Zubir Ahmed MP: speeches

Speeches

• 15 Sept 2026 · Immigration and Asylum Bill (First sitting) · Hansard source

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  Q Mr Featonby, thank you, and your counterparts at the Scottish Refugee Council, for the work you do to look after the vulnerable; we are very grateful. Of course, that work can go on only if there is public confidence in the system. As you know, applications have risen steadily since 2021. From your perspective, what is the urgency for a change in the legislation to return the trust and confidence in the system that have been eroded over the last few years? Jon Featonby: There are definitely some positive signs that the Government should be quite proud of. Around the time of the election, we published a report that looked at the state of the asylum system. We described it as a “system in meltdown”, largely caused by the Illegal Migration Act 2023, which had seen productivity in the Home Office drop to its lowest level since the height of the covid pandemic. Since then, the Home Office has done a much better job of being able to make decisions quickly. The latest statistics we have show that about 75% of initial decisions are made within six months of somebody making an application. That is a good thing. We think some Government priority should be given to how you make sure that people have confidence in the asylum system. That system needs to be doing its basics right: making decisions as quickly as it can that are right the first time; supporting refugees who are found to be in need of protection to get on with their lives, rebuild their lives and contribute fully to UK communities; and providing a way for people who are found to be not in need of protection to be removed safely and humanely. That is where we see some challenges in the Bill. We do not think it addresses some of that context. The previous panels touched on how the backlog in the asylum system is now at the appeals stage, which is an almost inevitable consequence of dealing with the initial decision backlog. There will be more decisions and therefore more refusals, and therefore more people will go into that appeals process. There are probably three times as many people in the appeals backlog as in the asylum backlog itself. Some of that will work its way through the system as the Government get more on top of the asylum system—what officials refer to as having friction within the asylum system—where the number of decisions they are making is roughly the same as the number of people entering the system. As a result of the speeding-up of decision making in recent years, we have also seen a reduction in the quality of some decisions, which we think has put unnecessary pressure on the tribunal and left people stuck in the asylum system, and in accommodation, for longer than they should be, at cost to the taxpayer and to those individuals. That is borne out by the appeals statistics that we now get from the first-tier tribunal, which show that in the last year, in two thirds of appeals that were disposed of, either the tribunal granted the appeal or—as is increasingly the case—the initial decision was withdrawn by the Home Office, because once the appeal got towards the tribunal hearing the Home Office found that it was not going to be able to defend the decision. That is why we think there should be a laser focus on initial decision making and on what else can be done to reduce the appeals backlog. One of our concerns around the IIAA is that the appeals backlog is an urgent problem that needs to be dealt with now, but the best case scenario is probably that the IIAA starts to hear some cases at the back end of next year. It may well be the next election before the IIAA is really up and running. We think that more urgent things could be done without having to rip up the entire tribunal system as it currently is.

• 11 Sept 2026 · Terminally Ill Adults (End of Life) Bill · Hansard source

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  I am grateful to my hon. Friend for mentioning the Scottish context. We voted down such legislation on Third Reading, when we understood the impacts and the wider societal ramifications. I have to be honest. When I am asked to prognosticate on whether someone has six months to live, I am as often wrong as I am right. It is no longer a good enough marker for the DWP to use in discharging benefits for life-limiting conditions, and I do not see why it should be a good enough marker for prescribing death. There is another paradox in this legislation: someone like me could write a prescription to induce death with less regulatory oversight than is on me when I have to remove a kidney to give life through transplantation. Of course, I sympathise with and endorse the desire of many colleagues who support this Bill to relieve suffering. To be clear, we have many tools to do this, and we must bust some myths today. Clinical discretion, for instance, means that there is no maximum dose of morphine, so I can give my patients whatever they need, in the setting in which they need it. But this Bill is less about relieving suffering and more about bypassing its possibility, and I understand that. The Bill is in many ways advocating for death as prophylaxis. Under the definition in this Bill, death must be induced by medical prescription. It will be the only medical prescription that I will be able to write as a doctor but not administer, because the burden of administration falls to the patient, and the weight of expectation falls on the patient. We must discuss the mechanisms by which death will occur: muscle paralysis, slowing of the heart rate, sedation, and the possibility that paralysis will take hold before sedation does. Death will not be an event; it will still be a process. In 15% of cases, it will be subject to some form of complication, such as vomiting or seizures, and it will not always achieve its goal. I wish I could give hon. Members more information about the complication profile, but despite this procedure being prevalent in other jurisdictions across the world, the data continues to be woefully lacking. Alongside that, the 14-day cooling off period means that the patient must remain lucid in that time. There have been cases elsewhere in the world where patients have denied themselves palliative care and pain relief to remain lucid in order to consent to their death. I am therefore of the opinion that the foundational elements of this Bill will create the allure of choice and control, but not the agency to pursue either. Turning to safeguards, much is made of the provision requiring two doctors to assess eligibility, but the trouble is that neither has to know the patient well, or go to any great lengths to exclude the likelihood of coercion. Doctors are trained to do many things, but assessing and picking up on coercion is not one of them. In fact, consultant psychiatrists with PhDs in coercion, like the hon. Member for Runnymede and Weybridge (Dr Spencer), whom I hope we will hear from soon, have said in written testimony presented in court that they would find it difficult to exclude coercive controlling behaviour. I came into medicine, and into Parliament, to act with compassion, and to provide dignity to those we serve. I believe that is why we are all here. Compassion and kindness is not the preserve of one those on one side of the argument or another, but for me, compassion and kindness also calls to courage—the courage to be honest with patient and constituent alike. We need the compassion and honesty to say that the Bill will not fulfil its aims; it will disappoint many who crave total agency and control, and it will expose and disenfranchise further the vulnerable in our society. We need the compassion and honesty to say that our NHS, while a great institution, is not, in its current form and state, ready. It is not safe for this conversation or for this Bill in this moment.

• 10 Sept 2026 · Vascular Sector Reform · Hansard source

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  It is a pleasure to serve under your chairship, Dr Huq. I welcome the Minister, my hon. Friend the Member for Bury North (Mr Frith), to his place—he knows that I was in his place not too long ago, and I will be kind to him in my asks. I also welcome the Opposition spokesperson, the hon. Member for Solihull West and Shirley (Dr Shastri-Hurst), who is a former orthopaedic surgeon, so he knows a thing or two about the blood vessels that run around the bones of the body. It feels like a unique privilege for me to stand here today as the Member of Parliament for Glasgow South West—where we have one of the largest hospitals in the country—a trained vascular surgeon, and a former Minister who was partly involved in bringing forward the cardiovascular modern service framework when I was in post. Vascular surgery was my bread and butter when I was a surgeon. There is no greater feeling for a surgeon and their team than returning blood flow to the limb—usually a lower limb—of a patient with critical limb ischemia, preventing them from undergoing a near-certain amputation, and watching them walk out of hospital. That is usually the culmination of many years of surgical training. I shall take this opportunity, because I may never get it again as a parliamentarian, to thank those who trained me and many like me in the west of Scotland and enabled us to acquire and practise those skills: people like George Welch, Wesley Stuart, Keith Hussey, David Kingsmore, David Wallace and Steven Boom, and colleagues in the Public Gallery such as my good friend Tamim Siddiqui, a consultant vascular surgeon in the west of Scotland. I am biased, but I believe that the west of Scotland vascular surgery is a cut above the rest, although other vascular surgeons are available in the Public Gallery. One of the reasons I think the west of Scotland vascular surgeons are a cut above the rest is that, unfortunately, our area suffers from some of the highest burdens of vascular disease in the country. That is reflected in the statistics more widely. In Scotland, life expectancy and healthy life expectancy are going down, having steadily increased from 1980 until about 2012. We now have some of the lowest life expectancy rates anywhere in western Europe. We have to reflect on why that is. Scotland spends more on its NHS and has more staff and resource relative to the rest of the country, yet productivity is lower. Scottish hospitals are treating fewer patients now than before the pandemic, unlike English hospitals, which have surpassed pre-pandemic activity levels under the Labour Government. We have to reflect on where the political failure lies. On behalf of my constituents in Glasgow South West, it is only responsible to reference the fact that the SNP Government have proposed a massive restructuring of Scotland’s NHS, seemingly without any detailed consultation with anyone. It is not clear who that structural change serves, how much it will cost, or how we can judge its success or failure. I urge the Minister, who also has responsibility for four-nation engagement, to ask the Scottish Government how we can help to reverse the trend by imparting our wisdom and what we have learned over the last couple of years about turning around waiting lists and optimising clinical pathways. We have become habituated to the idea that there is a physical border between Scotland and England that cannot be transcended, whereas I believe that we can co-operate and problem solve instead of point scoring. I urge the Minister to lend the weight of his office so that patients near the border can benefit from services each way and do not have to travel 80 or 100 miles to receive services simply for lack of political will. I shall be grateful if he does that and writes to me about the outcome. Will the Minister consider the asks from the Circulation Foundation and the APPG, with which I have done some work in the recent past? As we all know, diabetes is unfortunately on the rise. Synonymous with diabetes is diabetic foot, which is now the primary cause of limb loss in this country. A concerted effort is required because early intervention on a diabetic foot can prevent major limb amputation. I ask the Minister that we think about the national foot attack pathway, with a same-day or next-day triage service for urgent cases that enables much quicker treatment of diabetic feet and diabetic foot sepsis. The model of stroke care that we have established, particularly in England with thrombectomy services, which I understand will become near-universal in only a few months—it is far from universal in Scotland—is a good model to follow for diabetic foot care and the national foot attack pathway. We need community foot protection services in every single integrated care board, with multidisciplinary hubs linked to specialist centres, so that we can offer more care not in hospital, but in the community, which is a linchpin of our 10- year health plan in England; and the implementation of national waiting time standards of five days for in-patients and two weeks for out-patients with transparent reporting. If we do that, we will save not only money, but limbs and lives. On commissioning, we have all become too habituated to paying for activity and inputs. It is time to shift the dial and pay for an outcome. In many ways, vascular disease and diabetic foot disease offer an early win—an early exemplar—of how we can shift the dial on commissioning services from input to output. Alongside that, it is important to think about how we support innovation, which is in the Minister’s title. I know at first hand that there are so many innovative vascular scientists and specialist surgeons doing things very differently from what we were doing only five years ago. They need the Government’s support. The Government will be pushing at an open door if they come forward with new ideas for how to innovate so that patients benefit directly from effective technologies and digital technologies. We can even optimise the NHS app to produce end-to-end digital pathways for these patients. I know that the Minister takes these matters very seriously and will consider them in his response. I end where I began, by thanking everyone who has attended today, particularly the colleagues from the vascular community in the Public Gallery. I reiterate that it has been an honour and a privilege to be part of this debate, as a parliamentarian serving a constituency with a diverse community that suffers from diabetes and vascular disease, but also as a proud member of the vascular surgical community.