Tom Gordon MP: speeches

Speeches

• 4 Jun 2026 · Violence against Women and Girls · Hansard source

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  Does the Solicitor General agree that public confidence in the justice system and supporting victims is crucial to improving prosecution rates for violence against women and girls? What further actions is she taking with the CPS to reassure victims that sexual offences such as rape and other crimes are robustly prosecuted and treated with the gravity they deserve, and that justice will be delivered for victims?

• 4 Jun 2026 · Violence against Women and Girls · Hansard source

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

• 4 Jun 2026 · Access to Nature · Hansard source

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  Earlier this year, children from Pannal primary school went to their forest school in Sandy Bank woods, only to find that the path was cordoned off and trees had been felled. What steps is the Minister taking with her colleagues in the Department for Education and the Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government to ensure primary schools have access to forest schools all year round?

• 4 Jun 2026 · Pride Month · Hansard source

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  I sit alongside the hon. Member on the Joint Committee on Human Rights, and he does phenomenal work there, including on the code of practice and the issues that he is outlining. Does he agree that it is worrying that whenever anyone in this House or outside this place tries to defend trans people, we see transphobia slip into homophobia and other languages of hate? The same tropes are being used against other people, in hopes of shutting them up. Does he share my concerns about the chilling effect that has on our democracy and the rights of LGBT people in the UK?

• 4 Jun 2026 · Pride Month · Hansard source

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  I am sure the hon. Gentleman looks fantastic when he turns up to Pride events in the glad rags that I am sure he wears. An interesting thing happened to me a few weeks back when I went for dinner at my mum’s. My little niece was there with my middle sister. My middle sister and I have a very interesting relationship; we do not get along very well. With me, I had a friend—a Liberal Democrat member, who was off out knocking on doors ahead of the local elections—and my little niece, who is at primary school, turned to me and said, “Is that your friend or partner?”. It was an incredibly poignant moment for me, and I thought, “Gosh, I may not necessarily see eye to eye with my sister, but she’s done a good job raising her kid.” Does my hon. Friend agree that the world is a better place when kids have an open mind and can ask such questions, and are inquisitive and not hateful?

• 4 Jun 2026 · Pride Month · Hansard source

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  Will the hon. Lady give way?

• 4 Jun 2026 · High Street Businesses: Government Support · Hansard source

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  Whenever we talk about high streets, we think primarily about town centres, but there are smaller communities and sub-neighbourhoods, such as Bilton and Starbeck in my Harrogate and Knaresborough constituency—and even Kings Road, just a little further outside the town centre—that often miss out on support from the likes of the local chamber of commerce or business improvement district. Does the Minister think there should be additional measures for those that struggle because they are a little further from the town centre?

• 4 Jun 2026 · Home-to-School Transport · Hansard source

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  I beg to move, That this House has considered home-to-school transport. It is a pleasure to serve under your chairship, Mr Twigg, and I am grateful for having secured this important debate. At its core, home-to-school transport is a simple promise: where a child cannot reasonably walk to school, transport will not be a barrier to their education. However, that promise is under serious strain. Across the country, and acutely in North Yorkshire, families are finding that promise being broken by policy changes that are short-sighted, poorly designed and, in many cases, deeply unfair. The national picture is stark; the Public Accounts Committee published its report on home-to-school transport in March, and its conclusions make for uncomfortable reading.

• 4 Jun 2026 · Home-to-School Transport · Hansard source

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  I thank the hon. Member for his contribution. As ever, he puts his point eloquently and passionately. I agree that, no matter where a SEND child is living in this United Kingdom, they deserve a lot better than they are getting at the moment. I want to press the Minister on a number of specific points. The single most impactful achievable change that this Government could make is also the simplest. The statutory guidance on home-to-school transport should be updated so that the minimum provision becomes the nearest or catchment school, rather than solely the nearest suitable school. That one change would restore the alignment between admissions and transport that rural families depend on. It would give councils a clear framework and remove the incentive to reinterpret eligibility ever more narrowly. It would protect the community-school relationships that anchor rural life, and it would not even require primary legislation. I urge the Minister to give that serious consideration. Secondly, I urge the Minister to impress on her colleagues at the Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government the need to reinstate the rural services delivery grant. The rural premium matters enormously for local authorities such as North Yorkshire, where distances are not a policy choice, but a geographical fact. Cutting that grant has had real consequences for the decisions that local authorities have to make, and those consequences are being borne by families in villages across the dales, across my constituency of Harrogate and Knaresborough, and in North Yorkshire more widely.

• 4 Jun 2026 · Home-to-School Transport · Hansard source

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  It came to my attention that a freedom of information request to North Yorkshire council uncovered emails that suggested that the Conservative leader of the council was suggesting that there should not be more than one Liberal Democrat sitting on any of the council’s appeal panels. Does the right hon. Member agree that we need full transparency to understand what has been going on there and how the council might have been looking to fix who sits on those appeal panels?

• 4 Jun 2026 · Home-to-School Transport · Hansard source

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  I have been campaigning since before I was elected to get the special school for autism in Bilton Woodfield reopened. The situation has now been dragging on for years. Does my hon. Friend agree that we need to see North Yorkshire council, the trust that has now been appointed and the DFE work together to get that open on time for this September?

• 4 Jun 2026 · Home-to-School Transport · Hansard source

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  This has been an involved and thoughtful discussion. I appreciate the cross-party support for this issue across the Chamber; it is one of the few areas where the right hon. Members for Skipton and Ripon (Sir Julian Smith) and for Richmond and Northallerton (Rishi Sunak) and I see relatively eye to eye. I appreciate them both turning up today to make this case to the Conservative-run North Yorkshire council. It was, as always, fantastic to hear from the hon. Member for Thurrock (Jen Craft) on the work she does around disabled children and SEND. She is one of the best voices I have heard in this place on those subjects. Hearing from my hon. Friend the Member for Eastbourne (Josh Babarinde) regarding the horrendous situation he outlined and Lewis being physically restrained is heart- breaking. I hope he gets a solution and the accountability that is needed. I appreciate the Minister’s response. I would love it if she could be open to the further conversation she mentioned and make sure we can rule out things such as the nearest available walking routes to schools including river and motorway crossings and so on. There might be something in the statutory guidance that we could tease out to put some prohibitions on those things being part of those calculations. Question put and agreed to. Resolved , That this House has considered home-to-school transport.

• 4 Jun 2026 · Home-to-School Transport · Hansard source

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  I thank the right hon. Gentleman for that point. It is one of the things on which we absolutely agree. I would like to see all parties and especially the governing party put that problem right. As I said, cutting the grant has had real consequences for the decisions that councils make. Thirdly, we need to see expansion of the statutory minimum more broadly. The current system, which involves a 2-mile walking distance for primary, 3 miles for secondary and a duty that ends at age 16, was designed for a different era and different pattern of schooling. Where school systems have been reorganised, specialist provision has been concentrated and rural bus networks have been allowed to decline, the statutory floor is no longer fit for purpose. Fourthly, will the Minister confirm that the Government will make data collection on home-to-school transport mandatory, as the PAC recommended? We cannot improve what we do not measure. Voluntary, inconsistent data collection across more than 100 local authorities is not a sufficient basis on which to run a £2.6 billion spending commitment. The Department needs a proper baseline if it is ever to hold local authorities to account and drive genuine improvement. Home-to-school transport is not a niche issue. It sits at the intersection of SEND, rural sustainability, school attendance, the cost of living and the long-term viability of rural communities. In rural England, school buses are not a luxury, but essential infrastructure. Families across rural communities such as those in North Yorkshire are not asking for special treatment. They are asking for a system that works, keeps their children safe, keeps them in school and does not price them out of the education to which they are legally entitled. There should not be a rural tax on education. That is not too much to ask, and I hope the Minister agrees.

• 4 Jun 2026 · Home-to-School Transport · Hansard source

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  I thank my hon. Friend for her diligent work as a member of the PAC, and for making that point about SEND, which I will come on to during my speech. Local authorities in England spent £2.6 billion on home-to-school transport in 2024-25, which was a real-terms increase of 70% since 2015-16. SEND transport alone more than doubled in cost over that same period, and it now accounts for £2 billion of that total. These are enormous sums, but remarkably, the PAC found that the Department for Education does not know whether this spending is achieving value for money. It does not have the data needed to oversee the system effectively, and it cannot adequately measure the relationship between transport and school attendance. The consequences of that failure are visible in other figures: some 1 million young people in the UK are not in education, employment or training, and one in five children of compulsory school age misses at least a day of school per fortnight, which rises to one in three at sixth-form age. The Department’s own assessment looks only at transport disruptions on the day they occur, not the wider issue of whether the system is keeping children in school. This is a serious blind spot, and one that the Government need to address. This is not just a North Yorkshire problem; the County Councils Network has warned that three quarters of councils are expected to tighten mainstream transport eligibility in the coming years. What is happening in my constituency today, and across North Yorkshire, is a preview of what families across rural England will face if this direction of travel is not reversed. Nowhere is the picture more stark than in some of the stories that my constituents have told me, which is why I secured this debate today. At the heart of the problem is a growing disconnect between two systems that are supposed to work together but increasingly do not. We have a school admissions system built around catchment areas and feeder school relationships, and a home-to-school transport framework that has been interpreted ever more narrowly as being for the “nearest school only”. For many years, county councils bridged that gap pragmatically by offering transport to the nearest or catchment school. That reflects the realities of rural England, where many children live well beyond walking distance, where public transport is sparse or often non-existent, and where the geography means that the nearest school on the map is often not the most practical school to reach—sometimes there is a dale in the way, sometimes a river crossing, and sometimes a simple county boundary that bears no relation to how communities actually function. As budgets tighten and authorities retreat towards the statutory minimum provision, councils are removing catchment transport and reverting to nearest school only. In rural areas like North Yorkshire, the consequences are severe and they are being felt right now. Within days of being elected, the issue of home-to-school transport was landing in my email inbox, and it has not stopped since. North Yorkshire council changed its transport policy to base eligibility on nearest school only, rather than the nearest or catchment school. The council says this is to address rising costs, which are now expected to exceed £52 million—one of the three largest areas of the council’s expenditure—with unsubstantiated claims of savings of up to £3 million over the next seven years. I understand budgetary pressures, and I understand that local authorities are being squeezed from every direction, but understanding a pressure does not simply mean accepting the response to it uncritically, when the policy is clearly not working. The system that North Yorkshire council uses to calculate the nearest school is not publicly available, so families receive decisions with no ability to interrogate the methodology behind them. That opacity alone is a problem, but when we look at what the methodology is actually producing, it becomes something worse than opaque; it becomes absurd. The council measures distance using the shortest available walked route to school, which sounds reasonable until we look at what counts as a “walked route”. That includes riverside paths, farm tracks, roads with no pavements or street lights, cliffside grass tracks and hiking paths over the dales. Campaigners have discovered that the council’s mapping tool has even been thought to include a private farm track and a ford crossing of a river as an available walking route to school. In reality, the ford is passable only by tractor and the track is on private land. One family appealed successfully against the use of the route, but it remains on the council’s mapping system, ready to be used again. The School Transport Action Group has documented routes that children have been expected to follow, including climbing over metal barriers on the A64 and using paths that cross an active military firing range. I am interested to hear the Minister’s view of whether any of those constitute a “nearest available walked route”, in North Yorkshire council’s words. STAG, which was formed to fight the changes, has done determined and important work in documenting the human and financial cost of the policy. I pay particular tribute to Jo Foster, whose campaigning on the issue has been tireless and has helped bring the national attention that it warrants. STAG puts the situation plainly: “North Yorkshire Council has lost the plot on home to school transport”, and I am inclined to agree. More than 1,000 families have been affected, with more than 200 appeals and 20 ombudsman cases in the past year alone. A senior councillor who voted for this very policy has publicly admitted that it contains errors, and some families have been left as losers. This is not a rounding error; it is a clear policy failure. STAG has completed a survey of families going through the process right now, the class of 2026. The group has 60 responses so far, and the findings are telling: nearly 59% applied to a school because it was their catchment school, more than a third already had siblings there, and 84% live in towns and villages that have a school bus going to their chosen catchment school, yet 73% will not be eligible for free transport. Nearly two thirds of those families have no back-up plan at all. Some have told STAG what their options look like in practice. One parent said: “My back-up plan is to leave my job so I can drive my child to school.” Another said: “We would have to consider driving, but we both travel with work and it wouldn’t allow us to do our current jobs.” A single parent wrote: “I would not be able to work. I am a single parent household.” One parent captured the particular absurdity of sibling cases: “I shall have to take extra overtime at work in order to pay for my second child to sit on a bus that my eldest child is already on.” Those families who plan to buy a paid-for bus pass face a further cruelty. Those passes will not be confirmed until August. They will be subject to availability and can be withdrawn with one week’s notice. The council has made it clear that its intention is to phase out catchment routes entirely, as soon as possible. Families are therefore being asked to plan their working lives around a service that may not exist by the time that their child starts secondary school. Those are not edge cases; they are predictable, documented consequences of a policy that has stripped the transport system away from the admissions system it is supposed to support. The costs have not disappeared; they have simply been transferred from the council to the rural families who can least afford them. Council officers have described the changes as ensuring “fairness and consistency”, but I will put some individual stories on the record and let Members judge that for themselves. Leanne lives in a village outside Harrogate. Her daughter has been waiting three and a half years for a diagnosis, but is on the SEN register and has a PDA—pathological demand avoidance—profile with emotional-based school avoidance. There is no public bus through her village and no safe walking route. Leanne’s other child has Down’s syndrome and an education, health and care plan, and cannot travel to school safely alone. Both children need to be at school at the same time; Leanne and her husband both work full time. Under the new policy, they have been denied free transport to the nearest suitable school and are now paying £94 a month for a bus permit. She told me: “The system is broken and does not take into account personal circumstances or rural villages’ needs.” I agree with her entirely. David lives in Upper Wharfedale. Every morning he drives in convoy with his neighbours, following the school bus past his house, because his neighbours qualified under the old policy, but he did not. For him, the bus goes to the nearest primary school, the only school that anyone in the local area has attended for 60 years, along the only safe route available. North Yorkshire council, however, is now saying that his children’s nearest school is Hawes, in Wensleydale. To get there, they would have to cross Fleet Moss, one of the highest and most remote routes in the country, which is treacherous in winter and frequently impassable. David and his family moved to the dales five years ago to run a farm diversification scheme, but they would never have come had this policy been in place then. He has told me that it will be “the death of these communities, and that’s not hyperbole.” I believe him. Sophie, a friend I went to high school and college with, lives in one of the villages straddling multiple local authority boundaries, with a Doncaster postcode, North Yorkshire council oversight, an East Yorkshire postal address and a West Yorkshire phone number. Her children’s primary school cohort has been scattered across four secondary schools, in different local authorities and in four different directions. She made the point with her characteristic directness: it cannot possibly be more cost-effective to fund transport to four separate schools in four different directions than it would be to fund one bus to one school. The policy is not just unfair to families, but undermining the purpose that it is meant to be achieving. There is also a wider consequence that is often not discussed. One in four small primary schools in North Yorkshire stands to lose pupils because of this policy. Small secondary schools in Settle, Whitby and Boroughbridge face an existential threat. When we hollow out the transport routes that sustain these schools, we do not just inconvenience rural families, but undermine the schools themselves and the rural communities they serve. I also want to raise the issue facing SEND families specifically, and the additional injustice of a cliff edge at 16. I want to tell this Chamber about Noah, whose mother Catherine has shared his story with me. Noah deferred starting primary school by a year because he was unable to walk. After winning an appeal to attend St John’s, North Yorkshire council offset that deferred year and placed him in year 8. The consequence— I want colleagues to sit with this for a moment—is that Noah will now receive one fewer year of education than his peers, and four years of free transport rather than five because his transport entitlement ends at 16. He has already had more taken from him than other children, through no fault of his own, and the system’s response is to take even more. Noah cannot walk independently and requires one-to-one support. His taxi to school has become the highlight of his day because it is the one moment where he does not feel dependent on his mum—when he can feel something like freedom. His family have one income, claim universal credit and have little to no savings; they cannot find the money needed to pay the monthly costs for school transport. When Noah turns 18, the assumption is that his mum will simply be able to drive him because she has a Motability vehicle, which will strip away his independence that took so long to build. This is not a bureaucratic edge case; the system does this to families like Noah’s without apology. That is not an isolated experience. The Public Accounts Committee found that 40% of families with young people with SEND said that they needed to give up work because of transport provision ending when their child turned 16. Colleges report students failing to start courses because transport had not been agreed. I believe that there was an issue across the border in Leeds, where the Local Government and Social Care Ombudsman has already found the council at fault for its approach to post-16 SEND transport, identifying both individual injustice and systemic failure. However, families continue to report inconsistent decisions, inadequate assessments and personal travel allowances that do not cover the actual costs. The charity Contact put it clear in evidence to PAC: the policy is simply not working post 16. The change in entitlement can feel like a cliff edge. For families who have spent years building routines and supporting a young person with complex needs, that cliff edge can be devastating for the young person and for every member of their family around them. We cannot have a system that claims to support inclusion and participation while simultaneously pulling the transport that makes participation possible.

• 4 Jun 2026 · Russian Attacks on Civilian Infrastructure · Hansard source

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  The latest attacks by Russia should be condemned in the strongest terms. Russia has rightly been made a pariah on the international stage for its ongoing invasion of Ukraine and the crimes associated with it, but it is slowly slinking its way back into cultural and sporting events, such as last month when Eurovision boss Martin Green said that Russia could return to the stage while the war in Ukraine continues. What steps will the Government take with their international allies and across Departments to ensure that such normalisation and rehabilitation of Russia’s image is not allowed while egregious breaches of international law and war crimes continue?

• 3 Jun 2026 · Seasonal Hospitality Businesses in Coastal Areas · Hansard source

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  The visitor levy is the wrong policy at the wrong time, as the hon. Gentleman puts it, and I have discussed it with UKHospitality. Does he agree that we need to stop this tax, at the same time as cutting VAT? If we do not, we will end up with an effective VAT rate on hospitality and tourism businesses of 27%, which, compared with the rates in Ireland and Germany, for example, at 9% and 7% respectively, is just not competitive.

• 2 Jun 2026 · Topical Questions · Hansard source

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  Last September, I met the Minister for Energy Consumers, the hon. Member for Inverclyde and Renfrewshire West (Martin McCluskey), to discuss those who have been adversely impacted by incorrectly installed spray foam insulation. Has the Department considered remediation or support for those affected?

• 1 Jun 2026 · Equality Act 2010: Code of Practice · Hansard source

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  I am really appalled, frankly, with the response from the official Opposition. Just a few Prime Ministers ago, Theresa May said: “Indeed when it comes to rights and protections for trans people, there is still a long way to go.” Well, how far the Tory party has fallen from those words. As a member of the Joint Committee on Human Rights, I attended the evidence session when we interviewed the new chair of the EHRC, and for the Minister to say that that was an independent process when the Government rammed it through despite cross-party consensus that the new chair was not fit for the role is, quite frankly, surprising. I also want to pick up on the fact that the Minister said that we should “treat these issues sensitively”. Today is the start of Pride Month. To do this today, of all days, is not just a kick in the teeth but a slap in the face for LGBT people across this country. I want to know what the Minister would say to my constituents who have told me how they have been challenged in toilets because they live their lives as trans people already, before this guidance was put forward. Why does she think this will make it any better? What basis does she have for that suggestion?

• 1 Jun 2026 · Health Bill · Hansard source

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  Obviously, the Secretary of State has just outlined a huge raft of changes that are coming with the abolition of NHS England and everything else that goes with that. Last year, families and MPs got the inquiry into the Tees, Esk and Wear Valleys health trust—the mental health trust in the north of England that had been failing. My worry is that a chair of that inquiry was meant already to be in place. Will that inquiry now be lost amid all the changes to the healthcare system? Will the Secretary of State commit to meeting the families of those affected by the TEWV scandal, and will he get a chair in place as soon as possible?

• 1 Jun 2026 · Health Bill · Hansard source

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  Will the Secretary of State give way on that point?

• 1 Jun 2026 · Health Bill · Hansard source

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  Will the Secretary of State give way on that point?

• 1 Jun 2026 · Health Bill · Hansard source

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  Will the Secretary of State give way on that point?

• 19 May 2026 · Lord Mandelson: Government Response to Humble Address · Hansard source

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  I add to the comments by my hon. Friend the Member for Edinburgh West (Christine Jardine). The Minister outlined a date this week that the information could have been published, so why can he not commit to a timetable so we can hold him to account? That is the key point. This whole grubby saga has highlighted why the public do not seem to think that the ministerial code and responsibility in government count for anything any more. As a lesson from this grubby saga, will the Minister bring forward legislation to make the ministerial code binding and ensure consequences, so that action is taken when Ministers fall short and do not honour their end of the deal?

• 19 May 2026 · High Speed 2 Reset · Hansard source

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  I thank the Secretary of State for her statement. It is outrageous to hear about the waste, with money thrown away by successive Conservative Governments. Even now, the eye-watering level of money required to reset HS2 grates on people up in Yorkshire and the north, where the northern legs were cancelled. We also get comparatively less funding per head for transport than counterparts in the south. Does she agree that the small amount of money to be saved from reducing the scope and speed would be better spent on schemes such as Northern Powerhouse Rail and reinstating the York area capacity scheme, estimated at only around £150 million, which would unlock the bottleneck at York station and deliver benefit across the north?

• 18 May 2026 · Youth Justice · Hansard source

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  On Friday, I was at Leeds Trinity University and met with a group of future teachers. They were talking about the exclusion-to-offending pipeline in our schools, and the challenges in meeting the needs of SEND children. Will the Secretary of State elaborate further on what tangible steps his Department will take with the DFE to get this right?