Peter Prinsley MP: speeches

Speeches

• 23 Jun 2026 · Health Bill (Fourth sitting) · Hansard source

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  As the Committee knows, my hon. Friend the Member for Worthing West (Dr Cooper) is one of the five medical doctors in the parliamentary Labour party. It is a great pleasure to move the amendment, which she tabled. The amendment is about education and training. My hon. Friend would like us to consider whether there should be an additional subsection after proposed new subsection (1)(a), which is about ensuring that “there are sufficient people with appropriate education and training to meet the workforce needs of the health service”. My hon. Friend would like to include within that specific training about wider health determinants, which, as we discussed earlier this morning, consist of things like housing, air quality, occupation, and substance abuse—tobacco, alcohol and so on. Her opinion is that that needs to be specifically incorporated into the legislation.

• 22 Jun 2026 · Small Rural Schools · Hansard source

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  Small rural schools in Suffolk all face an uncertain future. I met with the brilliant Stephany Hunter, head of Barningham school, who explained the difficult problem of per-pupil funding in her very small classes. I would like to see more affordable housing in villages for young families by changing the rural exception sites. Does the Minister agree that village schools have a very special place in the heart of our rural communities?

• 16 Jun 2026 · Health Bill (First sitting) · Hansard source

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  I am a retired ENT surgeon and a fellow of the Royal College of Surgeons.

• 2 Jun 2026 · Milburn Review: Interim Report · Hansard source

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  Does the Minister agree that what is needed is a complete cultural change in our schools, giving equivalence of practical skills to academic pursuits? We have masses of rebuilding in our country after the wreckage of 14 years, including in Suffolk, yet we have no welders. Let’s fix this.

• 22 Apr 2026 · Junior Doctors’ Foundation Programme · Hansard source

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  Some time ago, when I came here, I had working with me an intern, Dr Harry Dunn, who was a medical student at Cambridge University. He graduated last year. He came top, not only of the University of Cambridge medical student cohort, but of the whole of the University of Cambridge, so he was the top student of his year. He was offered a foundation post in Northern Ireland. He chose not to take it, and has now gone into consulting, having given up medicine. That is an extremely sad example of an unintended consequence of this crazy lottery.

• 22 Apr 2026 · Junior Doctors’ Foundation Programme · Hansard source

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  I absolutely agree that doctors are only part of a much bigger healthcare system. We certainly need to look after all the people involved in health and social care. Of course, that is more of a problem in geographically remote districts such as the hon. Gentleman’s constituency, where I believe it is difficult to recruit professions of all sorts. I do not want only to sound nostalgic this morning, although of course I am. I am not arguing that absolutely everything was better in my time, because it certainly was not, but in one important respect it was better: it was designed around human beings. It understood that newly qualified doctors are individuals, not one of a herd to be simply moved across a map by a computer. It also recognised that pastoral support and clinical teams matter, and that the transition from medical student to doctor is a particularly vulnerable moment in a medical career. Let us come back to that point soon. Today, we have a thing called the foundation programme. In 2024, the foundation programme office replaced the application process with something called preference informed allocation. What happens is that medical students list the foundation schools in order of preference, and are each assigned a computer-generated rank. The rank is not informed by academic achievement, personal circumstance, where the student trained or what they did; it simply works through the ranks and places the student accordingly. The UK foundation programme’s 2026 figures show that of the 10,810 graduates allocated this year, 82% received their first preference. Superficially, that sounds quite reassuring, but I do not really think it is. Every year, a minority of graduates—this year it is roughly 1,900 young doctors—end up somewhere other than their first choice. The minority who do not get their first preference find themselves, aged 22 or 23, packing up their lives for a city where they know nobody. As I put it in the Chamber last month, it is a “crazy foundation lottery that sends a doctor from Norwich to Belfast and a doctor from Belfast to Norwich.” —[ Official Report , 26 March 2026; Vol. 783, c. 452.] That is what we mean when we talk about a lottery. It is not a figure of speech, but a literal description of how the system works. There is another reason why this headline figure flatters to deceive: the system incentivises what we call strategic preferencing. The students know the ranking system is random and that a high rank does not protect them tomorrow, so they game it. They preference the foundation schools they think they can realistically get, rather than the ones they actually want. A high first preference rate is, in part, a measure of the student lowering their ambition to protect themselves against a coin toss. That is not a system working; that is a system being worked around. Let me say a bit about couples. Medical students often form a couple with other medical students or other people who work in hospitals, because that is the nature of a hospital. The foundation programme offers something called linked applications, but the unfairness is particularly acute. Two medical students in a relationship can choose to link their applications so that they are allocated together, but the pair is placed using the lower of the two ranks, so that if one of them is lucky in the ballot and the other is not, both are placed in the worst ranked situation. Should the algorithm be unable to accommodate both in a single school, the link is broken. A student cannot unlink once they have applied, and there is no appeal. The system quite simply cannot see that these are two people trying to begin their careers side by side. It just sees two records on a database. That has knock-on consequences throughout the rest of the service. When foundation doctors are disorientated, unsupported and demoralised, their work does not disappear; it flows upwards to the more senior doctors, who take more and more of it on themselves. Young doctors should not be deployed by ballot into strange cities, with only limited account taken of their circumstances—their partners, their dependants, their health or their need to be near home. The claim that the current system is somehow fairer than the one it replaced is, I am afraid, one we cannot accept. Let me talk about how we got here and the recent reform. The old system was not perfect. For many years, medical students competed on a combination of academic decile and a national examination known as the situation judgment test. The SJT was quite unpopular: it was stressful, it had unpredictable validity and there was a documented score gap that consistently disadvantaged candidates from ethnic minority backgrounds. That was a real and serious unfairness, and those who reformed the system were right to try to address it. When the students lobbied against the SJT, they had a good reason to do so, but they did not ask for a random number generator—yet that is essentially what they got. In 2024 the SJT was abolished and academic achievement stripped out. In their place came PIA, underpinned by a computer ranking. It is hard to think of a clearer case of throwing the baby out with the bathwater. Students asked for fairness, and they were given randomness. Those are not the same thing. Fairness takes account of circumstance; randomness ignores it. Fairness rewards merit and responds to need; randomness does neither. What we have is not a reformed system, but an experiment that has gone wrong. That is not just my view. The medical training review led by Professor Stephen Powis and Professor Chris Whitty, published last October, drew on more than 8,000 responses, 6,000 of them from resident doctors. Its very first recommendation was that “a reform of postgraduate medical education and training is undertaken as a matter of urgency.” It also recommended that recruitment to medical training be reviewed so that it is “fair and equitable to all candidates”. It is not sufficient, on any reading of the report, for allocation merely to be random. Random is not fair. The BMA has taken a big interest in this question, which is not surprising, and I will read out some of its recommendations: “The BMA is calling for: meaningful improvements to working lives with greater access to support services, supervision, rest and mess facilities; increased flexibility in rotations, including the option to swap placements; a guarantee that all UK graduates will be offered a foundation post, with full details provided at least 12 weeks before the start date; and any review of the allocation system to include proposals for a new recruitment process developed with meaningful consultation with students.” There is another group of doctors that we should consider: those who will progress to become academic doctors. There is a crisis in this country of clinical academics, the doctors who teach the next generation of doctors. It has become very difficult to recruit into clinical academia. The career pathway for clinical academics has become very uncertain, and we have an emerging crisis—a real and present crisis—that must be addressed. One way to do that is to think about how we recruit foundation doctors into academic programmes. Here is a straightforward proposal, which I hope colleagues will improve rather than simply accept. Let us return to a firm-based model for the first year of training. The F1 placement should be arranged by the medical schools, not by a centralised national algorithm, with each new doctor placed alongside peers they already know with consultants who have taught them. That is the system we had so many years ago. Medical schools know their students; they know who has the caring responsibilities, who has a linked partner, who has health needs, who has a strong reason to stay close to home. They are in the best possible position to start designing a year that makes sense for each individual. That does not preclude movement later. F2 can broaden horizons, and specialty training will often mean relocation, but in the critical first year, when doctors are doing their first on-calls up at night by themselves, writing their first prescriptions and being present at their first deaths, they should not be alone in a city where they do not know anybody. They should be doing that with the support of their friends, teachers and colleagues they already trust. I do not think that would be particularly expensive; it might even cost less than the centralised allocation machinery we run today. Whatever we do, I offer one principle: medicine is the most distinctly human of professions and it is futile, and somewhat ironic, to try to reform it with an algorithm. The reform must be human. Let me close where I began. Resident doctors have just come off picket lines. I do not think that in this debate we can rehearse the pay dispute, which is a matter for another day, but the strikes are not just about pay. At root, they are about a sense that the profession has been treated as though it does not matter. The individual doctor has become invisible behind the workforce spreadsheet. The Government have taken one very important step, with the Medical Training (Prioritisation) Act 2026 giving UK graduates the rightful priority for specialist training places—and that matters. Today’s debate is an opportunity to take the next step to fix the starting point itself. We have in medicine one of the most extraordinary workforces in the world. Young doctors are among the best trained, most dedicated and most compassionate professionals. We owe them and, more importantly, the patients who depend on them, better than a lottery. We owe them the fair, well-supported, human start they deserve. I believe that would go a long way to resetting the Government’s relationship with the profession, and towards ending these damaging rolling strikes.

• 22 Apr 2026 · Junior Doctors’ Foundation Programme · Hansard source

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  I beg to move, That this House has considered the Foundation Programme and its role in supporting and retaining resident doctors. Thank you, Mrs Barker, for chairing today’s debate. First, I must thank everyone for coming and say something about my interests. As many know, I am an ear, nose and throat surgeon and I have a son who is a registrar in accident and emergency medicine. I am a fellow of the Royal College of Surgeons, I have an MD from the University of East Anglia, and my medical school was at Sheffield. This debate is to consider the foundation programme and its role in retaining resident doctors. It is a privilege to introduce the debate, and I am grateful to all the colleagues who have come along this morning. As we all know, our resident doctors just spent six days on the picket lines; the wards were covered by others, operations were postponed and patients’ appointments were rescheduled. When the strikes ended, as they did just over a week ago, the problems did not go away. That is why I asked for the debate. If we are serious about resetting the relationship between this Government and the medical profession, as I believe we all are, we must begin somewhere, and in my view we should begin where every doctor begins: at the foundations.

• 22 Apr 2026 · Junior Doctors’ Foundation Programme · Hansard source

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  I know—it is hard to believe. I was a medical student in Sheffield, and my first jobs were at the Royal Hallamshire hospital and the Northern General hospital. I have fond memories of the time that we started there. There was, for instance, a doctors’ mess with hot food. There was somewhere for us to live; we had residences. It is ironic that the name “junior doctors” was changed—just last year, I think—to “resident doctors”, because that is the very last thing they are. The residences have all disappeared—they have been sold off—and the doctors work shift systems, sometimes with absolutely nowhere to rest. We had six-month rather than four-month rotations, which meant that we got to know the teams we worked with. We worked with named consultants. We had a distinct pyramidal team, with senior registrars, registrars and senior house officers, and we knew the people we were working with. They were people we had known as medical students; they were often the people who had taught us. That meant that there was a sort of support network for young doctors as they started in their careers. On the whole, the newly qualified doctors of today do not experience anything quite like that.

• 22 Apr 2026 · Junior Doctors’ Foundation Programme · Hansard source

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  I heard the same thing; indeed, I met Dr Fletcher from the BMA yesterday myself and heard exactly this story, so the situation is intensely frustrating, but I believe that we can get ourselves back to a position in which an agreement can be reached. My argument this morning is simple. The foundation programme, the first two years of a doctor’s working life, is, in its present form, not supporting and retaining doctors as it should. The problem is that the doctors are treated like numbers on a spreadsheet rather than the people they are, and some of our brightest young doctors, at precisely the moment when they need the most support, are considering leaving the NHS altogether. Let me set out what the system does, why it is failing, what we have learned from recent attempts to reform it and what I believe we ought to do instead; but let me first refer to a Royal College of Physicians survey of resident doctors that was done in 2025, which has some interesting findings. Only 44% of the resident doctors stated that they were satisfied with their clinical training. Just 26% of the respondents felt ready to move on to the next step. About 20% of the doctors thought that the recruitment process was fair, which meant that 80% of them thought that it was unfair. About half of them want to work less than full time and, most alarmingly, only 65% of them said that they thought they would be working in the NHS in five years’ time.

• 15 Apr 2026 · Engagements · Hansard source

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  Q13. I would like first to thank the nurses, the doctors, the radiographers and the receptionists who were not on strike when I tripped and broke my wrist last week.After years of neglect, Labour is rebuilding our NHS, including the West Suffolk hospital at Bury St Edmunds and the new dental school at the University of East Anglia. Does the Prime Minister share my genuine alarm, as a surgeon who has worked at the frontline for more than 40 years, that the vague social insurance proposals of some of our opponents would be the end of our NHS and seriously threaten the health and wellbeing of millions of our fellow citizens?

• 15 Apr 2026 · Children’s Wellbeing and Schools Bill · Hansard source

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  I agree that we must hold the tech companies to account; they are the ones in control of the situation. The amendment proposes a higher standard—not simply “reasonable steps”, but highly effective age assurance, and that is meaningfully different. We have heard about movement internationally. France and Spain are taking similar steps, and others are following. We ought to be part of the broader shift in how Governments are approaching online safety for children. Also, this cannot just be about restrictions; of course, there is a role for education. Children need to understand the online environment that they are engaging with, particularly when it comes to the algorithms, data and content driven by artificial intelligence. We have heard about the consultation, and I support it in principle, but the scale of the issue is already well evidenced. There is a question about what additional insights small trials would realistically add, given the body of research that already exists.

• 14 Apr 2026 · NHS Dental Services · Hansard source

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  May I congratulate the ministerial team, the University of East Anglia and the Office for Students on finally getting the new dental school at the university over the line? It will admit 25 students from September next year and will go some way to dealing with the dental deserts that we inherited in Norfolk and Suffolk. In the meantime, what progress has been made with the General Dental Council to increase exam capacity for dentists coming from overseas to help with the present crisis?

• 26 Mar 2026 · Ehlers-Danlos Syndrome and Craniocervical Instability · Hansard source

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  It is a pleasure to serve under your chairship, Ms Furniss. I was not going to talk in this debate until last week, when a lady came to my surgery at Bury St Edmunds. I used to hold surgeries all the time for patients with ear, nose and throat disorders; now I hold surgeries for constituents who come with political difficulties. This young lady was in a wheelchair, and told me she had Ehlers-Danlos syndrome and that she had been to Germany to get a diagnosis, after many years of failing to get one in this country. Ehlers-Danlos syndrome is a disorder of the protein that is involved in the making of the connective tissue—which is the tissue that joins us all together—particularly the elastic bits. When I was a medical student there were four types of Ehlers-Danlos syndrome, and it was quite a favourite topic for examine questions. But now I see from the Ehlers-Danlos Society that there are 13 recognised types of the syndrome. We always thought of it as the double-jointed disease, and one would loosely test it by seeing whether someone could take their thumb and put it against the side of their arm—I increasingly cannot even get mine to a right-angle now. It is a rare disorder. To give hon. Members a flavour of the different sorts of Ehlers-Danlos syndrome, there is a hypermobile Ehlers-Danlos, which is the double-jointed person. That is about one in 5,000 people. The classical Ehlers-Danlos, which is where people get this very stretchy skin that kind of falls away, is about one in 20,000 people. The really frightening Ehlers-Danlos syndrome is the one that affects the lining of the blood vessels. The blood vessels have an elastic lining, and if the elastic lining fails, they begin to expand, causing aneurysms. The most frightening aneurysms are those of the main aorta, which in some patients can rupture, leading to sudden death. They can occur all over the body, however, and therefore cause all sorts of curious neurological or gastrointestinal symptoms depending on where the aneurysms are happening. That is about one in 100,000 people. There is even a dental Ehlers-Danlos syndrome, which causes the teeth to loosen and fall out. That is about one in a million people. Given that there are many different types of Ehlers-Danlos syndrome, it is not surprising that it can be difficult to diagnose. To diagnose something, one has first to think of it. In my long career as an ENT surgeon, I saw very few cases, but I am certain that I missed many cases. I did some brief research into ear, nose and throat surgery and Ehlers-Danlos, and there is a particularly frightening situation that occurs in patients who need to have their tonsils out. Ehlers-Danlos syndrome is associated with this instability of the neck vertebrae—the cervical vertebrae; the axis and the atlas bones. When one does a tonsillectomy, one anaesthetises a patient and tips their head right back to open the mouth as wide as one possibly can. I saw a report from 2013 by Agarwal of a child who developed quadriplegia after a tonsillectomy. The tonsils were taken out, and when the child woke up, the arms and legs would not move, because the spinal cord had been compressed by the subluxation of the vertebrae. Diagnosis is difficult, and we must first think of it. We should do what we can to educate people, particularly clinicians in medical schools and nursing schools, and even the general population. A debate such as this is certainly helpful in that respect. Research is essential. Specific genetic mutations are associated with many of the varieties of Ehlers-Danlos syndrome—sadly not the most common sort, but certainly many of the other sorts. The Minister may know that there is a proposal for universal genome sequencing of newborns and young people in this country. I do not think that future generations will have this problem of odd clinical symptoms accumulating over decades before somebody works out what has happened, because in future, people will be able to access their genomes. We will be able to predict what will happen. However, just because we can predict it and identify the genes that are causing it, that does not mean that we will come up with magic treatments. We will certainly need to provide services for all the people with this condition into the future. Diagnostic pathways and well-organised arrangements for the clinical care of people with this presently completely incurable condition are essential.

• 18 Mar 2026 · Student Loans · Hansard source

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  Student finance is complicated. With thanks to my hon. Friend the Member for Glasgow South (Gordon McKee), who has been in and out of his seat all afternoon, I was able to produce a biscuit explainer today, which is available on all good social media channels. Reforming the student finance system is not straightforward. It is a complex challenge—it is made much more difficult by the need to stabilise the economy, which is something that I obviously strongly support—but we must be clear that the task is harder because of the economic mess left behind by our predecessors: years of short-termism and under-investment that have constrained what can now be done. Yet even within those constraints, the direction proposed by the Opposition is a bit flawed. The suggestion to scrap degrees, particularly in the arts and cultural sectors, is culturally dismissive, plainly disrespectful and insulting. It reflects a narrow view of value and ignores the real contribution of the creative industries to our economy and our national life. Turning to the system itself, student finance is not neutral. It perpetuates an inequality. Those from less well-off backgrounds must take on larger maintenance loans simply to afford the cost of living, graduating with significantly higher debts than their peers. That undermines social mobility. Instead of higher education acting as a ladder of opportunity, the system has reinforced disadvantage. Those who start with less, leave with more to repay. In reality, we all know that what we have is a form of a graduate tax—long-term, income-contingent and unavoidable for many—but without the clarity or fairness such a system should have. So we do need reform, but not through the Opposition’s plan; we must make a better plan. The Labour party is and will remain the party of working people, grounded in the principles of fairness, which means confronting systems that entrench inequality and replacing them with ones that expand opportunity. If we are serious about fairness, we must act—and act we will, for we will use the levers of the state to ensure fairness.

• 3 Mar 2026 · Palestinian Authority’s School Curriculum · Hansard source

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  I accept that there are problems with the curriculum in Palestinian schools, but the eyes of the world are now distracted, and settlement expansion continues, as far as we can tell. I am concerned that when the dust settles and the rubble is cleared, the viability of the Palestinian state will be significantly jeopardised. Does the Minister share my firm belief that what is going on does not really represent the will of the Israeli people?

• 25 Feb 2026 · Student Loan Repayment Plans · Hansard source

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  It is a pleasure to serve under your chairship, Ms Lewell. I thank my hon. Friend the Member for Ilford South (Jas Athwal) for introducing the debate. This is an issue of intergenerational inequality, of which we should all be ashamed. My university cohort and I graduated without debt. We entered a housing market that was accessible and over time we accumulated assets, property, pensions, savings and security. I served 40 years in the NHS, until that was interrupted by an astonishing election result. Now, the landscape has changed. I see the difference in my own family. My two older children studied under plan 1; their repayment terms were short and less onerous. My youngest fell under plan 2 and she has a huge debt, which is growing despite the fact that she is paying it off. This debate is about aspiration, which, as my hon. Friend said, simply cannot compete with compound interest. It is about whether young people begin adult life with opportunity, or decades of liability. Let us sort this out. Let us increase the repayment thresholds, ensure that interest does not outpace realistic repayment capacity, explore tax-deductible repayments similar to pensions, and improve transparency so that students fully understand what they are signing up for. Education should expand opportunity, not entrench intergenerational unfairness. That is a reality we must confront, and a duty we must uphold, as we deal with this utterly iniquitous system.

• 11 Feb 2026 · Rural GPs: Funding · Hansard source

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  I am grateful to the right hon. Member for securing this important debate. Dr Richard West MBE and Dr Daniel James, general practitioners in Woolpit in my Suffolk constituency, have been awarded the Royal College of General Practitioners East Anglia Faculty GP prize this year in recognition of sustained contribution to rural mental health and community-focused general practice. Does she agree with me that we must do all we can to look after the mental health of the rural population, particularly isolated farm workers?

• 29 Jan 2026 · Holocaust Memorial Day · Hansard source

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  It has been an immense privilege and honour to listen to the many brilliant speeches in the House this afternoon. I thank anybody who said anything kind about me. I have made some notes about what people said—there is no time to go through all of them, but I must mention one or two. My hon. Friend the Member for Warrington North (Charlotte Nichols) spoke with such gravitas; I think she has a future as a distinguished rabbi, should she ever wish to go out of politics, which she perhaps will not. The hon. Member for Cheadle (Mr Morrison) spoke about Peter Kurer BEM, who is my sister-in-law’s father. He will be so chuffed to learn that he was mentioned here in Parliament, and I thank the hon. Member for that. My hon. Friend the Member for Rochdale (Paul Waugh) spoke about the Windermere children. We all know that story, but Samantha, who was a University of East Anglia student, became a close friend. She is one of the granddaughters of a Windermere boy, so it was great to hear about that. We will never forget the Heaton heroes. If there is time, let me quickly explain Bevis Marks, which was mentioned by my hon. Friend the Member for Cities of London and Westminster (Rachel Blake). Bevis Marks in the City of London should actually be “Bury Marks”, but I have to stop.

• 29 Jan 2026 · Holocaust Memorial Day · Hansard source

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  Thank you, Madam Deputy Speaker. It is an honour to be able to open this year’s Holocaust memorial debate. In The Sunday Times of the week before last, the Chief Rabbi described the dilemma of the teacher faced with the question of what to do on Holocaust Memorial Day. Given the polarising impact of the events of October 2023 and the terrible loss of life in Gaza, it may be simpler not to have an event at all this year. In 2023, 2,000 schools held events to mark Holocaust Memorial Day. Some 1,200 schools did so in 2024, 854 did so in 2025, and almost certainly there will have been fewer this year. The Chief Rabbi asked the question that we are all asking: as we lose the last survivors—the eye witnesses of the Holocaust—how will we keep our oft-repeated promise to them that we will never forget? The Chief Rabbi speaks of the moral foundation of our society, and of how the Holocaust did not start from nothing. It started with a normalisation of division, prejudice and hatred, building on the oldest hatred of all. There is a warning here for all of us: do not imagine that it can never happen again in our time. That is why it is so important to remember, why I believe it is so important for us to build a national Holocaust memorial, and why I am so pleased that that was included in the Government’s legislation. Let us get it done before the last eyewitnesses pass into the history books. I have lived with my family in East Anglia for 30 years. I am a part of the Jewish community of Norwich, a member of the synagogue and a past president of the community. There is a beautiful restored synagogue and a small thriving community. The community was established in the 19th century following the arrival of Jewish people from Europe, who were largely fleeing discrimination and persecution. I am delighted that Mrs M. Leveton, aged 80-plus, and her husband Mr B. Leveton, aged 90-plus, were both awarded the British Empire Medal in the new year’s honours for their lifelong service to the community. However, ours is not the first Jewish community in Norwich. Jewish people came to England with the Normans. Communities formed in many cities under the protection of the Crown, at Norwich, Bury St Edmunds, King’s Lynn and Thetford—all over the successfully growing economy of East Anglia. Moneylending was forbidden to Christians, so Jews began to work in finance and moneylending. A special Exchequer of the Jews was established by the Crown to collect taxes. Great chests with multiple locked clasps were made to keep Exchequer rolls and documents. There were five locks, with the keys held by Crown agents and local citizens so that they could only be opened together, to prevent any disagreements. Lately I discovered just such a chest in a church at North Creake. The county archive in Norwich contains hundreds of medieval property leases and documents, many of which are written in Hebrew. They have curiously wavy and crenelated margins, for they were written in duplicates to enable matching copies and ensure that there were no forgeries. These are called indentures. The leases have allowed a detailed map of the ancient city centre to be drawn, showing the location and the ownership of the houses, and the location of the synagogue, the school and the physician, for there were Jewish doctors in Norwich 1,000 years before I was appointed. On King Street there is a great merchant’s house, which still stands. It was the house of Isaac Jurnet. It is the oldest house of Jewish habitation in England, and the vaulted crypt is unaltered since the time of Jurnet, who was the financier of the cathedral and much else besides. The house is presently in need of restoration, and there is a plan to create a centre for the study of antisemitism with the department of Jewish studies at the university. Never has this been more essential. Which country in Europe was the first to expel the Jews? It was right here in Parliament, in 1290, that King Edward decreed that the Jews must leave. They were not allowed to return until the time of Oliver Cromwell, hundreds of years later. We should not imagine that this is a uniquely German idea; this is an ancient hatred and, with the leave of the House, I will tell Members something about it. It was in Norwich, in 1140, that the Jews were falsely accused of murdering a boy called William to use his blood for sacrifice—something that Jews never do. This is the infamous blood libel, which sparked antisemitic hatred all over England and echoes throughout the ages, even to this day. Some 20 years ago, a shopping centre was under construction. A medieval well full of skeletons was revealed—17 skeletons from three families, including children. A BBC “Hidden History” documentary brought the story to our attention when it was revealed that they were almost certainly Jewish skeletons. The bones were handed to the local community, and here I must name my dear departed friend, Mr Clive Roffe, who insisted that the bones be given a dignified Jewish burial. I held the bones in my hand, and there was a large hole in the side of a skull. Even after all these years, it was obviously not a natural hole. DNA studies by the Natural History Museum here in London showed that there were genetic matches to contemporary British Jews. Here we have scientific evidence of an English pogrom in 1190. Antisemitism is not new. Holocaust Memorial Day is so important. This year, the theme is “Bridging Generations”. Last weekend, I was privileged to attend the Holocaust Memorial Day events at Wells-next-the-Sea. A small group of non-Jewish people have established a regular series of cultural events at the Maltings arts centre. Diana Cook spoke about her mother, Margot, who escaped in the days before the outbreak of the war to become a nurse and who lost all her family in the Holocaust. Diana is part of an oral history initiative called G2G—Generation 2 Generation—which carries the story of the Holocaust down the generations. Margot spoke little of her childhood, and only after she died did Diana fully appreciate the crucial importance of oral history and of Generation 2 Generation. I thank her from my heart and soul. On Monday, I attended a most moving service at the Foreign Office, and I must thank the Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office, the embassy of Israel and the chargé d’affaires, Daniela Grudsky Ekstein, for the invitation. We heard the extraordinary testimony of Marla, who with her brother Ben Helfgott, were the only members of a large family to survive. I have heard Marla speak before, but her haunting testimony only amplifies in significance as one hears it again. We heard the quite incredible voice of Cantor Turgel, the grandson of Gena—the bride of Belsen—who married the British soldier who liberated her. He sang the prayer for the departed, “El Male Rachamim”—“God full of compassion”—the prayer which asks God to grant rest to the souls of the deceased. On Holocaust Memorial Day itself I was so proud to stand in the cathedral of Bury St Edmunds, alongside local Jewish citizens and the schoolchildren of Suffolk, and to make the declaration of remembrance as the first Jewish MP for this ancient town, for we are living in a time of increasing polarisation and division. This is our struggle. I have seen the marches, and they fill me with foreboding. We have seen the protests, and we have seen the rise of far-right, so-called populists all over the world, including right here on Westminster bridge. Too often, the legitimate street protests against the actions of the Israeli Government have simply degenerated into shocking antisemitic chanting. The murderous attacks on Jews on Yom Kippur in Manchester and in the attack in Australia did not arise from nowhere. This is our real and present danger, and we must not underestimate it, for it is pervasive.

• 29 Jan 2026 · Holocaust Memorial Day · Hansard source

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  I absolutely agree with the right hon. Member: that is exactly the case. He makes the point extremely well, and I thank him for doing so. The banning of a Jewish MP from a local school in Bristol was simply an outrage. We receive messages from families of isolated Jewish pupils in rural East Anglian schools where there are persistent taunts and worse, and the schools are simply unable to cope. Resources must be found to address this problem, because this is urgent. Antisemitism, which never disappeared from this country, exploded after the events of 7 October 2023, even before the actions of the Israel Defence Forces. There has been a terrible war in Gaza, but the origins of the political problems are ancient and complex, and it is not the responsibility of the law-abiding Jewish citizens of this country, who have been intimidated and vilified. I welcome the measures that our Government have announced to address this. I am a Jewish MP for Bury St Edmunds and Stowmarket, and the very first Jewish MP for the town that was the first to expel its Jews in 1190 following the slaughter of 53 Jewish citizens—commemorated with a steel teardrop in the abbey gardens—so history has come full circle. There is no greater honour in my life and no greater duty than to ensure that we will always remember them.

• 27 Jan 2026 · Medical Training (Prioritisation) Bill · Hansard source

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  I welcome the Government’s plan to change the law. It was obvious to me and to others that such a change would be needed, and it was one of the matters about which the newly elected doctors spoke to Ministers last year. Imagine, Madam Deputy Speaker, that you have graduated from a medical school, excited at last to be called a doctor, and looking forward to finally getting to work after years of intense study, uncountable examinations and fierce competition. When this happened to me at Sheffield medical school, our early pre-registration posts were organised by the university. We were simply distributed around the local hospitals. We were in familiar locations, with our classmates and consultants who knew us. We began, rather hesitantly, to work as doctors, but suddenly we had responsibility for life and death. However, something changed. Now young doctors are simply sent by chance, with little notice, to a region of the country they have never visited. They are far from their friends. Ironically, they are now called resident doctors, but that is the very last thing they are; the residences have long since disappeared. The shift system replaced the on-call rotas, and the doctors’ mess disappeared, so hot food was no longer available. Now, if they are lucky, they have an office chair in which to rest, and a sandwich dispenser in a cold corridor. They have no friends nearby, nowhere to live, and nothing to eat at night. It is not really the best start, and these are the young doctors on whom your life may depend. We really must do something to look after the health workers who look after us—all health workers. That does not just mean paying them properly, although we obviously must do so. Today we are speaking about our doctors, for young doctors face a very uncertain future. After Brexit, many of our European doctors just left. The deficit was filled, as so often in the past, by doctors from the rest of the world. Especially in hospitals that are remote from medical schools—such as my hospital, the West Suffolk hospital in Bury St Edmunds, and the hospital where I worked for so many years, the James Paget hospital in Great Yarmouth—we have always depended on brilliant doctors from many nations, many of whom have become my long-term colleagues and some of my best friends. Immigration rules were altered after Brexit, effectively enabling applicants from across the world to apply for a very limited number of posts. As we have heard, although competition is healthy, it is certainly not healthy for the ratio of applicants to posts to go from about 2:1 to more than 4:1. As we have also heard, this is absolutely the cause of the bottlenecks. UK graduates simply cannot progress and are obliged to repeat years, often as unstructured and unrecognised clinical fellows. They leave the country or give up medicine altogether. The Government have rightly recognised that this must change. Medical training is a continuum, and the end result is a general practitioner or a hospital specialist—by the way, I much prefer “specialist” to “consultant”. Doctors have five or six years of undergraduate training, and eight to 10 years of postgraduate training, and it makes no sense to graduate so many students and then fail to accommodate them in postgraduate training. The measure to prioritise the graduates of UK medical schools is simply common sense and I support it, alongside, I understand, almost all Members of the House. Finally, let me issue a word of warning. The number of new medical schools—I understand that there are many new medical schools, including the one in Cumbria, which I did not know about—means that we have more graduates than ever. That is good, because we have insufficient doctors, but the health system must create additional training posts, more substantive posts for general practitioners and hospital specialists, and incentives to create these posts, especially in general practice, so that our new neighbourhood health centres, which I like to call “Bevan health centres”, can be fully staffed and open late at night, and so that we see an NHS renewed. That is our aim, and we will achieve it.

• 13 Jan 2026 · Universities: Statutory Duty of Care · Hansard source

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  I am concerned about medical students. If they have problems at university, there is a duty of care for them; if they are outwith the university, at a general practice or in another clinical setting under the aegis of the NHS, there appears to be no statutory duty of care. Does my hon. Friend agree that we must sort that out, particularly in respect of the sexual harassment of students?

• 6 Jan 2026 · Less Survivable Cancers · Hansard source

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  It is a pleasure to serve under your chairship, Mr Efford. I thank the hon. Member for Wokingham (Clive Jones) for securing this debate. Cancer remains a most feared word. We doctors have learned to use all sorts of other words: “growths”, “tumours” and suchlike. There are relatives who will tell us, “Don’t use that word in front of the patient, for it would simply kill him.” But things have changed. Cancers that were considered incurable are now curable, and cancers for which there was no treatment are now treatable. Such is the power of scientific progress, for it is upon science that we will depend. What exactly is a less survivable cancer? It is one defined by persistently poor outcomes across all stages. Many have mentioned the six with a survival rate at five years of only 16%. One such example was my lovely neighbour, who presented last Christmas with loss of vision in one eye. He was found to have secondary lung cancer in the retina. It was completely incurable and unamenable to any effective treatment. Sadly, he was dead within a few weeks. Our country has a proud record of medical research. After all, it was here that we first discovered the link between cigarettes and lung cancer, when epidemiological studies of British doctors were conducted in the 1960s. When that was revealed, my own dad gave up his pipe. The greatest act of our new Government, some 60 years later, was to continue with the legislation introduced by the last Government to ban cigarette sales, eventually, for every citizen. Clinical academics are doctors who not only teach the next generation of doctors, but translate scientific research into clinical applications and the supervision of clinical trials. I did an MD at the University of East Anglia on the clinical observation on the genetics of a rare ear disorder, so I understand the difficulties of medical research, but also the intrinsic delight that comes with unravelling the mysteries of medicine. That role is particularly critical for less survivable cancers, where progress will depend on sustained academic leadership on converting research into viable treatment. Unfortunately, there has been a serious collapse in the number of clinical academics in our country. Many are now approaching retirement, and the levels of recruitment of young clinical academics are completely insufficient. We must address this crisis, starting with co-ordination between the Department of Health and Social Care and the Department for Education, so that salary equivalence is restored to retain the existing workforce on which our medical science depends. Let us do something we can actually do to make survivable cancer survivable. This is our political task.

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

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  I congratulate our own frontline team, because this is a great deal. I came to Parliament partly to speak up for our NHS, and I have spoken in many debates. I have also trained many surgeons over the years, and I know that my fellow surgeons will be up for this deal. College presidents will support it, and I urge all resident doctors to support it, too. I will just issue a word of caution from my son, a resident doctor, who is up there in the Gallery: if we increase the number of trainees, we will also need to increase the number of consultants and GPs. If we do not do that, we will simply push the bottleneck down the road.

• 27 Nov 2025 · Palace of Westminster: School Visits · Hansard source

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  1. What steps the Commission has taken to enable more schools to visit the Palace of Westminster.