Sarah Russell MP: speeches

Speeches

• 15 Sept 2026 · Student Loans · Hansard source

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  One of my constituents has been in touch. He is a neonatal nutritionist and is paying a marginal tax rate on his loan of 57%. Does the Chair of the Treasury Committee agree that that is not an acceptable outcome socially and that we must have change?

• 3 Sept 2026 · Vaccination Rates: England · Hansard source

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  It is a pleasure to serve under your chairship, Mrs Barker. I thank my hon. Friends the Members for Uxbridge and South Ruislip (Danny Beales) and for Worthing West (Dr Cooper) and the hon. Member for Oxford West and Abingdon (Layla Moran) for securing this debate on such an important issue. I will attempt to talk about three different vaccinations in less than three minutes, but before I do that, I would like to say a huge thank you to Congleton Rotary, which recently raised over £1,000 towards polio vaccination. That is such an important topic. First, it is completely unacceptable that the UK lost its measles-free status this year. We know that it can be a devastating disease for anyone who is unvaccinated, but it is especially dangerous for babies, young people, pregnant women and anyone with a weakened immune system. We have relied on herd immunity for a very long time, and we no longer have the percentage required to have that. During the last major outbreak in central and eastern Cheshire, nearly a quarter of the cases were in the under-ones. Our babies depend on the rest of us having vaccinations, because otherwise they are profoundly vulnerable. We must work to get that rate back up again. Only 90% of children in Cheshire East had received both doses of the MMR vaccine by their fifth birthday. We must work harder on that, and I would welcome any progress that the Government can bring, including by addressing the legacy of missed appointments during the covid pandemic. The second vaccination that I want to talk about is cervical cancer. Every year, 3,300 women are still being diagnosed despite the take-up of the HPV vaccine among younger women, and around 685 women a year are losing their lives to the disease. The recent study mentioned by my hon. Friend the Member for Bury St Edmunds and Stowmarket (Dr Prinsley) shows that the risk of cervical cancer death before the age of 30 has effectively reduced to zero—the HPV vaccine is amazing. Our goal as a Government is to eliminate cervical cancer by 2040, which would be fantastic, and we have a 90% target vaccination rate for girls. In Cheshire East, the vaccination rate at the moment is 77.4% of girls but only 72% of boys. For some reason, we do not have a target for boys, but boys are also vulnerable to the equivalent cancers, and they absolutely need and deserve the same protection as girls. Why are we not making sure that they also have these targets? Lady Garden Foundation research found that over 45% of eligible girls who missed their school HPV vaccination did so because a consent form was not returned. Active parental refusal apparently accounts for just 12% of the failure rate. As a parent, I do not want vaccination to be forced on anybody, of course, but lifetime consent would make life so much easier. Why am I being asked every single time? Unless a child’s health status has changed, there is really no reason to withdraw vaccination consent. I believe we could make that much easier. Lastly, Cheshire has so many people in hospital with flu each year, so I remind everybody of the importance of vaccinating children against flu, to protect both them and their elderly relatives over Christmas. I thank the Minister and the Health and Social Care Committee, and I hope we can move this forward.

• 3 Sept 2026 · Children in the Social Care System: England · Hansard source

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  I thank my hon. Friend for that introduction to the Select Committee’s work. I have a particular concern, having met with the National Association of Child Contact Centres this week, about the ability of children in social care to continue to have supervised and appropriate contact with wider family members, particularly in the context of wanting children to see more of their siblings, which everyone would absolutely welcome. My concern is that contact centres have been closing at a huge rate. Is that something that we have tracking information on? Could we look at perhaps using family hubs as locations to resolve that issue?

• 14 Jul 2026 · Public Office (Accountability) Bill · Hansard source

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  I join my many colleagues in paying tribute to the Hillsborough families—those in the Gallery today, and those who, for very understandable reasons, felt that they could not be here. Your quest for justice is truly inspirational to all of us, and I thank you so very much for your perseverance and everything you have done. I do not doubt that it will make the country a better place. Many people have raised concerns about the duty of candour in this legislation, and its application to the security services. I am sure that when the right hon. and learned Member for Kenilworth and Southam (Sir Jeremy Wright) raised this issue in the Chamber, he did so in good faith, but no one who has raised those concerns has been able to point to any case in which the existing law protecting the security services and the secret information that they hold has actually failed, or to any problems resulting from the existing arrangements. Those concerns seem to be entirely hypothetical. Giving the security services a huge carve-out from the duty of candour when there were known problems with, for example, the evidence given to the inquiry on the Manchester Arena bombing seems completely unsustainable and unreasonable. There is literally no evidence to suggest that this Bill presents any risk to national security. I join my colleagues in saying that if there were evidence to suggest that the existing arrangements had ever failed us, many of us would think again about the drafting of this Bill, as it has been presented by the Government. We would all put the country first, but I cannot see anything that should prevent this law from going ahead as drafted. It is so important to get to the truth, and I hope that the duty of candour will help to move things forward significantly. We owe it to the Hillsborough families, and the many families affected by the many other disasters that we sadly hear about too often in this place, to ask the other question: what comes next? That is why I rise to speak in support of new clauses 5 and 6, tabled by my hon. Friend the Member for Hammersmith and Chiswick (Andy Slaughter), through which he calls for a national oversight mechanism that follows up on the actions taken by public authorities in response to the conclusions and recommendations of inquests and inquiries. We must get to the truth, and we must have recommendations on how to avoid future catastrophes, disasters and unnecessary risk, but we then have to do something to stop those things happening again. At the moment, prevention of future death reports and inquiry reports are all too often not followed up—or not followed up consistently across the board. All too often, including after the Ockenden report and the maternity scandals, systemic change has not followed from inquiry recommendations, despite the considerable resources and effort put in by individuals to improve systems. We think about justice for the Hillsborough families, the Grenfell families and many other families who have sadly lost loved ones in terrible circumstances, but we must make sure that we bring into play the mechanisms that ensure proper follow-up after all these disasters. We must follow through on inquiry outcomes, and ensure that the right mechanisms are in place. I thank very much everyone who has worked to get us to where we are today—the many families, but also the Members of Parliament who have worked across party and for a great deal of time on bringing this legislation forward. Let us keep this work going.