Sarah Russell MP: speeches

Speeches

• 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.

• 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.

• 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.

• 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?

• 4 Nov 2025 · Economic Growth: Congleton · Hansard source

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  I thank the Chancellor for her answer. In my constituency, Dane Valley Community Energy, a marvellous group of volunteers, has raised hundreds of thousands of pounds for solar panels on schools and other local buildings, including Daneside theatre and Havannah primary school. Unfortunately, recent Government guidance has suspended applications in respect of solar panels for schools. Will the Chancellor look at that guidance and work with Ministers in other Departments to review that outcome?

• 16 Oct 2025 · Ada Lovelace Day · Hansard source

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  It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Ms Furniss. I thank my hon. Friend the Member for Morecambe and Lunesdale (Lizzi Collinge) so much for securing this important debate. Other hon. Members have already outlined some fantastic initiatives to encourage women and girls in STEM. Such initiatives are so important. There is one in my constituency, at the all-girls Sandbach high school, which runs an extracurricular club called CAUC—Complete and Utter Chaos—for their female students. To be honest, it does not sound chaotic to me: together they design and build electric cars in the school’s workshop, and then race them against other schools at prestigious circuits around the country, including Silverstone. I have been and it is honestly phenomenal. They have this car building workshop, and it is just incredible. The aim of CAUC is to inspire and encourage female students to pursue careers in traditionally male-dominated industries. We know that, at the moment, only 14.5% of UK engineers are female. The club looks to expose its students to a unique hands-on learning opportunity and many of them have gone on to do STEM degrees and become engineers and have obtained placements, including with Bentley and an F1 racing team. They are doing great stuff. There is also the Jodrell Bank observatory in my constituency, which I truly love and have spoken about before—I should mention that a member of my immediate family works elsewhere within the University of Manchester. There are lots of fantastic women at Jodrell Bank doing groundbreaking research and discovery, and I want to recognise that Jodrell Bank has made active efforts to improve the percentage of women using its radio telescope with double-blind evaluation of applications for it. Having done that, female scientists now take up 50% of the telescope’s usage, which is fantastic and what we should all be aiming for. The point I want the Government to look at is that there is a massive problem with childcare for people doing PhD studentships. I do not regard childcare as exclusively women’s work, nor do I regard it as exclusively their financial cost to bear. None the less, if a person doing a PhD is a young woman wishing to have children, it takes years and it is quite likely to be within a time during which they might want to have kids. At the moment, if they do a fully funded PhD, paid for by the state, they are not eligible for free childcare hours within nursery settings. An average PhD stipend is £15,000, whereas an average full-time nursery place is £12,500 a year. People would be completely unable to live and parent on that sort of money. We should urgently change that. Dame Jocelyn Bell Burnell discovered radio pulsars during her PhD. We could be losing all kinds of talent by having that restriction.

• 15 Oct 2025 · Work for Serving Prisoners · Hansard source

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  My local women’s prison is HMP Styal, and my hon. Friend will be aware of the Clink Charity, which does work in developing people’s skills in hospitality. Its ability to operate in HMP Styal collapsed completely because, as there was such a shortage of prison officers, the women were locked up for so much of the time that it was simply unable to provide the service. In other prisons, the charity is being forced to retender for contracts on a commercial basis. It is a not-for-profit that was set up to do that work. I encourage the Minister—I wonder whether my hon. Friend agrees—to review whether contracting in the Ministry of Justice is really working as we need it to in that regard.

• 15 Sept 2025 · Children with SEND: Assessments and Support · Hansard source

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  I agree with my hon. Friend; in fact, that is a matter I will come on to. The distress I see within this system is staggering. I see parents making decisions about taking their children to school, when they suspect that the school place might be damaging for their child, but they also strongly suspect that not taking their child to school is damaging that child—that is a horrific position for parents and children to be placed in. I see two big points of problem in the system. The first is when children or their parents are seeking a diagnosis. In response to my survey, I heard from parents who had got into thousands of pounds—sometimes tens of thousands of pounds—of debt in seeking diagnoses for their children, because they were so desperate to get them some help. However, when they get that EHCP, after a great fight and sometimes legal confrontation, they often find that the support that it gives is not consistently maintained, despite schools doing their absolute best—I have never met a teacher who did not want to help children with special educational needs. Those parents are then incredibly distressed, and those children struggle to stay in school. The second difficulty, I find, occurs as their children get somewhat older: the parents have the diagnosis that they desperately wanted, but their teenage child’s mental health goes down sharply. At that point, they often find that a neurodivergent diagnosis is a hindrance to getting their children the mental health support that they need. That is shocking; it is appalling that people appear to think, on a widespread basis, that autism inherently involves anxiety, and therefore children with an autism diagnosis do not need support with their mental health. That is what I am hearing from parents in my constituency. I could give so many stories. I recently spoke to one parent who explained that her son had repeatedly gone missing from home. She has had referrals to CAMHS from the police, social services and other organisations, and her son is 13 years old and suicidal, but there is a two-year wait for a child’s mental health assessment in my constituency and he is not deemed to meet the threshold. This is life and death for our children, and it is really frightening. These parents are terrified; as my hon. Friend the Member for Oldham East and Saddleworth (Debbie Abrahams) mentioned, they are so frightened for their children that they cannot go to work and leave them unattended. I ask the Minister to please process as quickly as possible the applications for special schools at Westfields and Flag Lane Baths, previously flagged to her predecessor, my hon. Friend the Member for Newcastle upon Tyne North (Catherine McKinnell).

• 11 Sept 2025 · Regional Transport Inequality · Hansard source

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  I was quite tempted to stand up this afternoon and just say the word “pothole” over and over again for three solid minutes, as the peculiarity of such an approach might really bring home to the Minister, who I know has been doing his best on these matters, quite how strongly my constituents feel about the state of their roads. The Government did give Cheshire East several million pounds more in this year’s Budget to deal with road maintenance backlogs than in recent years, which was very much appreciated by my constituents. However, the reality is that 14 years of chronic underfunding has left my roads in a catastrophic state. I cannot emphasise enough how dark, dangerous and worrying rural roads are—the number of young people who die on the roads in my constituency is absolutely horrific. Similarly, I cannot emphasise enough that we need separate funding for significant safety upgrades, as well as a dramatic increase to the road maintenance pot as soon as the Government are able to do so. There is another matter concerning roads in my constituent that I want to draw attention to. Gritting might sound like a trivial thing to those living in an urban area, but gritting in rural areas is absolutely critical. Our roads get a lower level of use, and the result is that they freeze and stay frozen for longer periods of time. One impact of my local authority having had so many financial challenges over the past 14 years has been reductions in gritting. There are schools in my rural areas that have no pavements outside them, and the roads in front of them are completely and utterly ungritted. When those children are dropped off at school, they are put into a road—alongside cars—which has not been gritted at all. Headteachers do their best to mitigate the associated risks by not demanding that parents bring their children in on time, so the lack of safety features not only puts children at risk, but undermines their education. Let me contrast that with London, where automatic number plate recognition cameras help to shut roads off completely at specific times of day. I find it staggering that we have such a complete contrast in treatment. Of course, I want children in London to be safe; this is not about taking things away from London schools, but it is very much about children in my constituency, as well as older people and others, having the same access and safety as everyone else. Briefly, given that I have only 30 seconds left, I want to touch on Northern Rail and the complete lack of Sunday services in my constituency. The strikes have been going on for a year, and we desperately need the issue to be resolved. Sandbach station rail accessibility, including the lack of an accessible lift at the station, is a huge issue. I echo points made by colleagues about the importance of funding such things properly. Lastly, there has been a 67% reduction in buses in my local area over the past 15 years. We must improve on that desperate situation.

• 21 Jul 2025 · Extending the Ukraine Permission Extension Scheme · Hansard source

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  I thank the hon. Gentleman for giving way. He talks about children. There are children in my constituency who came here as very small children and have only ever been in the English education system. Their parents are deeply concerned about what will happen to them going forward, so it would be appropriate for us to look to put in place permanent measures as soon as humanly possible. I am sure he would also want to join me in thanking the host families in my constituency, who I am so proud of and grateful to, and Refugees Welcome, which continues to work to help Ukrainian families integrate in our community.