Sarah Russell MP: speeches 2026

Speeches

• 29 Jun 2026 · Home Office and Ministry of Justice · Hansard source

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  Many thanks, Madam Deputy Speaker. My right hon. Friend the Member for Makerfield (Andy Burnham) suggested in December that this might be worth looking at again, and many of us in all parts of the House would be grateful for such an approach.

• 23 Jun 2026 · Draft Employment Tribunal (Extension of Time Limits) (Miscellaneous Amendments and Transitional Provisions) Regulations 2026 Draft Employment Tribunals Extension of Jurisdiction (England and Wales) (Amendment) Order 2026 · Hansard source

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  It is a pleasure to serve under your chairship, Sir Alec. The shadow Minister asked whether this is really what Members came here to do, and I can say that I genuinely and literally came to this place to do this, so I am delighted that we are doing it. I was one of the people who joined Pregnant Then Screwed in its #Givemesix campaign against maternity discrimination. I spent years practising in employment tribunals, and I saw very large numbers of women with maternity discrimination claims and people with discrimination claims of all types. There is a huge problem: 74,000 women a year are estimated to lose their job while they are pregnant or on maternity leave, over and above what would otherwise be expected for their demographic. This absolutely enormous problem is affecting our national productivity, with so many women falling out of the workplace after they have children. When women have just had a baby and suddenly lose their job, they have very limited money because statutory maternity pay is extremely limited—it is awful—so they cannot afford legal advice. They also have a tiny baby, so bringing legal proceedings is not something they are seeking to do. It often takes them a long time to seek advice about their situation. Women are regularly being ruled out of bringing perfectly legitimate claims for the widespread problem of discrimination. I gently remind the shadow Minister that his Government failed to recruit any employment tribunal judges from 2010 to 2018, and that is how we ended up in this mess. We have no pipeline of people coming through who have seniority. This Government recommenced the recruitment of judges, and, to be fair, at the very back-end of the last Government there was some realisation of the catastrophic mess that had been generated in the employment tribunal system. It is not in employers’ best interests for the system to be run down, and it is not in employers’ best interests for us to assume that the best thing for employees is to insist that they have no rights and are unable to enforce those that they have. None of those things make business better in Britain; what they do is level down so that the worst employers are enabled to get away with misconduct while penalising those who do the right thing. I literally came here to do this. I have campaigned for this for years, and I could not be more pleased to see it happen, because what I think we will see is that good employers have absolutely nothing to fear from these measures. Good employers are the ones who are taking the time to deal with grievances properly, and that takes more than three months. At the moment, we are seeing people being pushed to bring claims to protect their position far too quickly, which pushes them into an adversarial process that is not in their best interests or employers’ best interests, and it is potentially enabling unscrupulous employers to find ways to get people to time-out by unduly elongating the process. I absolutely support these measures, and every Labour Member should be proud of them. I want to say a huge thank you to Pregnant Then Screwed for the campaigning it has done for many years. I am really proud to be here today.

• 9 Jun 2026 · Water Safety · Hansard source

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  I thank my hon. Friend the Member for Southampton Itchen (Darren Paffey) for securing this important debate. My constituent Chiedza Nyanjowa was only 15 when she went to Formby beach on the bank holiday weekend with her 11-year-old cousin and her auntie—the beginning of this story is such a wholesome day out. Chiedza could not swim, so she and her cousin were playing safely on the sand with a beach volleyball. Unfortunately, the volleyball went into the sea and the girls went into the water to try to retrieve it. I think about how often I have told my own children: “Look after your things!” That was all the girls were trying to do; they were trying to do the right thing. Unfortunately, Chiedza did not make it back out of the sea in time. Chiedza was, by all accounts, an absolutely lovely girl. She really liked helping others and her ambition was to grow up and become a nurse—an ambition that, sadly, will not be realised. That is a great loss to our community, because it sounds like she really was a deeply lovely child and a very loving Christian. She was also, by all accounts, fun; she liked taking selfies and doing all the things that teenage girls do. She liked to get flowers for her friends for their birthdays. She was extremely giving. She had recently won the local Rotary competition for cheffing. Chiedza’s mother is the most incredible woman; meeting her was such an honour. She spoke to me at length about how grateful she was to both the off-duty doctor who spent a considerable period trying to rescue Chiedza from the water and the two off-duty nurses who spent a really long time doing their absolute best to revive Chiedza. I am sure she would also like me to say thank you to the members of New Life church; she is very grateful for their prayers for Chiedza. Chiedza’s mother is just a great inspiration, and I feel very strongly that we must do everything we possibly can to prevent further such tragedies in our community. You cannot participate in the debate, Ms McVey, but I know that you have a lake in your constituency at which there are regularly tragedies of this kind, and I am sure that you would want us to assure everybody that we will work on a cross-party basis in Cheshire to look at this issue on a local level. When we look at the statistics for child safety in water, we see that boys tend to die at twice the rate of girls, children in the most deprived communities die at twice the rate of more affluent children, and black children are three times more likely to die than white children. Luck should not determine whether children make it to adulthood; there are systemic problems here that we are failing to address. In my community, 39% of children with low family affluence can swim 25 metres, compared with 82% of children with high family affluence, so there is a systemic problem. Whether someone makes it to adulthood should not be an accident of birth, but at the moment it is. We need to strengthen the school curriculum. The aim is that children should leave primary school able to swim, but a third of children cannot. It seems to me that even if a child can swim at the end of year 4, if they do not have the opportunity to practise that skill in the years that follow, the chances that they will still be able to swim 25 metres when they are 16 are negligible. My hon. Friend the Member for Southampton Itchen read out the terrible list of names of the many young people who died over the bank holiday weekend. Rather than regarding those as individual unfortunate accidents, we must look at what we need to change systemically when it comes to improving access to swimming for the wider community—including the availability and affordability of leisure centres and swimming lessons—and introducing greater consistency through the national curriculum so that children do not leave primary school unable to swim, and can still swim when they leave secondary school. There are a lot of steps that we could take; I was interested to hear the reference by my hon. Friend the Member for York Outer (Mr Charters) to Sam’s law. We should absolutely look at opportunities in the clean water Bill. I know that Education Ministers have agreed to look at that, and I agree that we should be working cross-party and across Departments to ensure that we consistently prioritise our young people’s making it to adulthood. Since I became an MP, it has shocked me to learn how many young people die by some sort of misadventure in my community. It is not only drownings, but road accidents and issues associated with mental health problems. We need a consistent approach across the country to ensuring that our young people make it to adulthood, because they are not doing so at the rate that they should be. Too many young people are dying in my community. I go to too many schools where I see whole cohorts of bereaved children. It is not just about the families of the children who have died, although it is horrific for them; it is also about the impact on all their peers. My heart goes out so much to Chiedza’s cousin and the rest of her family. I really would like to impress upon the Minister that we must do something, systematically and urgently, about water safety. I know that she takes these issues very seriously. Given that we have so many avoidable deaths of young people, we must also look at ourselves as a society and consider whether we are committing our resources in the right places.

• 9 Jun 2026 · Water Safety · Hansard source

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  It has been mentioned in this debate that there is great regional inequality, and that children in the most deprived areas are most likely to drown. Interventions solely focused on deprived areas concern me because there are considerable numbers of deprived children in England who do not live in deprived areas. We compound their disadvantage if we focus lifesaving decision making and resources only in those areas. I want to see deprived children across the whole country receive the assistance that they need—they should not be dying.

• 8 Jun 2026 · Water Companies · Hansard source

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  Since 2003, my constituent has suffered multiple incidents every year of raw sewage flooding into his garden. United Utilities is disputing with him how the guaranteed standards scheme works, and he is not receiving adequate compensation. His golden wedding anniversary was completely ruined when he had family over and the garden was literally full of excrement. This situation could not be any worse—it is an absolute disgrace. Although we have strengthened the regulations, our current system is not sufficiently economically damaging to UU to force it to take actions that would solve the problem for my constituent. Will the Minister please meet with me and my constituent to talk to him about this issue?

• 8 Jun 2026 · Digital Safety: Children · Hansard source

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  The tech companies are big, they are rich, they are clever, and they are playing a very long game. I do not doubt that in the next three months we shall see some degree of compliance or movement towards what the Government are asking for from those tech companies, but I fear that there will then be constant backsliding—that we shall see them endlessly rowing back on, or not quite meeting, what they have agreed to. How can we prevent that from happening by means of any steps short of legislation? Could legislation please be enforced by means of class actions for children who are damaged by this content? I think that that is the only thing that the tech companies might pay attention to.

• 3 Jun 2026 · Small Towns: Transport Links · Hansard source

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  I thank my hon. Friend the Member for Rossendale and Darwen (Andy MacNae) for securing this important debate. I have spoken previously about train services in my community; I will not spend a huge amount of my limited time on them, but I want to flag that we have been in government for two years, and train strikes in my constituency have written off our Sunday services for the entirety of that time. We talk a lot about bringing train services into public ownership, but those train services in my area were in public ownership. My residents are furious that they have no Sunday service from Congleton station and have not had one for a long time now. I would be very grateful if the Minister took that back to the Rail Minister with the utmost urgency, because this really needs to move forward. We also have a long-standing problem with accessibility at Sandbach station, which is frankly disastrous. It is a huge problem for anyone who cannot manage the extremely steep stairs. The service runs to a major city and an airport, so by definition people have luggage, buggies and so forth. What I really want to talk about is buses. There are so many problems with buses in my area. The Government’s transport improvement funds for buses have helped, and so have section 106 contributions from developers. I would like to praise my local council, which has been able to put on some additional services with those two sources of funds. None the less, there are so many problems. When I spoke to young people at Shipton Explorer Scouts, they spoke at length about the difficulty of buses that are just too full: there are too many students trying to get on them, so the buses stop letting them on. I have GCSE students who are terrified. One called my office recently because his bus simply had not shown up. We eventually got to the bottom of it: the app was not working, the bus had been diverted because of roadworks, and no one had informed the school or the pupils. These buses only run once an hour. When children and young people need to get to life-changing exams, the consequences of unreliability—buses that do not show up or that do not stop because they are too full—are potentially devastating. Local employers I speak to in places like care homes and nurseries, some of which are not in the centre of town, have huge problems recruiting because people simply cannot get to them without car access. In rural and semi-rural areas, this is a huge, long-standing economic problem. It makes it difficult for parents to work, because they cannot reliably get their children to school on public transport. The economic and other impacts for people are absolutely massive. My constituents also talk to me about a sense of rural isolation—which I would go into further, but I have run out of time.

• 3 Jun 2026 · Small Towns: Transport Links · Hansard source

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  Will the Minister give way?

• 27 Apr 2026 · Lord Mandelson Humble Address: Government Response Update · Hansard source

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  Could my right hon. Friend the Minister please confirm whether any documents that were previously in the scope of the Humble Address have been deemed no longer to be within its scope due to the application of litigation privilege in respect of the dismissal of Olly Robbins?

• 20 Apr 2026 · Security Vetting · Hansard source

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  It is accepted by many on the Government Benches that the Prime Minister did not know the outcome of the vetting, but the Cabinet Secretary came forward on Tuesday, having spent a month researching whether or not she could provide the advice that she did, so she had clearly thought very carefully about the information that she brought forward. The Prime Minister then launched an investigation, rather than coming straight to the House with the information that she had provided. Was that because the information was insufficient to present to the House? If so, when was the Prime Minister planning to come to the House?

• 13 Apr 2026 · Southport Inquiry · Hansard source

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  I know that the thoughts of the whole House are with the families, as are mine. One of the many aspects of what has gone wrong here relates to children’s mental health services. Will the Home Secretary please outline what we are doing about the workforce in children’s mental health services? There is a real shortage of people who are skilled in that area.

• 19 Mar 2026 · Violence against Women and Girls: Prosecutions · Hansard source

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  4. What steps she is taking to help increase prosecution rates for cases involving violence against women and girls.

• 19 Mar 2026 · Violence against Women and Girls: Prosecutions · Hansard source

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  I very much welcome that news. Prosecution rates in cases involving violence against women and girls are shamefully low. I strongly welcome the Government’s ambition to tackle violence against women and girls, including our manifesto commitments to fast-track rape cases and introduce specialist courts. Will the Minister meet me to discuss the Government’s progress on those promises?

• 12 Mar 2026 · Parental Rights at Work · Hansard source

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  Since 2004, the limit on relief for small employers at which they can reclaim statutory maternity pay has been set at £45,000. Small and medium-sized enterprises want to support working parents, but they need our help to do so. Will the Minister confirm whether that will be looked at as part of the parental leave review?

• 12 Mar 2026 · Parental Rights at Work · Hansard source

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  9. What recent progress he has made on improving parental rights at work.

• 10 Mar 2026 · Courts and Tribunals Bill · Hansard source

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  I am afraid I will not. When we look at how much these measures will bring down the backlog in totality, it is simply not enough. When the time from reporting a rape to an actual trial is, on average, six years, bringing down the backlog slightly by the end of the next Parliament is just not enough. I have significant concerns about the restrictions on access to jury trials. Anyone who has read Baroness Harman’s independent review of bullying, harassment and sexual harassment at the Bar should have real concerns about the attitudes of some barristers towards women and ethnic minorities. Not every barrister exhibits those traits, but they are a systematic problem. She talks about the fact that: “A recurrent theme in the submissions was that there is a tolerance of misconduct at the Bar which is learned and passed down from generation to generation. I was told that some barristers, particularly men of the older generation, ‘have no idea how outdated and offensive some of their views are, nor do they care about the impact of sharing those views with others who may be offended by them’.”

• 10 Mar 2026 · Courts and Tribunals Bill · Hansard source

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  On that point, there is a backlog in the family courts of 110,000 cases, more than what we are discussing, and legal aid rates for family law have not gone up since 1997. Does my hon. Friend agree that this is an important move but we need to do more?

• 10 Mar 2026 · Courts and Tribunals Bill · Hansard source

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  Does my hon. Friend agree it is absolutely crucial that we fund contact centres properly, so that there are properly supervised options for courts to order?

• 10 Mar 2026 · Courts and Tribunals Bill · Hansard source

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  The Judicial Executive Board produced a report on judicial bullying and racism in 2022, but has never published it. Does my hon. Friend agree that that backs up her point that there are concerns about the judiciary?

• 10 Mar 2026 · Courts and Tribunals Bill · Hansard source

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  In the magistrates court, only those who earn less than £21,000 a year—less than a full-time job at real living wage rates—are entitled to legal aid. Does my hon. Friend agree that there is real danger in that in terms of access to justice?

• 10 Mar 2026 · Courts and Tribunals Bill · Hansard source

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  What does the right hon. Gentleman say about the freedom of women to walk the streets without fearing for their physical safety? What does he say about the freedom of women who have made allegations of rape, and who are waiting six years between reporting to the police and having a trial? Does he recognise that those are liberties that matter, too?

• 10 Mar 2026 · Courts and Tribunals Bill · Hansard source

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  I draw attention to the fact that I am a solicitor with a current practising certificate who has appeared before tribunals historically. I will speak briefly today about the £1.3 billion maintenance backlog in our courts. We have heard that the Justice Secretary will commit £287 million to it. That is a large sum of money, but it is not enough. I want to talk about the fact that legal aid rates have not gone up since 1997. The Justice Secretary is looking at increasing them significantly, but unfortunately that is moving them from £40 an hour to £60 an hour. In private practice, most solicitors would expect to be billing about five times that to run their firms. It is just not enough.

• 10 Mar 2026 · Courts and Tribunals Bill · Hansard source

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  Obviously not everyone is exhibiting these traits and training can help, but my understanding, from what I have heard anecdotally, is that substantial numbers of members of the judiciary are not up to date with the training requirements that they already have. I would welcome hearing more from the Secretary of State about exactly how those training programmes will be developed, brought forward and made mandatory in a way that is effective. It is of significant concern that Baroness Harman had to make a recommendation on the importance of the Judicial Appointments Commission taking into account findings of misconduct when considering who to appoint as judges. It is astonishing that she had to recommend that that should be required. How has the Judicial Appointments Commission been operating to date? I stand here as someone who does not like to criticise the judiciary. I know that it has many hard-working members who have been operating in a difficult environment for a very long time. We have to be honest in saying that most of the rates that I have referred to were not put up by the new Labour Government either. We have had cuts to the justice system for 25 years, and that is why it is on its knees. We can do things within the context of the current system that might make it somewhat better, but I go back to my original question: when rape trials are taking six years from arrest to prosecution, what are we going to do to make wholesale change? Nothing I have heard so far has convinced me that what we will do here today, whichever permutations we go with, will fundamentally transform those waits.

• 10 Mar 2026 · Courts and Tribunals Bill · Hansard source

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  I respect the hon. Gentleman and understand that his concerns about the Bill are genuinely rooted. None the less, the presumption of parental involvement being revoked in this Bill is absolutely critical, and I do not understand how he can proceed with a reasoned amendment that would kill the entire Bill on that basis.

• 5 Mar 2026 · Cyber-security · Hansard source

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  I thank the Minister for his answer. We have seen in recent days that Iran is bombing data centres across the middle east, and we are well aware that there have been problems with cyber-attacks by non-state and state-backed actors from Iran. Can the Minister please outline what the Government and the National Cyber Security Centre are doing to deal with the increased threat?