Peter Prinsley MP: speeches

Speeches

• 15 Sept 2026 · Civil Service Pension Scheme · Hansard source

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  It is a pleasure to serve under your chairship, Dame Siobhain. Let me tell Members about two men. The first is Adolfo Hernandez, the chief executive of Capita, who has an annual remuneration, I believe, of £1.6 million. The other is my constituent, a man who gave 33 years of service to the Metropolitan police and, despite giving ample notice of his retirement, did not receive his pension for at least six months. He wanted to fund his daughter through university, but was unable to do so. He took out loans from the police. He then developed cancer and is under treatment at my local hospital. He has finally received a quotation for his pension. This is an utter disgrace and we in this place must surely be able to do something about it. We all came to this place to change things. Surely, this is something that we can change. I look forward to hearing the Minister’s view.

• 3 Sept 2026 · Vaccination Rates: England · Hansard source

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  It is a pleasure to serve under your chairship, Mrs Barker. I thank the members of the Health and Social Care Committee for securing this debate. Doctors like me do not need any convincing about vaccination, but some of our political opponents do not agree. It is incredible to think that a platform was given at last year’s Reform conference to someone claiming that vaccinations had caused cancer in the royal family, and that the head of the United States Health Department is a vaccine sceptic. That is quite pernicious and wrong—very, very wrong. Doctors like me do not need convincing. Nor do wives like mine who are Rhesus-negative and whose mothers had multiple miscarriages before the discovery of anti-D injections to prevent baby loss, which was first tested in the famous Sing Sing prison experiments. When I was young, every county had a school for the deaf, but they had all closed by the time I was a senior ENT surgeon. Why was that? Maternal rubella, or German measles, in pregnancy had been abolished by simply vaccinating all girls at puberty, just like that—brilliant. There was no longer a need for so many schools for the deaf. A landmark 2026 Lancet study reported no cervical cancer deaths among women aged 20 to 24 between 2020 and 2024: a dramatic drop from the previous five-year period directly credited to the national human papillomavirus vaccination programme. We will see the same fall in the number of deaths from oropharyngeal throat cancer in boys as a result of HPV vaccination. We all know that the national response to the pandemic was not a glorious one. There were costly errors in personal protective equipment and test and trace, but the one thing we did get right was vaccination, which saved countless lives. I recall myself vaccinating the first very elderly patients in Great Yarmouth. Just lately we have seen reports of increased life expectancy in patients with malignant melanoma due to personalised cancer vaccines—brilliant. Doctors like me, unlike some politicians, need no convincing of the crucial importance of vaccination, but there must be a warning here, for we are short of clinical academics who lead medical education and research. We need to incubate the next generation of scientists who will lead these discoveries, for this is the country of Jenner, who discovered vaccination; of Lister, who discovered antisepsis; and of Fleming, who discovered penicillin. We have a great legacy, and we must secure a great future.

• 13 Jul 2026 · Topical Questions · Hansard source

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  T6. On Friday I met members of Barnham parish council in my constituency and the headteacher of the adjacent primary school, Amy. They raised concerns about the proposed accommodation of large numbers of asylum seekers at RAF Barnham. They worry about community cohesion, particularly if large numbers of young men are to be transported into neighbouring towns and villages without access to supervised constructive activity. Will the Minister outline what material steps will be taken to address this problem?

• 9 Jul 2026 · Health Bill (Fifteenth sitting) · Hansard source

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  My wife is an educational psychologist, so I have lived this, in a vicarious fashion, for the last 30 years or more. I understand how the system for special educational needs has evolved, particularly the role of the psychological services and how children are supported. As a result of a series of reforms, in particular during the years of austerity, the services provided by local authorities to schools—particularly the schools’ psychological services—became much more focused on psychologists providing reports to inform the distribution of resources, and much less focused on educational psychologists actually being in schools supporting children. I would like to see a change, such that educational psychologists and their expertise are back in schools, in classrooms, supporting teachers. Time and again when I visit schools, they say, “Let’s get educational psychology support back into schools.” I think that is something my wife would support.