were doing, and it was a real inspiration for me. The Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office contributes £104 million a year to the World Service budget of £366 million. The BBC does an awful lot with its licence fee. I was told this week that, for the cost of a cup of coffee a week, it delivers drama, comedy and news across TV and radio, as well as one of the world’s most visited websites. However, money is tight and there are serious fears that its essential work will be chipped away. Like many, I would describe the BBC World Service as a tool of British soft power. Remarkably, the entire Foreign Office contribution to the BBC World Service is roughly equivalent to the cost of a single F-35 jet. We lately agreed to purchase a whole lot more of those, and that was the right move because we need to boost defence in a dangerous world, but it would be a critical mistake to invest heavily in just one aspect of our security while neglecting another equally essential aspect. Global inflation and rising costs are putting the World Service in increasing funding difficulties, and without more support there is a risk that it will lose critical technological capabilities, especially among younger audiences. Although broadcast services currently account for two thirds of the World Service’s reach and they remain crucial, the future is digital, and on digital platforms the BBC is not just competing with Russia and China but is up against Facebook, TikTok, Google and the others, so we need sustained investment. Despite all the funding challenges, BBC World Service journalists continue to bravely provide quality journalism in the most challenging circumstances, often at great personal risk. When it comes to Iran we rely heavily on the work of BBC Persian’s brave journalists who face, as my hon. Friend the Member for Leyton and Wanstead (Mr Bailey) said, threats, asset seizures and passport confiscations just for doing their jobs.

• 12 Jun 2025 · Long-term Medical Conditions · Hansard source

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  It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mr Efford. Long-term conditions need a long-term plan. We were promised one of those, and it cannot come soon enough. The Chancellor’s statement yesterday, which committed to a 3% real-terms rise in NHS funding each year, gives me enormous hope for the future of our health service. Some 70% of that funding will likely go to the treatment of long-term conditions, so it is incredibly important that we consider how we should treat them. Most of us at some point will collect a few long-term conditions. Some of us are born with them; sometimes, they are serious disabilities. I am sure that we will hear some stories of those challenges. I reached out to the people of Bury St Edmunds and Stowmarket and heard many stories about their experiences of using our NHS. All too often, it is the same story: it is those with long-term conditions, not deadly diseases, who feel most let down now. The reality for many is that by the time they reach my age, they are fortunate if they have never had to visit a clinic or see a nurse about something that is no longer working quite as well as it should. The wheels begin to fall off all of us eventually. Living with a long-term condition has a profound impact on people. It can mean lost work days, missed opportunities and, for many, being pushed out of the workforce altogether. When people are unable to work because of poor health, they are cut off from society and their quality of life obviously declines. That also has a terrible effect on the economy. It is estimated that successfully addressing the crisis in long-term sickness would increase GDP by between £109 billion and £177 billion over the next five years, generating billions of pounds of additional tax revenue. This is a growing trend and as the population gets older it will simply become more pressing. I worry that we have not truly adapted our medical system to deal with this reality. When I was a medical student, a heart attack was managed with morphine and bed rest. Things have certainly changed, and yet the NHS has not changed enough. In 1948, it was created to deal with infectious diseases and acute hospital care, but the health needs of the population have changed completely. People now live long lives with conditions such as heart disease, diabetes and arthritis. We need to focus on keeping those people in the community rather than waiting until they become so unwell that they have to be brought to hospitals. The NHS should not just be a sickness service; it should help people to manage their conditions and live much better lives. During our debate on dementia a few days ago, I heard many moving stories about families challenged by that devastating illness. Dementia fills so many hospital beds, and the cost to society is quite staggering, but the real message of the debate was about the need for better community care and greater investment in technology and research. That is true for dementia, but it is also true for many long-term conditions. We have the time and the ideas; now, we must use them. There is much talk about moving care from hospitals to the community, which is not a slogan but an absolute necessity. I have seen it work in practice: before I came here, I was involved in a project that moved care for people with hearing loss out of hospitals and into the community. Patients benefited from easier and quicker access to specialist NHS audiology and nursing services. We now need to see such an approach rolled out across the country. The neighbourhood practice model advocated by my Suffolk GP colleagues must be part of the answer, with community health hubs open into the evening, resourced with nurses and mental health services and incorporating a pharmacy, with a GP who is known to the patient and to the family. Those hubs would be the place to call when sick—a better option than calling 111 or having a long wait in A&E. They would offer access to multi-disciplinary teams all in one place, a bit like the geriatric day hospitals that my dad, Professor Derek Prinsley, a pioneer of geriatric medicine, introduced into his practice in Teesside in the 1960s. The NHS must be a neighbourhood health service, not just a national health service. That is how we join up care so that patients no longer feel like they are being pushed from pillar to post. Instead of being rushed between different appointments in hospital corridors, people should be cared for in one place, bringing lifesaving continuity of care. It is time to end the fragmented system of the past, where people ended up in A&E simply because there was nowhere else to go, and where we had older people lying in trolleys in the early hours for long-term conditions that could have been managed in primary care. A&E should be for real accidents and emergencies. That is how we must start thinking about the long-term care of long-term conditions. At the centre of our thoughts must be the patient. Health services are all too often designed to deal with patients with a single disease, but for a growing number, that is no longer a suitable model. If I have high blood pressure and asthma, I have to visit the practice three times: once for the blood pressure check and once for the asthma check, and then another appointment to see the GP. I think we can do better than that. How can we truly put the patient at the centre of healthcare? As I have said before, one answer is to embrace the digital transition and change the medical record paradigm. Let the patient have the record. Give them agency over their healthcare. If people knew a bit more about their health, they might care for it a bit better. More than one in five patients with a long-term condition has said they do not have enough information to manage their condition. That is 5.5 million people across the country who are not confident that they can manage their condition, so let us have the doctor ask the patient for the record, not the other way round. That would be a revolutionary change. I would like to talk about medical research. Of course, our country has an incredible record of medical research: Jenner, who devised vaccination; Lister, who invented antisepsis; and Fleming, who discovered penicillin—British doctors who saved unimaginable numbers of lives. Then there is Dr John Snow, who removed the handle from the water pump in Broad Street, near to where we are sitting today, ending the cholera epidemic and founding the field of public health. It is on scientific advances like those that we mostly depend as we fight many long-term conditions. We will hear of artificial pancreas pumps to treat diabetes and genetic treatments to cure sickle cell disease and arthritis, but let us not take that progress for granted. We should support medical innovation and put the best technology into the hands of our doctors. I am proud that the Government are boosting investment in diagnostic machines in hospitals across the country, because I have been told by constituents about the struggle of misdiagnosis—months and years spent unsure what is wrong with them, with doctors unable to shed any light. We are rolling out artificial intelligence and improving diagnostics across the country, and the Government have promised to support that further. Improving researchers’ access to medical data will be part of the approach. Let us imagine the scientific advances we could make if researchers could conduct studies on sample sizes of 67 million people. Scientific and medical advances depend on our brilliant young people, who must be funded and supported as they embark on research careers. The number of clinical academics is in decline, which is a particular worry of mine. We should challenge that and reverse it. The NHS is easily the biggest employer in our country—perhaps one of the biggest employers in the whole world—but what are we doing to ensure that its people can best support us? A failure to tackle long-term conditions is significantly impacting the NHS’s own workforce. Musculoskeletal conditions, rheumatoid arthritis and osteoarthritis are leading causes of absenteeism among NHS staff, with ambulance and clinical support staff particularly affected, but we also hear many examples of terrible workforce planning. We learn of nurses and midwives graduating from colleges carrying large debts, after working for thousands of hours on placements for free, only to find a recruitment freeze in the very hospitals that desperately need their skills. Instead, hospitals are spending huge sums on agency staff. This is not a long-term plan; this is short-term thinking of the very worst kind. I am glad that agency spending fell last year. We must make sure that we spend wisely on newly qualified nurses and midwives, which will end up saving the NHS enormous sums. We also ought to do something about their student debt. Why not write it off if they commit to working for five years in our NHS, giving them security? Our health service needs their expertise. What about the young doctors, of whom I have spoken before? We need enough GPs, nurses and clinicians to help people to get well, but every year, thousands of UK doctors qualify with debts of up to £100,000. Many are then sent far from home, family and friends just as they begin their careers, and after two years they face intense competition for higher training against thousands of international doctors who fill up our hospital rotas and keep our services running. Some young doctors find themselves repeating their foundation years or going overseas, and others leave medicine altogether. This is certainly not a long-term plan. We must do better. I have seen for myself that our hospitals can run better with the resources they already have. At my West Suffolk hospital I saw the results: corridor care has been abolished and long-term waits in A&E are now a thing of the past. That has been done by taking a whole-hospital approach to improve the patient experience and ensure that the appropriate health professional is dealing with the patient at the earliest opportunity. That does not cost more, the staff are happier and the service is massively better. That is what happens when we put people first, work together across the disciplines and take real responsibility for change. Mr Blair once spoke of dealing with crime and the causes of crime; today I speak of dealing with diseases and the causes of diseases. Poverty, poor nutrition and poor housing are at the heart of so much of our country’s ill health. Those are not just background factors; they are the root cause of suffering and long-term conditions. If we are truly committed to a healthier society, those are the challenges we must address. The mission of our party and our Government is to lift millions out of poverty, tackle deep inequality and shape people’s health from cradle to grave. We will not accept the shocking housing conditions endured by so many of our fellow citizens. These are not simply political and economic problems; they are the underlying causes of much disease and misery, and many avoidable deaths. There is much for us to do, but I am convinced there is much that we can do to create easier access to NHS services, improve primary care and support those who want to conduct groundbreaking medical research. I hope the Government will look to tackle our long-term conditions crisis.

• 5 Jun 2025 · Joining Up Government · Hansard source

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  I am grateful for the Minister’s answer. Bury St Edmunds and Stowmarket is privileged to host thousands of servicemen and servicewomen from RAF Honington, RAF Lakenheath and RAF Mildenhall. They play a crucial part in the lives of our towns and villages. Can the Minister assure me that the Ministry of Defence is working with other Departments to ensure that places such as Bury St Edmunds and Stowmarket will benefit from the announcements in the strategic defence review in the form of jobs, housing, investment and apprenticeships?

• 3 Jun 2025 · Dementia Care · Hansard source

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  I thank the hon. Member for South Devon (Caroline Voaden) for securing this important debate. We have heard many moving speeches this afternoon, and it has been a great honour to sit and listen to them. We must remember that dementia is not a fact of life, or something that everyone must face as they get older. It is not inevitable as a part of ageing. Dementia is a disease— a dreadful disease at that. Some 1.5 million people will be living with dementia in this country by 2040, so let us treat dementia with the same seriousness that we treat all other deadly conditions. Let us not neglect dementia simply because it disproportionately affects older people. At present, we have a fragmented and complex health system that does not provide a clear enough route for people with dementia. Let us improve specialist dementia support in hospitals and in the community. It is simply our duty to do so. The estimated economic impact of dementia in the UK last year was £42.5 billion. By contrast, we learned yesterday that the defence budget is £58 billion. It is suggested that, by 2040, the dementia budget will be £90 billion, so something must be done. Improving the treatment of dementia in our communities and in primary care settings will certainly help to free up hospitals and care systems, because, as we have heard, people with dementia occupy a quarter of all the hospital beds in the country. Let us move dementia treatment into the communities, with specialist nurses in communities to ease the pressure. Dementia is not inevitable. We must be bold, optimistic and forward-thinking, and prepared to deploy radical advances in science to tackle the condition. Let us support our scientists and researchers as they strive to develop more effective treatments and make progress towards curing the disease. Let us support research by enabling the NHS to empower its clinicians to conduct research and to use patient data. That would help to facilitate medical research and increase the number of clinical academics, whose number has been declining for much too long. I was delighted to hear my hon. Friend the Member for Oldham East and Saddleworth (Debbie Abrahams) talk about hearing loss. Many members will know that I am an ear, nose and throat surgeon. Hearing loss is absolutely central to the problem of people withdrawing from the society in which they live. The simple testing of hearing and the provision of hearing aids will do much to help. I urge Members of a certain age to consider having a hearing test. I am interested to know what we can do with patient data. If researchers across the country ran studies on 67 million people, we would accelerate progress towards a cure. Artificial intelligence could be set to work analysing datasets and providing rich sources of longitudinal data to inform future research and cures. Artificial intelligence already models the folding of proteins that cause the disease, so to secure those benefits, let us do something about the collection of medical information, and let us prioritise openness by giving patients access to their medical records, allowing them to see how the information is being used to support the NHS. That is something we could do to help.

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

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  Some 9,000 UK medical graduates compete with 15,000 overseas graduates for postgraduate training, meaning that many of our own graduates simply cannot progress into higher professional training, and either go abroad themselves or leave medicine. Does the Minister agree that the Treasury has a crucial role to co-ordinate spending on medical university education by the Department for Education and on postgraduate training by the Department of Health and Social Care, so as to ensure that public money spent on medical student education is not wasted?

• 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.

• 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.

• 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.

• 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?

• 23 Jan 2025 · Holocaust Memorial Day · Hansard source

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  May I say how moved I have been by all the speeches that I have heard this afternoon? On Monday I will stand in Abbey Gardens in Bury St Edmunds, at a steel teardrop erected as a memorial not only to the 6 million Jews murdered in the Holocaust, but to the 57 Jews slaughtered by their neighbours in Bury St Edmunds in March 1190. I will also the honour the memory of the liberation of Auschwitz precisely 80 years ago. In East Anglia, Bury St Edmunds, Norwich and King’s Lynn were important centres of medieval Jewish life. However, East Anglia also has a sad role in the history of European antisemitism. It was here that the myth of the Jewish blood libel first emerged when, in 1144, the Jews of Norwich were falsely accused of the ritual murder of a boy named William. That myth persisted for centuries, played its part in the growth of antisemitism in the 20th century, and lives on to this very day. The blood libel stoked hatred in Bury St Edmunds, culminating in that vicious massacre in 1190. In the aftermath, the town expelled all the surviving Jews. Exactly 100 years later, in 1290, King Edward expelled all the Jews from England. I stand here not only as the first Labour MP for Bury St Edmunds, but as its first Jewish MP. I am a Jew who represents a town that, almost 1,000 years ago, was the first in the country to expel the Jews. History has come full circle. However, sadly, antisemitism is on the rise again in this country. The number of antisemitic hate crimes has reached record levels—more than double the number in previous years. The Community Security Trust reports that damage and desecration of Jewish property rose by 246% on the previous year, which is deeply concerning. The CST does crucial work to protect Jewish communities across the country, enabled by the support of His Majesty’s Government, for which we are all deeply grateful. Similarly, Holocaust education, promoted through the work of the Holocaust Education Trust and the Holocaust Memorial Day Trust, is of great significance in this country. This generation is privileged to know the last few living witnesses of the Holocaust. We must make sure that their stories do not fade into obscurity, but survive in the collective memory of humanity. I finish with a few lines by the medieval poet Meir of Norwich, written as he fled England in 1190—the earliest Hebrew poetry ever written in this country: “When I hoped for good, evil arrived, yet I will wait for the light. You are mighty and full of light, You turn the darkness into light.”

• 21 Jan 2025 · Welfare of Doctors · Hansard source

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  I agree with my hon. Friend, as he will see. There are odd shifts, night duties without hot food, and days and weeks that go by without an opportunity to meet supervising consultants. Short clinical attachments mean that the relationships previously created with senior mentors are rare. Just last week, I received an email from a surgeon who was my consultant in 1986. He had noticed in a surgical journal that I had become an MP, and I remembered him as the brilliant surgeon that he was. These are the relationships that make people feel as if they belong within a wider profession, but I doubt whether the young trainees of today would have the chance to make such lasting connections. There is little security of employment, because doctors are obliged to apply every year or two for another post, probably in another place. The doctors’ mess used to be a place where young doctors could find a sort of surrogate family in an unfamiliar place, but that is now sadly a thing of the past. According to research from the British Medical Association, fewer than 10% of UK trusts or health boards offer hot food after 11 o’clock at night. The demands of the job affect relationships. Many young doctors are in relationships with fellow doctors, but lucky indeed are the couple who can work and live in the same place, or even contemplate raising a young family together. Sadly, relationship difficulties and breakdowns are commonplace. Holidays must be taken at odd times, and rotas are inflexible. Doctors are left unable to take a day off to attend a wife’s graduation, a sister’s wedding or even their own wedding—all true. Progression in a chosen career depends on a multitude of competitive interviews and hugely costly professional exams. There is no security of employment. In a survey called “Fight Fatigue” conducted by the Royal College of Anaesthetists, 50% of respondents said that they had had an accident or a near miss when driving home after a night shift—I recall fatalities like this in my own hospital; 84% were too tired to drive home after a night shift; and only 64% had access to any rest facilities. What would we say if the same were true of airline pilots, to whom anaesthetists are sometimes compared?

• 21 Jan 2025 · Welfare of Doctors · Hansard source

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  I will speak of general practice shortly. My son is an A&E doctor here in London, and I am therefore one of three generations of doctors who have served the NHS continuously since it began; the welfare of doctors is personal for me. This Government have already done much for doctors, who are on the frontline and not the picket line for the first time in several years, but burnout, fatigue and stress are still very real problems that threaten to undermine the efficacy of our NHS. Today’s new doctors graduate into the profession with debts of nearly £100,000. They immediately enter a lottery to be appointed to their first jobs as pre-registration doctors, sometimes ending up miles away from family and friends in places they have never visited before. Now that reminds me of another job that I just started. Young doctors are left immediately responsible for life-and-death decisions, sometimes with insufficient support. They are left scrabbling at the very last minute for somewhere to live—the on-call accommodation that my generation remembers has disappeared—and I have known several of them to sleep in their cars. It has not escaped my notice that the new name for junior doctors is “resident doctors”. Resident doctors? That is the very last thing they are. If they are lucky, there is a place for them to rest, but many a time I have arrived to find a young doctor fast asleep from exhaustion at an office desk.

• 20 Jan 2025 · Obesity: Food and Diet · Hansard source

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  A bariatric bed is a special big, strong bed used in hospitals for extremely obese people. When I was a medical student, there was no such thing as a bariatric bed—not invented, not needed. But then, hospitals did not have food banks for their staff either. So how have we got our relationship with food into such a mess? The epidemic of obesity is a public health emergency costing billions. Millions of our citizens are dying early. The Government simply must act. This cannot be left to the market. We did it with smoking, and now we will do it with obesity. We have no choice. We know that at the heart of the matter is high-fat, high-sugar, high-salt, factory-produced food that is often ultra-processed, cheap, convenient, tasty and very profitable for a few very large food businesses. Nor must we forget that it is our poor citizens who are most affected—those who are cash-poor, time-poor and at high risk of a poor diet. We cannot continue like this. The Government must act to change food habits. This is not the nanny state; this is simply good government. “Smoking kills,” it says on cigarette packets. Some food kills, too, so how about “The food in this packet will kill you if it is not part of a healthy, mixed diet”? Obesity is a massive issue for surgeons, increasing morbidity and mortality. Although we can staple stomachs or inject up to 3.5 million people with anti-obesity drugs, we all know that that is not the answer. Let us use the power of Government to legislate: warnings on food packets, breakfast clubs in schools, which we have already introduced, advertising bans, tax incentives, cooking education and an end to the dependence on the cheap, unhealthy food that blights the lives of so many of our citizens. We have no choice.

• 18 Dec 2024 · BBC: Funding · Hansard source

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  It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mr Mundell. I, too, would like to speak up for the BBC World Service and the brilliant people who work there. The World Service describes itself as the world’s radio station. That is right: we are lucky to have it and must do whatever we can to support it. It offers 42 language services and is a beacon for democracy around the world. We know the truth when we hear it from the BBC. In a world of endless rolling information and disinformation, it is surely significant that the Arabic service alone saw a 9% audience growth to 35 million a week just last year. There are places in the world, especially where internet connections are restricted and local journalists are fearful, where conventional radio remains crucial. Abuse and state malfunction are called out, and the powerful are held to account. There are 318 million listeners every week. In 2022, the World Service announced 382 job losses and the complete loss of the Persian radio broadcast, which was so important in its coverage of the protests against the Government in Tehran. In Lebanon, Russian state-backed media are now using the frequency suspended by BBC Arabic. There is news and there is fake news, as we have all learned. While we debate the funding of the BBC, let us therefore remember the World Service, which Kofi Annan described as “Britain’s greatest gift to the world”. Presently, about three quarters of World Service funding comes from the licence fee and about one quarter—about £100 million—comes from the Foreign Office. Previously in this Parliament, I said that amount was about the same as an F-35 jet, and we have 75 or so of those. As I said then, I ask whether some of us might agree that the vital soft power of the World Service is equivalent to at least one of our jets.

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

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  Thank you, Madam Deputy Speaker. I welcome the measures that the Chancellor has announced to support our NHS as we begin the enormous ask of repairing the damage caused by 14 years of neglect. I absolutely commend this imaginative and transformative Budget to the House. As the first ever Labour MP for Bury St Edmunds and a consultant ear, nose and throat surgeon, I welcome the specific commitment to replace the RAAC-infested West Suffolk hospital. My ears certainly pricked up when I heard that. We will see great investment too in medical research, and I welcome that. This country continues to be very proud of our amazing and historic contribution to discoveries and innovation, which are certainly the best way to ensure that we find cures for many mysterious afflictions. The Government have rightly emphasized the need for investment in the NHS to be accompanied by reform. With reform must come value for money. I would like to bring a serious matter to attention of the House: an example of a reform which, while at first sight appears to be of benefit, is neither value for money nor the right thing to have done. I am sorry that so few of the previous team are here to listen. NHS eye surgery services are in difficulty, and I am informed that we are in danger of creating ophthalmic deserts, just like the dental deserts familiar to us in the east of England. The last Government took their eye off the ball as cataract services were outsourced to private providers, taking with them the very same NHS surgeons and staff who were providing the service in the hospitals. The generous tariffs for the provision of cataract surgery means that private cataract clinics, often owned and run by the same surgeons, are springing up everywhere. The number of cataract operations has shot up, and a relatively minor cataract, which is a cause of correctable visual difficulties, can be operated on within a few weeks by a choice of private clinics, generating annual profits of well over £100 million. Meanwhile, NHS eye surgery departments which are treating serious causes of irreversible blindness such as glaucoma and macular degeneration are in trouble, with long waiting lists. They cannot recruit surgeons and are struggling to survive. This is the next dentistry crisis. Just as in dentistry, a reform of the contracting system is now urgent, and I urge the Government to do that. It will save millions of pounds and preserve NHS eye surgery services. As my ophthalmic colleague informed me, we can treat dental problems with false teeth, but false eyes do not work very well.

• 16 Oct 2024 · Access to Primary Healthcare · Hansard source

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  First, I must declare, as the shadow Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, the right hon. Member for Louth and Horncastle (Victoria Atkins), reminded me last week, that I am a surgeon. I have, therefore, an interest in this matter, but so do we all. The last Government should be truly ashamed of themselves. I see but one remaining Member—a colleague of mine—sitting on the Conservative Benches. General practice has been badly neglected. The public could see that. Surely the Government must have known it. Certainly patients could see it, given their scramble on the phone at 8 o’clock, hoping not to be at the end of the queue for one of the very few appointments with one of the very few doctors. During my career, I have seen the number of hospital doctors and consultants increase many times, but we have seen very little increase in GP numbers, and now we live with the consequences: too many exhausted GPs, many leaving the profession altogether or retiring much too soon, and now the spectre of a two-tier GP system, as private GP services expand rapidly all over the place. We can, and will, do better than this. We already are doing better, with plans to recruit many qualified GPs without jobs into practices without doctors. Today, we must look after our GPs as never before. We will move much of our care out of our hospitals and into the community, but it is on GPs that we will depend to achieve that. GP services will expand to provide community investigations, facilities, specialist and surgical services, and much more, as we rightly adopt the new Government’s agenda of moving care out of hospitals. We must ensure that GPs have the very best IT and technology. We must connect the GP IT with the hospital IT, so that I can see the same record as the GP; the nonsense of typed letters and fax machines should end completely. I am, however, optimistic. Scientific advances continue to astonish us. We know what we have to do, and we have the determination to do it. Doctors and patients will support this. Let us get to work. General practice is the best of the NHS, and we must support it.