Sarah Champion MP: speeches

Speeches

• 1 Jun 2026 · Child Sexual Offender Data · Hansard source

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  Does the hon. Member share my frustration that the petition did not include victims and survivors? I know from my experience that the vast majority are white British girls, but a particular sect of Sikh girls is also being very aggressively targeted. It would be good to include them so that the police can do more protection work.

• 25 Mar 2026 · Victims and Courts Bill · Hansard source

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  I welcome this Bill and this Government’s laser focus on supporting victims and survivors, which has been lacking in our courts system for a very long time. I hear what the Minister says about court transcripts. It is incredibly important for the victims and survivors I know to have a physical copy of sentencing remarks so that they can process them in their own time, so I am confused about why she is not accepting Lords amendments 1 and 3 at this point.

• 3 Mar 2026 · West Bank: Illegal Settlements · Hansard source

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  The rapid growth in Israeli settlements in recent months has been fuelled by settler violence, which not only goes unpunished, but receives tacit support from the Israeli Government. The UK Government continue to avoid responding to the International Court of Justice’s 2024 advisory opinion condemning Israelis’ forcible transfer of Palestinians—a war crime. Last month, the UN high commissioner for human rights noted that the forcible transfer of Palestinians from their homes in the west bank raises concerns of ethnic cleansing. Does the Minister agree with his analysis?

• 24 Feb 2026 · Gaza Healthcare System · Hansard source

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  It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Sir Jeremy. I thank my hon. Friend the Member for Stroud (Dr Opher) for securing this much-needed debate. I will focus on one specific aspect of the humanitarian crisis in Gaza where the UK can really make a difference: medical transfers to the west bank. Israel’s continued ban on medical transfers from Gaza to hospitals in the west bank, including East Jerusalem, costs lives every day. It is not an unintended consequence of conflict, but a deliberate decision. Before October 2023, Gaza’s health system functioned as part of a wider Palestinian medical network, with around 2,000 patients travelling each month from Gaza to hospitals in East Jerusalem and the west bank for specialised treatment. The Augusta Victoria and Makassed hospitals alone handled more than 40% of Gaza’s referrals. At times, nearly one third of their beds were filled with Gazan patients. However, that system collapsed overnight. Since October ’23, Israel has banned all internal medical transfers from Gaza. In January 2026, the Israeli Government confirmed to its own High Court that it is standing by its refusal to allow seriously ill patients to travel to the west bank, including East Jerusalem, citing vague security concerns but offering no evidence of the threat supposedly posed by innocent Palestinian civilians. As of early 2026, more than 18,500 patients approved by the World Health Organisation are waiting for evacuation because their treatment is unavailable in Gaza. More than 4,000 of those patients are children, and more than 1,000 people have already died while waiting for care. For every week that the ban remains in place, more preventable deaths will become inevitable. Israel permits some patients to travel abroad for treatment, with more than 4,000 patients evacuated to third countries. But that only makes its continued refusal to allow access to nearby Palestinian hospitals even harder to defend. Hospitals in East Jerusalem are within a couple hours’ drive of Gaza. The WHO has been clear: reopening that route is the fastest, safest and most cost-effective way to save lives. Instead, patients are forced through the Rafah crossing, which operates under extremely severe restrictions. Exits through the crossing are capped at around 50 patients per day, with each allowed only two accompanying family members. At that pace, they will not survive long enough to be treated. At the current rate, Save the Children estimates that evacuating those in need could take more than a year. Furthermore, while departures through Rafah are possible, re-entry is heavily restricted, with more than 20,000 Palestinians who left Gaza earlier in the war still waiting to return. That puts medical evacuees in an impossible position: if they leave for essential treatment, they risk permanent displacement. Medical evacuations must not become de facto forcible transfer. Under the fourth Geneva convention, Israel, as the occupying power, has a duty to ensure access to medical care and supplies, and to maintain medical services. Article 33 explicitly prohibits “collective punishment”. A blanket ban on all medical transfers imposed regardless of individual circumstances risks breaching all of those obligations. The Government rightly emphasise the importance of international humanitarian law, and now is the time to put that into practice. The Government should publicly urge Israel to lift the ban on internal medical transfers and continue emergency overseas evacuations only as a stopgap, not as a substitute for lawful access to nearby care. Restoring access to hospitals in the west bank and East Jerusalem would save lives, relieve pressure on Gaza’s collapsing health system and reaffirm the basic principle that the sick must never be treated as a security risk by default.

• 9 Dec 2025 · Grooming Gangs: Independent Inquiry · Hansard source

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  As you know, Madam Deputy Speaker, I have spent 13 years researching this most evil of crimes. I do not know how or where to start, but let me boil it down to a couple of things. First, I still have no idea why those who were paid to protect children did not do that, so I hope the inquiry finds that out and ensures there is no way that can happen again. Secondly, I believe that the scale of this spans to literally every town, city and village in the United Kingdom, so I hope the inquiry and the NCA work is able to cover all of that. That brings me to my substantive point, which is that this is going to cost a lot of money. Every case that is found will need an investigation, and local authorities will also have to put child protection measures in place. In Rotherham, all that money has come from the local authority. Can the Home Secretary assure us that our local authorities will have child protection money and that our police forces will have the resources they need to get the prosecutions we have to see?

• 18 Nov 2025 · Gaza and Sudan · Hansard source

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  This morning, Members received a private briefing on Sudan, at which one of the academics stated: “El Fasher is a slaughter house. Our low estimate is 60,000 people have been killed there in the last three weeks.” That would make it the biggest atrocity crime since the 1990s. These are civilians, not soldiers, and this is not about conflict; it is about genocide. The Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office has been briefed on the likelihood of a mass-casualty event for years. In November 2021, the FCDO was publicly warned of a likely genocide. The recent Independent Commission for Aid Impact report concluded that last year, officials took “the least ambitious option” on civilian protection. I say to the Foreign Secretary that scrutiny and diplomatic surge can slow down this slaughter, so are we leading the 25 states who signed the joint statement on 11 November to work together to put pressure on the United Arab Emirates? Why has our atrocity prevention team not been surged? Tawila now needs to be our focus of our protection. What are the evacuation plans to protect up to 650,000 people from genocide? The Sudanese civilians need a champion. As UN penholder, will that be us?

• 27 Oct 2025 · Victims and Courts Bill · Hansard source

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  I rise to speak to new clause 1 in my name. It would ensure the implementation of recommendation 18 from the independent inquiry into child sexual abuse. Survivors of child sexual abuse have been let down for years by a national compensation scheme. Too often their applications are delayed or denied, not because the legitimacy of their abuse is in any question, but because of loopholes set by the very organisation that was established to support them: the Criminal Injuries Compensation Authority. The many limitations of the scheme were considered during IICSA, which resulted in a clear recommendation to remove the unfair barriers set by CICA, but in April Ministers rejected that recommendation. My new clause 1 would overturn that decision. It has commanded the support of 27 Members from across the House and the backing of 29 charities and experts. They include the Marie Collins Foundation and the Association of Personal Injury Lawyers, which have campaigned passionately on this issue. In opening, the Minister said that she wants a universal scheme without hierarchy, but unfortunately that is not the case at the moment. My amendment would widen the eligibility of the scheme to include those who have been victims of online-facilitated child sexual abuse. The recent Casey audit found that 40% of the 100,000 recorded child sexual abuse offences last year took place online, so that is around 40,000 children who will struggle to access compensation because their abuse is not considered by CICA “violent” enough to qualify. As IICSA rightly concluded, that rule “does not take account of the extent of the harm and damage” of online abuse, such as the ongoing fear that images of sexual abuse will remain available online indefinitely. By continuing to leave online abuse out of scope, CICA reinforces the risk that online sexual abuse is perceived somehow as less serious or less deserving of redress, but nothing could be further from the truth. New clause 1 also seeks to increase the time limit for applications so that survivors have seven years from the date the offence was reported to the police, or from the age of 18 if the offence was reported while they were a child. The scheme currently has just a two-year time limit, but the average time it takes for a survivor of child abuse to come forward is 24 years to 27 years. There are many reasons for that, and we have heard some in the Chamber today: trauma, fear and shame, not to mention the length of time to go through the court process. The Minister knows this, which is why she and the other Justice Ministers rightly abolished the three-year time limit for civil claims by survivors of child sexual abuse, in line with IICSA recommendation 15. However, the decision means that survivors face a strange paradox: no time limit for them to take legal action against their abusers, but tight restrictions if they wish to seek compensation for that same abuse. The Government have argued that there is discretion in the scheme to allow applications after the time limit has expired. That is indeed true. However, the proportion of resolved cases accepted after the time limit has fallen each year between 2020 and 2024. In 2020, 87.3% of applications received outside the time limit were resolved. By 2024, that was down to 66.9%. By contrast, the compensation model in Quebec allows seven years for all types of crime except for domestic abuse, child sexual abuse and sexual violence, which have no time limit at all. Surely that is the model we should be following. Finally, new clause 1 would prevent survivors of child abuse from being affected by a rule that blocks or reduces compensation for victims with unspent convictions. APIL shared with me the case of a woman who was sexually abused by her father. She had suffered with her mental health as a consequence and was hospitalised. While in hospital, she threatened to kill herself with a letter opener. The hospital called the police, and she was convicted of possessing a knife. Because of that conviction, she was then refused the compensation by CICA that had been originally offered to her. That is why new clause 1 would ensure applicants with unspent convictions are not automatically excluded where offences are linked to circumstances of their sexual abuse as a child. Anti-slavery charities have also been in touch to explain how this particular rule impacts on victims of trafficking who try to access the compensation scheme. It is not unusual for victims of slavery or, indeed, child or criminal exploitation to be forced into criminality by their exploiters. Those convictions, however, commonly lead to immense difficulty for those victims to then access compensation—something that victims of modern slavery, for example, ought to be entitled to under article 15 of the European convention on action against trafficking. The criminal injuries compensation scheme is supposed to be a support scheme of last resort. Sadly, for many survivors, it is not even that. In the long term, CICA needs a complete overhaul. In the short term, however, survivors are keen to see the swift implementation of recommendation 18, because in doing so this House and this Government can send a powerful message that their abuse is recognised, that their future is prioritised and that meaningful change is under way.