Sarah Russell MP: speeches

Speeches

• 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?

• 5 Mar 2026 · Cyber-security · Hansard source

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  18. What steps his Department is taking to help improve the cyber-security of national infrastructure.

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

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  The hon. Gentleman has referred to plan 2 loans but plan 3 loans were also brought in by his Government. Plan 3 loans are for those with postgraduate qualifications—people who are definitely making an economic contribution to our society—and now kick in from when they earn £21,000. Does he agree that that was the wrong thing for his Government to do?

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

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  The Minister has spoken very well about plan 2, and we are grateful that he will be looking at it, but so far as I can tell, plan 3 thresholds have remained frozen for postgrads at £21,000 since their inception. That is deeply unjust. Will he commit to looking at plan 3 as well as plan 2?

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

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  I am pleased to see you in the Chair, Ms Lewell. I thank my hon. Friend the Member for Ilford South (Jas Athwal) for securing this debate. The system just is not fair; it does not make any sense and it does not set people up well for life. Realistically, a person makes a decision about whether to go to university when they are about 16 or 17 years old. We would not let banks lend money to 16 and 17-year-olds on these terms—we would think it wrong; people cannot enter into those contracts until they are 18—but when someone makes the decision to apply to university, unless they are from a very wealthy background, they are essentially signing up to a huge amount of ongoing debt. Young people quite rightly aspire to own homes, start families and have the same sort of life and pension savings that the generations before them had, and I do not see how that is unreasonable. Yet we are allowing a system to persist in which many of them are paying 9% of their income, on top of the tax they already pay, spiralling house prices and the incredibly high requirements for childcare, if they wish to have a family. Of course, Labour has rightly helped with many of those problems, but the student loans system remains a barrier to opportunity. We should have great aspirations for our young people. Education is a right, and should not be a privilege, but those privileged enough to have parents who can pay for their fees up front have a massive benefit over everyone else. That is wrong and it needs to change.

• 23 Feb 2026 · Schools White Paper: Every Child Achieving and Thriving · Hansard source

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  In terms of the points raised about funding, Cheshire is struggling significantly with underfunding per pupil. Will how we roll out funding for these changes follow the existing formula, or will that be revised?

• 10 Feb 2026 · Cyber Security and Resilience (Network and Information Systems) Bill (Sixth sitting) · Hansard source

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  On a point of order, Mr Stringer. I am not sure whether this strictly meets the criteria for a point of order, but it is clear that some people in the room cannot hear what is happening. I know the convention is that only the Whips and Ministers sit on the front row, but if those who are struggling to hear wish to sit closer, could we abandon that convention? It would be a reasonable adjustment so that everyone can participate properly, because this is discriminatory.

• 3 Feb 2026 · Cyber Security and Resilience (Network and Information Systems) Bill (Second sitting) · Hansard source

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  Q One of the things talked about this morning was that the risk in these relationships and sectors will simply be managed down the supply chain until it is essentially contracted out of existence, because the smallest organisations that end up holding the risk will be incapable of effectively managing it. Should they fail, because they have not failed the risk and their liabilities become so big, they will just collapse. It will not be possible for you guys to manage the entirety of the supply chain down, so how do you see your enforcement capabilities and the adequacy or otherwise of the legislation in that context? Stuart Okin: Essentially, we would not go all the way down the supply chain. First, the operators of essential services are defined very much by the thresholds. Ultimately, they are the first point of responsibility. On the critical third party suppliers that have been brought in by the Bill, there will be a small number of those that, for energy, are for the entire systemic system of the UK, not the smaller entities. So we will hold those to account. On the enforcement side of things, if and when it comes to that, they will be in the same situation as the current operators of essential services are today. We welcome the simplification in the Bill and bringing those into the same sectorial powers and the same types of fines that we see today. It will not go down to those minutiae of detail. Again, the secondary legislation gives you the ability to define that. Natalie Black: To keep it brief, we welcome the supply chain being brought into scope because we are all well aware that the most high-profile recent incidents often emanated from the supply chain. That said, we should be very honest about the complexity of entering this space, exactly for all the points that you have alluded to in terms of volume and scale and everything. We are already using this time to work through what our methodology will be. Engaging with the operators of essential services who are ultimately the customer of these suppliers has to be a starting point in terms of who they are most worried about in their supply chain. As Stuart says, you will see some commonality across all our sectors, so the numbers might not be as big as we might at first think, but this is what we need to work through over the coming months. Ian Hulme: From an ICO perspective, one of the big tasks that we are going to have in understanding the MSP market is what their supply chains look like. We are perhaps a little behind colleagues in other regulators because of the difference in the regulatory regime, but that is one of the tasks that we will have to get to grips with.

• 3 Feb 2026 · Cyber Security and Resilience (Network and Information Systems) Bill (Second sitting) · Hansard source

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  Q Professor Child, I note that you are very supportive of legal reform in quite a number of areas. With emphasis on the Computer Misuse Act, surely the reality is that the Crown Prosecution Service will never conclude that it is in the best interests of the country to prosecute any of the behaviours that people are concerned about, which we recognise as positive and helpful. Is there a need for legal reform? Professor John Child: Yes. It is not the easiest criminal law tale, if you like. If there were a problem of overcriminalisation in the sense of prosecutions, penalisation, high sentences and so on, the solution would be to look at a whole range of options, including prosecutorial discretion, sentencing or whatever it might be, to try to solve that problem. That is not the problem under the status quo. The current problem is purely the original point of criminalisation. Think of an industry carrying out potentially criminalised activity. Even if no one is going to be prosecuted, the chilling effect is that either the work is not done or it is done under the veil of potential criminalisation, which leads to pretty obvious problems in terms of insurance for that kind of industry, the professionalisation of the industry and making sure that reporting mechanisms are accurate. We have sat through many meetings with the CPS and those within the cyber-security industry who say that the channels of communication—that back and forth of reporting—is vital. However, a necessary step before that communication can happen is the decriminalisation of basic practices. No industry can effectively be told on the one hand, “What you are doing is vital,” but on the other, “It is a criminal offence, and we would like you to document it and report it to us in an itemised fashion over a period of time.” It is just not a realistic relationship to engender. The cyber-security industry has evolved in a fragmented way both nationally and internationally, and the only way to get those professionalisation and cyber-resilience pay-offs is by recognising that the criminal law is a barrier—not because it is prosecuting or sentencing, but because of its very existence. It does not allow individuals to say, “If, heaven forbid, I were prosecuted, I can explain that what I was doing was nationally important. That is the basis on which I should not be convicted, not because of the good will of a prosecutor.”

• 3 Feb 2026 · Cyber Security and Resilience (Network and Information Systems) Bill (First sitting) · Hansard source

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  Q Obviously no one wants to put crippling costs on to businesses, but cyber-security costs money—there is no way of avoiding that. We only have to look at the JLR attack to see the scale of the impact on our economy when it does not work, and we are looking at only critical national infrastructure here. Have you had any information from business about whether and to what extent this will promote increased spending on cyber-security? Jill Broom: We can assume that it will, because if you are in the supply chain or come within scope, you will have certain responsibilities and you will have to invest, not just in technology but in the skills space as well. How easy it is to do that is probably overestimated a bit; it is quite difficult to find the right skilled people, and that applies across regulators as well as business. Generally speaking, yes, I think it will be costly, but there are things that could probably help smaller organisations: techUK has called for things such as financial incentives, or potentially tax credits, to help SMEs. That could be applied on a priority basis, with those working within the critical national infrastructure supply chain looked at first. Dr Sanjana Mehta: If I may expand on that, we have been consulting our members and the wider community, and 58% of our respondents in the UK say that they still have critical and significant skills needs in their organisations. Nearly half of the respondents—47%—say that skills shortages are going to be one of the greatest hurdles in regulatory compliance. That is corroborated by evidence, even in the impact assessment that has been done on the previous regulatory regime, where I think nearly half of the operators of essential services said that they do not have access to skills in-house to support the regulatory requirements. Continuing to have sustained investment in skills development is definitely going to require funding. Taking it a step back, we need first of all to understand what sort of skills and expertise we have to develop to ensure that implementation of the Bill is successful.

• 27 Jan 2026 · Commonhold and Leasehold Reform · Hansard source

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  I thank the Minister for his statement, which demonstrates how Labour stands up for people against vested interests—my constituents will thank him for it. On the ongoing problems with unadopted estates, which I have been raising with him since before my election, I would be extremely grateful if he agreed to visit my constituency to see the difficulties that homeowners face.

• 20 Jan 2026 · Mobile Phones and Social Media: Use by Children · Hansard source

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  The Children’s Commissioner spoke to a group of 15 and 16-year-olds in 2024 and found that three quarters of them had been sent a beheading video. It is possible that a great number of children are protecting us from what they see online, instead of us protecting them. Can I emphasise strongly the importance of speaking to a large range of children from different backgrounds about this? Sadly, they do not always feel able to make us aware of everything that they are exposed to online.

• 20 Jan 2026 · ADHD Diagnosis · Hansard source

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  I have similar stories of incredibly long waiting lists, my local ICB closing waiting lists and my constituents’ general difficulty in accessing support. Does my hon. Friend agree that the Government have already had a two-part report with recommendations on dealing with ADHD, and that there is plenty in there that could be implemented while further evidence is sought?

• 14 Jan 2026 · Northern Powerhouse Rail · Hansard source

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  Northern Powerhouse Rail will be great for economic growth across the north and that will very much benefit my constituency. My constituency is geographically located in such a way that it should be great for travel to London, Liverpool and Manchester. Sadly, at the moment it is usually terrible for travelling to any of them. Will the Minister please meet me to talk about accessibility at Sandbach station, the quality and regularity of services across all those areas, and how we can make Northern Powerhouse Rail deliver for Cheshire?

• 14 Jan 2026 · Horse and Rider Road Safety · Hansard source

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  I support the hon. Gentleman’s point about the importance of equestrian representation in these structures. In my constituency, there is a major equestrian centre at Somerford. We also have many horse riders throughout the area, and there have been multiple accidents. We really need to take action on this issue, and I know that the Minister will be listening carefully.

• 12 Jan 2026 · Social Media: Non-consensual Sexual Deepfakes · Hansard source

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  The overwhelming majority of child sexual abuse imagery produced online is still, very sadly, produced by children themselves, who have been groomed by adults in order to do so. What steps will the Government take to ensure that there are device-level protections to prevent children from taking and sharing nude images of themselves?

• 8 Jan 2026 · Road Safety Strategy · Hansard source

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  In my constituency, 19 people died on the roads between 2018 and 2024. It is usually assumed that that is because we have some motorway in the constituency, but in fact people are six times more likely to die on a rural road. I thank the Minister very much for the measures within the strategy. I know there will be those who push back against changes to drink-driving limits, so does she agree that when people talk about personal responsibility in respect of driving, they fail to understand the depth of damage that is caused—both to families and to the wider community—when there are so many deaths of young people in my constituency?

• 6 Jan 2026 · Cyber Security and Resilience (Network and Information Systems) Bill · Hansard source

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  Happy new year to you, Madam Deputy Speaker, your team and everyone else in the House. It is no overstatement to say that this is one of the most pressing issues of our time. I suspect that if we were not bringing forward this legislation it would only become apparent quite how pressing it had been when there was a major incident that lay it bare. I think it is one of the marks of successful government that we are, hopefully—I touch wood as I say this—managing to stay ahead of the curve on these incidents. There is nothing more important than national security relating to critical infrastructure. I think it is exactly what our constituents want to see us acting on, and I wish they saw more of us discussing issues on a cross-party basis, with broad agreement. It is welcome to see the Government taking these steps. I particularly want to discuss the enhanced incident reporting duties on the digital service providers and the duties to inform customers. In short, I have real concerns about how those duties will play out in practice. From my experience of having advised whistleblowers in the financial sector, when there are obligations of this nature, some corporations unfortunately make more effort to avoid complying with them than to comply with them. It is an excellent piece of legislation, and I am not suggesting that the Government should have drafted it in any other way, but we need to look at our whistleblowing laws alongside it, because at the moment we do not have strong enough protections for whistleblowers within UK law. That applies both inside and outside employment settings—for example in relation to contractors and other third parties. If we do not ensure that people have mechanisms by which they can anonymously report breaches of those sorts of obligations, and if we do not have the right protections for them when they are raising the concerns internally in the first place, we will not be able to make adequate use of the Bill’s excellent provisions. I want to impress upon the Minister how important it is that this legislation is looked at in that wider context. Also within the wider context is a broader debate—lots of us have touched on this without specifically identifying it—about how we balance the risk across society and the cost of the risk. It is about the risk to individuals, national security, individual businesses and individuals within those businesses, such as directors or other senior leaders. It is about how we ensure that in our country we do not have large tech companies, major data centres and other big private sector businesses taking economic benefits without carrying risk. We need those businesses and they are crucial to us, but we do not want them taking the economic benefits of operating in our advanced economy while the Government and therefore the taxpayer carry all the risk and burden of the regulation. It is great to see that the Bill contains provisions allowing for financial recovery in the enforcement action that we want to take. It is also fantastic that when it comes to the enforcement provisions and finances associated with it, we are looking at up to 4% of global turnover in terms of potential fines for not complying. My position as a former lawyer is always that I want to know that things are enforceable. There are good enforcement mechanisms in the Bill, and there is plenty of money that could potentially be at risk, which incentivises the kind of compliance that we want to see, but we need to look at the broader societal piece about how we balance the risks and opportunities in relation to tech in general. I was going to talk quite a bit about my concerns about my local public services and how they can better manage cyber-security. The Legal Aid Agency cyber-attack enabled criminals to steal the details of anyone who had applied for legal aid between 2007 and 2025. The scale of the financial risks to those individuals cannot be overstated; the amount of personal data that that involved was absolutely huge. Six out of 10 secondary schools are now subject to cyber-attacks. The Cheshire Cyber Security Programme is in place to help local small businesses manage their cyber-risk. It provides training for up to five members of staff in small businesses. Our local police powers are being used to try to take proactive steps to improve the situation for our local small businesses. Schools in academy trusts are spending quite a lot of money on cyber-insurance to try to protect against these risks. We have seen schools across the country shut down because they are unable to open following cyber-attacks. The public sector action plan that the Government published this morning is incredibly welcome in terms of cyber-risk, and I really look forward to the opportunity to go through it in more detail. We again need to look at the balance of cost within our society. I would like to add to the comments of those who have suggested that we should review the Computer Misuse Act 1990 and the lack of current protections for researchers doing important work in this area. We obviously have several institutions that are currently engaged in cyber-security work, including the Alan Turing Institute and the National Cyber Security Centre. We need to make sure that they have the right remit, because this area is only going to expand when the complexities of AI are added. We must ensure that everyone is protected to do their job effectively. That means protecting individuals, businesses and our wider society. Lastly, we need to move as quickly as we can on this. It is great that we are maintaining our EU alignment, because realistically the only way that we can continue to be a major player and have considerable influence over companies, many of which now have much larger budgets than major economies, is if we work in conjunction with other countries. That is what our ongoing relationship with the EU should be about. I thank everyone who has been involved with work on the Bill. I think it is excellent, and it is completely the right direction of travel. It is a shame that the Government doing the right thing every day does not get more publicity, even when it is not likely to grab many headlines. It is about doing the work, getting the right structures in place and moving forward productively in a cross-party way where possible. It is about securing our nation and ensuring that our economy is on a strong footing. There is everything to be said in favour of that.

• 11 Dec 2025 · National Plan to End Homelessness · Hansard source

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  I thank my hon. Friend for bringing forward this welcome strategy, to which I know she is personally committed. There is a long-term ambition in the strategy to reduce the number of days of school missed by children in temporary accommodation, but is there a specific target for that? On data transparency for children from more deprived backgrounds, will she set out in more detail how that will be achieved and in particular whether there is an ambition to have wider tracking of outcomes for these children—not just the number of school days lost but how many times they return to temporary accommodation in the course of their childhood?

• 10 Dec 2025 · Topical Questions · Hansard source

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  T5. There is a massive problem with childcare for mothers doing PhDs. Even if they are fully funded for their university research, essentially by the Government, they will not be eligible for free childcare hours and that affects both parents. The average PhD stipend is just £15,000 a year, but the average nursery place is £12,500 a year. Will the Minister look into that?

• 10 Dec 2025 · AI Safety · Hansard source

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  As a specialist equality lawyer, I am not currently aware of any cases in the UK around the kind of algorithmic bias that I am talking about. I would be delighted to see some, and delighted to see the Minister encouraging that, but I am not sure that the regulatory framework would achieve that at present.

• 10 Dec 2025 · AI Safety · Hansard source

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  Does the hon. Lady agree that we should be looking hard at the EU’s regulation in this area, and considering alignment and whether there might be points on which we would like to go further?