Rupa Huq MP: speeches

Speeches

• 17 Jun 2025 · Prostate Cancer Treatment · Hansard source

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  I totally agree. West London needs the same as the west of Scotland, the west of Wales, and all the other bits of those other nations. Men can access abiraterone on the NHS in Scotland and Wales, but not in England, even with an identical diagnosis. It seems at best anomalous that their postcode, not their prognosis, is determining their treatment, and we all know that the NHS is meant to be free at the point of need. I would give anything to have had longer with my dad. I was reminded of him when, like the hon. Member for Harrogate and Knaresborough (Tom Gordon), I had someone come to see me: Peter Treadgold, who came to my advice surgery and pointed out that he is falling between the cracks. He had a long-standing diagnosis, with remission, and he diligently followed all the advice. He was under NHS monitoring for 20 years because he had heightened prostate-specific antigen levels, although he was never actually offered an MRI or ultrasound scan. Last year, his cancer came back, and he was told that he would need hormone and radiation therapy; abiraterone was not offered. Peter is one of the one in three people who get the devastating news that their cancer has come back, and has been denied access to a treatment that could save or extend his life. The first time I heard of abiraterone was when I met Peter, because as my hon. Friend the Member for Uxbridge and South Ruislip (Danny Beales) said, in my dad’s day, it would not have been cost-efficient. However, it is now a generic drug—it has gone off patent—but it is licensed only for metastatic cases. As my hon. Friend the Minister knows well, there is a complicated, convoluted process involved in getting it approved for non-metastatic cases. There is no question about the effectiveness of abiraterone. It has had one of the biggest trials known to mankind, a genuinely world-beating trial. When NHS England’s own clinical priorities advisory group plotted the clinical benefit against the net cost, abiraterone scored highest in that tabulation. It is calculated that two years of abiraterone treatment would halve the death rate for men with locally advanced prostate cancer, but we hear about budgetary challenges. I have written to the Minister and tabled questions, and have been told that NHS England has not identified the recurrent budget to support provision of the drug. We should look long-term, at the remissions, and at the cost of chemotherapy, hospital appointments and other associated things. Those costs add up. University College London found that abiraterone would pay for itself if it were £11 a day. Do Members know what the NHS is actually paying? Does anyone want to hazard a guess? Oh, we are not doing call and response. Abiraterone costs £2.75 a day, now that it is off patent and has come down in price. That is less than three measly quid to avoid costly relapses, scans, chemo, hospital appointments and everything else—less than three little round ones to improve lives and reduce deaths. As we have heard, only people who can fork out up front for private treatment or private medical insurance currently have that option, and again, our NHS was not meant to be for private profiteering or big pharma drug pushers. People are seeing their pensions and life savings evaporate, and we are in a cost of living crisis. This drug should be universally available. It took less than one year for abiraterone to be approved for men with non-metastatic prostate cancer in Scotland and Wales. In England, it is now three years and counting, and we still have not had a concrete resolution. Right now, abiraterone is the cheapest and most cost-effective it has ever been, and as the excellent Prostate Cancer UK put it, the postcode lottery must end. Lord Darzi’s independent investigations into the NHS found that the UK had higher cancer mortality rates than other comparable countries, and sadly, progress in diagnosing cancer at stages 1 and 2 is flatlining. Just over half of prostate cancers are caught at an early stage. That falls well short of the NHS target of 75%. I appreciate that Labour has just come into power after 14 years of the Conservative party, so it will take time to fix our health system, but we need it to be more responsive—to act early and rapidly, to use all the tools it can, and to offer preventive rather than after-the-fact care in every case. Abiraterone exemplifies all those things. I welcome the Chancellor’s 3% real-terms increase in NHS spending to deliver the exciting plan to build an NHS fit for the future. With the 10-year plan coming soon and the national cancer strategy due this autumn, we have a real chance to deliver significant improvements for people living with cancer, so as is customary, I have a list of questions for the Minister. I will incorporate those of my hon. Friends—I think we are all friends here, even if we sit on opposite sides of the Chamber. First, will the Minister commit to exploring ways of ensuring that additional NHS funding is used to make abiraterone available to all men who need it in England—and in Northern Ireland, as the hon. Member for Strangford (Jim Shannon) has pointed out? Secondly, will the Minister support the introduction of a national programme of screening for prostate cancer, like those that we have for comparable cancers in the United Kingdom? Thirdly, given the complexity of NHS England’s decision-making processes in relation to the availability of abiraterone—which sound like a right old bureaucratic nightmare—as the functions of NHS England are transferred back to the Department of Health and Social Care, will the Minister take steps to ensure that all decisions about access to medicine, including abiraterone, are timely and transparent? I know that she has had a long career in the NHS, and as I have said, she is on the side of the angels. Fourthly, will the Minister commit to publishing an equality impact assessment, given the disturbingly disproportionate effect that prostate cancer is having on black men, who are more likely to develop it and to receive a late diagnosis, and less likely to receive the right treatment? I am doing this partly for Dad, who is watching from somewhere up above, but also for the black and minority ethnic men who are implicated here and now. This is the second time that you have been in the Chair, Madam Deputy Speaker, when I have been talking about health inequalities since Friday, when we discussed assisted dying. You have chaired both debates excellently. Fifthly, in the light of the lengthy approval process, will the Minister assess the adequacy of the funding formula model—we have NICE and we have the Medicines and Healthcare products Regulatory Agency, and it all seems a bit knotty—and consider whether novel pharmaceutical treatments could be produced cost-effectively, especially, as my hon. Friend the Member for Uxbridge and South Ruislip said, when they come off-patent. I am arguing for simplification in cases in which drugs are already prescribed for limited use and there is a credible case for expanding their application to a generic treatment. We are halfway there; we just need to go that little bit further. Prostate Cancer UK estimates that 672 men die prematurely each year because we have no access to abiraterone. Each week that this continues, 13 men in England will die from a cancer that could have been treated cheaply had they lived in Scotland or Wales. Labour is the party of the NHS, and a Labour Government introduced the UK’s first dedicated cancer strategy; so let us go for this win-win for all, end the iniquitous, unjust postcode lottery, celebrate the best of British science, and widen access to abiraterone for all those who need it, not just those who can afford it.

• 11 Jun 2025 · Outdoor Education · Hansard source

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  I will call Tim Farron to move the motion. As is the convention with 30-minute debates, only interventions are permitted, not whole speeches, because we need to allow time for the Minister to reply, as well as for all those lovely interventions that are coming.

• 11 Jun 2025 · Outdoor Education · Hansard source

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  indicated dissent.

• 3 Apr 2025 · Access to Sport: PE in Schools · Hansard source

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  My hon. Friend makes a brilliant case for access to sport. I could challenge him on his last claim, but he is such a doughty champion for Harlow, and I thank my hon. Friend the Member for Stafford (Leigh Ingham), who brought us together for the debate. Does he agree that sometimes school sport can fall off when we talk about elitism, elite athletes, the Olympics and all that? Will he champion the Culture, Media and Sport Committee report that we are working on? We took evidence the other day. It is on community and school sport and the challenges facing sports clubs and under-represented groups. Schools are central to that, and as an ex-teacher, I know he will agree.

• 3 Mar 2025 · Independent Schools: VAT and Business Rates Relief · Hansard source

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  It is a pleasure to serve under your chairship, Mr Vickers, and to see the newly minted Minister in his place—I think it is the first time I have been in a debate with him. It is also a pleasure to follow the right hon. Member for East Hampshire (Damian Hinds), who was the Secretary of State; I sometimes see him on the District line, because we head the same way. I rise to speak on behalf of constituents who have contacted me about this issue—in my inbox, in person at the advice surgery I do every Friday, and on the doorsteps when meeting and greeting voters in the recent general election. This issue comes alongside an array of others raised by mums and dads. I am familiar with the arguments and have read the Government’s response; it contains very compelling figures—94% of schoolchildren in the UK, including my own, attend state schools. I also know that the policy polls very well. However, there is also that 6%, and 14 of those private schools are in the constituency of Ealing Central and Act; in 2023 there were 15, in fact, but one has closed its doors since then. I want to vocalise some of their concerns to my hon. Friend the Minister. Fourteen is a higher than average number of private schools in a constituency, and the petition was signed by 821 people in the constituency—although that is not even in the top 10. The heat map shows that the top 10 seats all have more than 1,000 signatories. I think two of those constituencies are in Surrey, but the remaining eight tend to have a W, NW or SW postcode. What I am trying to say is that the distribution of the signatures and the schools is a fairly west London-type phenomenon. In fact, if we look at the 650 constituencies across the land, the first one on the list is single digits; it is a seat in Wales starting with A—Aberconwy, or somewhere like that. This is not a phenomenon everywhere, but in west London it is not that unusual. The high school of the hon. Member for Farnham and Bordon (Gregory Stafford) was not very far from my high school in my constituency. I was a Notting Hill girl, and I know that he was a St Benedict’s pupil back in the day. The prep school of the Minister who is often sent to respond to this debate—my hon. Friend the Member for Ealing North (James Murray), who is my neighbouring MP—was Durston House, and it is in my seat of Ealing Central and Acton. We should not demonise these parents. In some senses, they are people who I have grown up with and live alongside, and they do have genuine concerns. As a parent, I would never dream of going private, but I can understand and accept that people do. I went to school in the 80s—the dark days of Thatcherism—before the Labour Government reforms that made excellent state schools in my constituency. My parents chose to put me in the state sector for primary school, at Montpelier primary, and as a parent myself, I have benefited from Gordon Brown’s reforms. The child trust fund came to maturity for my son recently; it did go up in the end—it was the one that could go up as well as down. I have not used the private sector as a parent—as a child I did, but it was not my own choice. I completely appreciate that people, like my own parents at the time, make enormous sacrifices to send their children to independent schools, as my hon. Friend the Member for Paisley and Renfrewshire North (Alison Taylor) said. I have heard people say on the doorstep, “We have the worst car. We never go on holiday.” That was me in the ’80s. I want to point out some unintended consequences of the policy to the Minister aware. These are people who consider themselves to be working people. The strapline of the Labour manifesto was “No taxes on working people”. We should be careful with our rhetoric sometimes and not seek to—[Hon. Members: “Come over here!”] Hang on—let me carry on. The first unintended consequence—or commonly misstated thing—is that pupils with an education, health and care plan still remain eligible. It is impossible to get one in west London. We have all taken on new wards in our boundaries, so now I do not only represent Ealing borough but a bit of Hammersmith and Fulham too. A head from one of primary schools was saying that they have a large percentage of special educational needs and disabilities pupils. The wards that I have inherited are from the north of the borough—Shepherd’s Bush way. Apparently, by the age that a child goes to school and those issues show up, it is kind of too late. A sharp-elbowed, middle-class parent from the south of the borough might have had their child assessed privately at a very young age, ensuring they have support all the way through, but by school age, there is a waiting list of many years to get the assessment and then it is potluck. The problem is that the words “private school” imply a whole load of things—but they are not all Eton. Some of the comms around this policy have not been done very sensitively. I know that offence was taken at a comment about how they all have astroturf pitches, swimming pools and embossed stationery; that did not go down well with parents and heads in my constituency. They are not all like that. There are smaller SEND schools and smaller faith schools—what I am trying to say is that they are not all Eton, and some of the comms are based on a caricature. We should be careful about what we do in that regard. One parent, Matthew, forwarded me a missive from the private school that his boys are at, which read: “For music lessons with peripatetic teachers employed by the School…VAT will need to be applied at 20%.” He continued: “Traditionally the tax system has been a way of discouraging people from picking up bad habits like smoking and drinking. Not from picking up a trombone”. It seems as though people are capitalising on the policy, and then other things are coming in through the back door. I have been replying and trying to sound sympathetic to these parents. My constituent also said: “you referred to a consultation…on the VAT proposals—yet like most government consultations, what was passed didn’t seem, in any significant way, different to what had been proposed.” Maybe that is a lesson in life for all of us: if we put something out for consultation, we should make it look like we listened, because he is saying that it came back exactly the same. The right hon Member for East Hampshire raised that elitist private schools such as Eton have actually done quite well out of this policy, because they can cash in on windfalls from the new VAT rules on independent schools—they can claim it back on capital projects, such as buildings and land acquisition, over the last 10 years. All the VAT on costs, which is now 20%, is recoverable when factoring in non-business use, so the policy will basically hand money back to schools such as Eton from Treasury coffers. Surely there is a loophole there—an unintended consequence—that needs to be addressed by my hon. Friend the Minister. There are long lists of such things. The Times says: “Eton spent more than £20 million on a sports centre in 2023 and Winchester College’s”— where I think our former Prime Minister went— “accounts from the same year said it spent £15 million on capital expenditure”. It also says that Radley College, in Oxfordshire has a 20-acre solar farm and 40-acre woodland, and that Charterhouse in Surrey “built two boarding houses in 2021 and is developing a theatre and lecture theatre” Again, costs can come back for the big boys, but not for the little ones.

• 3 Mar 2025 · Independent Schools: VAT and Business Rates Relief · Hansard source

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  I would suggest implementing it in a slightly different way, based on turnover—so doing it for the enormous schools that can afford it, but not for smaller ones that have been caught in the trap. There is also an argument for looking at grammar schools, which are a legacy from many years ago. We do not have them in my area, but when I was the Labour candidate in Chesham and Amersham in 2005, they came up as a hustings issue. The argument that the Labour party always gave me in those days was that we respect parental choice. At times, the Conservative party has flirted with bringing back more grammar schools, but they are even more elitist in a way because they take state funds for private school-type facilities. Dr Challoner’s grammar school in Amersham was way bigger than the school I went to; I felt very small when I went there. Perhaps something could be done about the grammar school system, because that is an inegalitarian one. I wanted to vocalise some of the concerns from my electorate and remind hon. Members that one size does not always fits all. In this case, that is far from the truth.

• 3 Mar 2025 · Independent Schools: VAT and Business Rates Relief · Hansard source

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  The hon. Lady and I were both girls in those schools, and she talked about her daughter. Does she accept that it is often the parents who want their daughters to have an all-girls education. There are figures from the Girls’ Schools Association. There is also the head of Dame Allan’s girls’ school, who said that girls thrive better in all subjects in all-girls environments and that they choose things such as physics and maths more when there are not boys around mucking about.

• 3 Mar 2025 · Independent Schools: VAT and Business Rates Relief · Hansard source

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  I do not know how parliamentary that language is. I am not going to join in the praise of Eton, particularly because I think the hon. Lady may have been an atypical parent. I imagine that some parents there would be able to bear a 20% increase, and for a school that is clever with its accounts, these things may just be a rounding error. I am talking about smaller schools for which that does not apply. It is interesting to see the hon. Member for Boston and Skegness (Richard Tice) here. I have a massively remain constituency, with 72% of my electorate voting remain, but, perversely for Reform, it is leaving the EU that has made this policy possible—it is a Brexit benefit. If only we had never left the EU, this would not be happening. Usually education is not a taxable luxury good, and there is a fear that if this increase happens, what could be next—nurseries or universities? I used to work in that sector. There is a slight worry that there is a loophole, because the policy contradicts the EU’s VAT directive that specifies there should be no VAT on any form of education. In Greece in 2015, the left-wing Syriza Government wanted to introduce VAT at 23%. They had to abandon that for a slew of different reasons, including because it was contrary to the EU’s VAT directive. University tuition is zero rated, and there is a worry among my friends in the sector there, who say, “You’re lucky to have got out when you did, because they’re closing so many university departments in the UK.” What could be next? I hope that my hon. Friend the Minister can assure me that nurseries and universities are off limits. We have heard all these things—that schools are going to close—and we have heard a lot of catastrophising, but it remains to be seen whether those things will come to pass. One of my schools went in 2023. My worry is that this policy will make an elitist system more elitist. The Government say in their response: “Ending tax breaks for private schools was a tough but necessary decision”, but when growth comes, is there a way of undoing it? It was a very clear policy in many manifestos, so I understand that it will not all be undone, but let us think a bit creatively.

• 22 Jan 2025 · Education, Health and Care Plans · Hansard source

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  We are going to work out the time limit for everyone, because 34 names were submitted to speak, but I think there may be even more Members in this room now. The Clerk has done the calculation and it is 75 seconds each—one minute 15 seconds. We will start, as a model of brevity, with the Chair of the Education Committee.

• 22 Jan 2025 · Education, Health and Care Plans · Hansard source

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  Order. I call Charlotte Cane.

• 22 Jan 2025 · Education, Health and Care Plans · Hansard source

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  I call Marie Goldman to respond briefly to this epic debate.

• 22 Jan 2025 · Education, Health and Care Plans · Hansard source

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  Order. I remind hon. Members to bob if they wish to speak so that I can work out exactly how long they have.

• 22 Jan 2025 · Education, Health and Care Plans · Hansard source

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  I call the Liberal Democrat spokesperson.

• 12 Nov 2024 · Topical Questions · Hansard source

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  My constituent Konnie Huq, with Arts Council and Lottery funding, has compiled a kids’ climate guide, with Jamie Oliver among the contributors. Will Ministers join forces with her to get it out there, preferably to every school in the country, because we have got to start young?

• 7 Oct 2024 · Benefit Sanctions · Hansard source

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  According to recent research by Gingerbread, a high percentage of sanctions have been misapplied to single parents, not because they have not met the job search requirements but because of missed meetings for reasons connected with childcare. Max, a bereaved single dad of two, had his sanction overturned, which involved a fairly challenging process. Will my hon. Friend please look into the possibility of overhauling the mess of a system that was left behind by that lot over there?

• 11 Sept 2024 · Democracy in Bangladesh · Hansard source

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  I completely endorse what the hon. Member is saying. We do need to temper our language and be careful. Every Member in this House has a curry house in their constituency, and that will not be an Indian restaurant—it will be Bangladeshis who run it. An enormous contribution has been made to our society. With the things we saw this summer, we should stamp on the misinformation that I referred to in response to my hon. Friend the Member for Slough (Mr Dhesi). Again, those Bangladeshi university students showed courage, and they were not just the elitist ones from the capital city; it happened all over the country at public and private universities, with boys and girls. Their demands were initially against corruption but they grew to wider pro-democracy concerns and the overthrow of the Prime Minister. So far, so predictable, but then in the biggest plot twist since Bobby Ewing in the shower, when all those tensions were coming to a head, we heard that the previous Prime Minister had suddenly scarpered. She helicoptered out. A regime so entrenched that it looked like it would last forever suddenly collapsed like a pack of cards. In January, there was an election in Bangladesh—we hear that 40% of the globe is going to the polls this year—although there were not any other real candidates in it, so that was declared null and void. We now have this caretaker Government who are there to oversee fresh elections. We do not know exactly when those will be.

• 11 Sept 2024 · Democracy in Bangladesh · Hansard source

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  There is plenty more to say. We need a fresh start—a reset, as the right hon. Gentleman said, and “in neither Washington nor Moscow”, as the slogan used to be. We need less gerontocracy. Yunus is 84, though he is very sharp. The leader he overthrew is 76, and the opposition rival, Khaleda Zia, is 78. I have some questions for the Minister. As I said, there is a big job to do. Given our unique role in all this, we should offer support. Apparently, the constitution is being amended and redrafted. Could we lend expertise there? British lawyers have good form on this; we constructed the European convention on human rights. Capacity building is needed to cleanse all sorts of institutions of party people who were in the pocket of the last regime. Hendon police training college is renowned all over the world; perhaps we can rebuild the police in Bangladesh, because apparently there has been a bit of a vacuum there recently. The Stormtrooper-like Rapid Action Battalion force should be disbanded, and the death penalty should be gone. Maybe we could do something about climate finance, because countries in the global south face the brunt of climate problems, and we are in the run-up to COP29. These measures do not even have to cost anything; we could put a polluter-pays levy on some countries. Lastly, we need to recover some of the assets. The right hon. Member for Islington North (Jeremy Corbyn) mentioned foreign Governments’ interference. When I last went to Bangladesh, I saw Chinese power plants and Russian flyovers—lots of things like that; I cannot remember what they all were. Money that belongs to the Bangladeshi people was looted and plundered. We need asset tracing to recover it. I understand that Professor Yunus is coming to the UN General Assembly. It would be great if His Majesty’s Government warmly welcomed him—I do not know if they will be represented by the Under-Secretary of State for Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Affairs, my hon. Friend the Member for Hornsey and Friern Barnet (Catherine West), the Prime Minister or whoever. We are talking about Bangladesh 2.0 and human rights. When Gandhi was asked what he thought of western civilisation, he famously said: “I think it would be a good idea”. Let us make sure that democracy and human rights in Bangladesh are not just a good idea, but a given. People are talking about this as a second revolution. Let us rebuild Bangladesh, so that human rights and democracy are a given. I look forward to hearing what the Minister says.

• 11 Sept 2024 · Democracy in Bangladesh · Hansard source

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  My hon. Friend is so right. I did not see any demos in Reading, but I do know that in all sorts of European capitals, including Paris and Rome, as well as in Manchester and Trafalgar Square, there were solidarity protests when these things went on. The diaspora has been active. I am a London-born Bangladeshi. I kind of knew about the country from my parents telling me that it was this paradise of coconut trees and those kind of things. I only went as a teenager. More recently, as an adult and as an MP, I have noticed the slightly more sinister side, with things like enforced disappearances and extrajudicial killings. Every human rights organisation—Amnesty International and so on—has condemned those. I try to keep out of this subject—I do not have a very Bangladeshi electorate—but I was jolted when in 2018 I heard from the family of Shahidul Alam, a photographer who was taking pictures of an earlier student protest, that he had been banged up and tortured. Then I had to get involved. I was there as recently as May with the excellent all-party parliamentary group on global sexual and reproductive health rights—it has been reconstituted just today—for a United Nations Development Programme conference. Again, I realised that I was in a one-party police state—it is not quite right. As one of the diaspora, these human rights crackdowns came into my inbox, and they reached fever pitch in July when hundreds of brave students gave their lives in a struggle. Before we broke for recess, I had a panel discussion, with the panellists including Toby Cadman, a barrister who has defended people from the Jamaat party that was banned by the previous regime—it has just been unbanned—and the head of Amnesty International UK. The discussion, which we had in the Grand Committee Room of Westminster Hall, was so oversubscribed that people had to be turned away, such was the thirst for information. I see the hon. Member for Leicester South (Shockat Adam) in his place. He was there, and I think that his defeat of Jonathan Ashworth may have had something to do with some comments about this subject, but let us not speculate.

• 30 Jul 2024 · Topical Questions · Hansard source

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  Mr Speaker, you and I are both old enough to remember Tiananmen Square. The use of lethal force on student protesters in Bangladesh has rightly been condemned by our Government. I urge the Government to put pressure on the Bangladeshi investigation, so that it has an international element, because a country that can just turn off all communications with the outside world and that controls all institutions, right down to its stormtrooper-like police, should not be allowed to mark its own homework.

• 25 Jul 2024 · Business of the House · Hansard source

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  In recent days, there have been protests in Rome, in Paris, in my right hon. Friend’s city of Manchester and in Trafalgar Square over what has been going on in Bangladesh. A three-figure number of student protesters have been killed; we do not know how many, because the internet has been turned off. May I press again for an urgent Government statement on our position, because I was not successful in the ballot for Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office questions on Tuesday? We have a historic, unique role in this situation.