Antonia Bance MP: speeches

Speeches

• 1 Jul 2025 · Parental Leave Review · Hansard source

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  As I welcome the Minister’s announcement, I think of the HGV driver who I met recently who said that he was not able to take time off to be with his partner and their newborn baby. Will the Minister assure me and all my constituents that the new rights will work for working-class people as well as people on higher incomes in professional jobs? Does he agree that today’s announcement, along with our announcements on free school meals, childcare and housing, make it clear that the Labour party is the party of the family?

• 26 Jun 2025 · Topical Questions · Hansard source

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  Following the question asked by my hon. Friend the Member for Derby North (Catherine Atkinson), last week the Casey review showed us yet again that private hire vehicles are a dangerous place for many children and young people. Nationally in 2023, 96% of taxi licences were issued in one local authority—Wolverhampton, one of my neighbouring local authorities—yet only 10% of the applicants lived there. What action is the Minister going to take to ensure local taxi licensing is done locally and to high standards?

• 23 Jun 2025 · UK Modern Industrial Strategy · Hansard source

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  Representing Tipton, the birthplace of the first industrial revolution, I hugely welcome this industrial strategy and its 1.1 million good jobs. I am particularly pleased to see the Black Country singled out as a centre of clean-energy industries. We recently welcomed £45 million of investment in Eku Energy’s new battery energy storage system at Ocker Hill in my constituency. The action on high energy prices is especially welcome, and I wonder if my right hon. Friend could give us more details about how soon we can expect it to make a difference to businesses in our constituencies.

• 13 Jun 2025 · Terminally Ill Adults (End of Life) Bill · Hansard source

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  My hon. Friend is setting out her concerns eloquently. What concerns does she have that the Bill writes a blank cheque for a future Health Secretary to change the nature of the NHS without parliamentary scrutiny?

• 12 Jun 2025 · Industrial Strategy · Hansard source

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  I thank the Chair of the Committee for the opportunity to come in on the topic of this important inquiry, which I was glad to be a part of. One of the best days of the inquiry was the day we welcomed a roundtable of small and medium-sized enterprises in the automotive sector to talk to us about the threat posed to them at the time from the tariffs imposed by the United States and more broadly about the challenges that SMEs face in advanced manufacturing and automotive. Does he agree that, as our report sets out, the industrial strategy must be one for SMEs across all the growth sectors, as well as for the large primes and big organisations?

• 11 Jun 2025 · Spending Review 2025 · Hansard source

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  One of the first pieces of casework that I picked up was from a young woman pushing her two children through central Wednesbury. We moved to the side and she told me that she was in temporary accommodation, and then she showed me the insect bites up her arm. In my council area, there are 21,000 people on the housing waiting list and nearly 550 families in temporary accommodation—awful, substandard bed and breakfasts, from which it takes multiple buses to get the kids to school. Will my right hon. Friend confirm that our share of the £39 billion for council and social housing is coming to Tipton and Wednesbury and Coseley, to the Black Country and to the west midlands to build the homes that our local families need?

• 4 Jun 2025 · Regional Growth · Hansard source

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  For so long, Tipton, Wednesbury, Coseley, the Black Country and the whole of the west midlands have been an afterthought. Now our Mayor Richard Parker and the West Midlands combined authority will have £2.5 billion for transport, to unlock desperately needed good jobs and growth across our cities and towns. I hope that the mayor will look favourably on our need for a new roundabout at Great Bridge, to get the traffic flowing to our factories and jobs, as we seek the economic growth that we are prioritising. Does the Minister share my view that the statement starts to put right decades of under-investment in the west midlands?

• 21 May 2025 · Business and the Economy · Hansard source

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  Perhaps the hon. Member has not had a chance to see the piece of work produced by a former shadow Chancellor that sets out the relative recovery rates of different world economies in the developed world since the pandemic. It shows that the United Kingdom is right at the bottom of the pile thanks to the mess left to us by Liz Truss crashing the UK economy.

• 7 May 2025 · Automotive Manufacturing: Employment · Hansard source

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  Thank you for indulging me, Sir John, and for letting me speak after I walked in so late. I also thank the hon. Member for Reigate (Rebecca Paul) and congratulate her on securing this important debate. We have heard today how strategically important the automotive industry is for our country and about the £93 billion turnover across the industry and its supply chain. I would also like to flag how important the industry is to many of our regional economies. In my constituency, which covers Tipton, Wednesbury and Coseley—the home of the industrial revolution—we have 21,000 manufacturing jobs across 1,000 firms, many of them in the supply chain for the automotive industry. I recently visited J.H. Lavender & Co., which makes cast aluminium casings for JLR’s new electric Land Rover. It was incredible to see the process go from the silver liquid all the way through to the finished casing. Those world-class products are made in a family firm in the heart of my constituency. Truflo makes industrial air-cooling fans that go in industrial vehicles—the construction and heavy goods vehicles we are all so familiar with—and exports across the world, including to China and the US. As my hon. Friend the Member for Wolverhampton North East (Mrs Brackenridge) so eloquently outlined, the west midlands is also the home of Jaguar Land Rover, with its 34,000 jobs—many of those people live in my constituency—and 200,000 jobs in the supply chain. The automotive industry faces two key challenges: transition and tariffs. On the transition piece, automotive is critical if we are to reach net zero. I do not believe that this country will give up its cars—I certainly do not want to give up mine—so it matters that we move towards net zero in a way that is sustainable and that supports the freedom that owning a car brings. We can see that the investment towards that net zero future has already begun, whether it be JLR’s investment of £18 billion over the coming five years or the investment elsewhere in the industry. I was so glad the Prime Minister went to JLR in April to announce the flexibilities that have been needed for so long in the ZEV mandate to smooth the requirements, cut the fines and ensure that there is a continued role for hybrids. We know there is more to do to increase the uptake of electric vehicles, whether that be on consumer demand or the charging infrastructure we need. More broadly, I hope that the industrial strategy, when we see it, takes action on the issues that have held back advanced manufacturing: skills, access to finance—particularly in the supply chain and for smaller manufacturers—and energy costs. I was absolutely appalled to hear Nissan tell the Business and Trade Committee two weeks ago that its plant in Sunderland is its most expensive in the world, because of the energy costs. It will be great to hear the Industry Minister’s thoughts ahead of the industrial strategy, although I know she will have more to say in the coming months. Let me turn now to tariffs. This morning, I talked to Richard Parker, our Mayor of the West Midlands, and his team. They have produced research by Steve Rigby, which my hon. Friend the Member for Wolverhampton North East touched on, showing a £6.2 billion hit to the west midlands economy from the US automotive tariffs if nothing changes—the biggest regional hit in the country. Some 52% of firms in our local manufacturing base are warning about profits because of the tariffs. JLR alone accounts for 4% of UK goods exports. We need a deal, and soon. I thank the Prime Minister, the Chancellor, the Business Secretary and the Industry Minister for their calm approach to the negotiations. That is right, but we must get a deal; otherwise, that impact will be coming down the road in my constituency and in all our constituencies in terms of jobs and the critical research and development that will help us navigate the transition that we need to electric cars and net zero. When it comes to a deal, fast is better than perfect: that is the message from the west midlands automotive industry to my colleagues in the Government. I would like to hear from Ministers what options they intend to explore to help the industry, and especially the employment base in the automotive industry supply chain in my constituency, if—God forbid—we get no deal. The Chair of the Business and Trade Committee set out a number of options in a letter to Ministers earlier this week. It would be good to hear what consideration is being given to things such as a reduction in employer costs, help with energy costs, domestic sales subsidies for EVs, an increase in research and development tax credits, and help with cash flow, particularly for the smaller companies in the supply chain, which tell me time and again that they need that. Then, of course, there is the £2 billion that was allocated in the Budget to the automotive industry’s transition, which we will hear more about in the industrial strategy. It would be good to know whether that can be used to help in the event that there is no deal and there is a prolonged period of tariffs. But that money is necessary for the transition—for research and development, and for moving our workforces to the new industry’s new production techniques and requirements—so it will have to be replaced in time. My colleagues in Government know how urgent this issue is and have been working at pace to get the deal that our automotive sector needs. They have the support of all of us in this House, and I urge them to continue that work for this vital sector of the UK economy, of which we are so proud.

• 28 Apr 2025 · Apprenticeship Funding · Hansard source

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  My constituency of Tipton, Wednesbury and Coseley, in the Black Country, is a proud manufacturing area and the birthplace of the industrial revolution. Will the Minister please tell me what she is doing to increase the uptake of manufacturing and engineering apprenticeships across the country and in the west midlands?

• 24 Apr 2025 · Lesbian Visibility Week · Hansard source

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  My hon. Friend and sister is absolutely correct. There are a load of stupid barriers that do not reflect modern families and how we form our relationships nowadays. People do form second partnerships, and people do have existing children. Frankly, when many people are delaying childbearing and when fertility problems are on the rise, although in many cases they are completely soluble with medical treatment that we know very well how to do, the fact that these barriers continue to exist is absolutely outrageous. Too many women are navigating a postcode lottery and unfair rules, piling costs on their credit cards—I know about that—and worrying about money when they should be concentrating on the medical process. In this place, books for children depicting all sorts of families were once decried as depraved and were used as justification to deny that lesbian families existed, to silence us and to call our families pretend. No longer. Heather does have two mummies, and so do Sam, Sanjay, Jessie, Aaron, Lily, Albie, Clementine and so many more, because it is love that makes a family.

• 24 Apr 2025 · Lesbian Visibility Week · Hansard source

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  It is an honour to serve under your chairship, Ms Butler. I congratulate my hon. Friend and sister the Member for Jarrow and Gateshead East (Kate Osborne) on securing this debate. I am a proud trade unionist, a proud Black Country MP and a proud lesbian MP—out for 26 years and now out here in this place. I rise to add my voice and my visibility to the debate. I could talk about the advances made by Labour Governments or the advances we hope for from this Labour Government, but instead I want to talk about a subject very close to my heart, the subject of this year’s Lesbian Visibility Week: being a mama. There have always been lesbian mums. So many of us feel the urge to parent and to mother, often—sometimes in the past, sometimes today—in the face of huge homophobia and abuse, as well as practical obstacles. Indeed, a Radio 4 documentary in December, “The Lesbian Mothers Scandal”, set out how homophobic judges removed children from their mums simply because they were lesbians and sometimes gave custody of the children to abusive fathers. These women, who are now in their 70s and 80s, deserve an apology for the actions of the courts and the family court system. I hope the Minister will look at giving it. I say again what I said in my maiden speech a few months ago: “I grew up in a world where people like me could not get married, but now our beloved daughter has both her mothers’ names on her birth certificate.” —[ Official Report , 8 October 2024; Vol. 754, c. 194.] One of the proudest achievements of our last Labour Government, but one that people sometimes do not speak of, was the Human Fertilisation and Embryology Act 2008. For the first time, it recognised lesbian parents with both our names on birth certificates, and it opened fertility treatment to us, as well as to single women. Sometimes I think it is missed off the list of achievements of the last Labour Government, because it was an achievement for women in particular. Now that we have a Labour Government again, it is time to take the next step, for all the lesbians who would like to have a family, and make sure that we equalise fertility treatment on the NHS. It is so clear that lesbian women still face unequal barriers to accessing fertility treatment. They face an average cost of £25,000 before they become eligible for NHS treatment, because of the need to jump through the hurdles of self-funded IUI rounds—sometimes many rounds—before they qualify. My own integrated care board, the Black Country ICB, requires lesbian couples to undertake six cycles of self-funded IUI before they are eligible for IVF. That is in addition to the cost of donor sperm, which I know for sure is not cheap. In my area, just one cycle of IVF is funded, not three as per the NICE guidelines. The financial impact of self-funding is huge. For many couples, the disappointment when one IVF round is not enough is completely avoidable. I would like to see revised NICE guidelines and a commitment that every area should meet those guidelines in full. After all, as well as being Lesbian Visibility Week, this week is Infertility Awareness Week. I send my solidarity to all the women and their partners who are trying to conceive—TTC, in the language of the message boards.

• 18 Mar 2025 · Welfare Reform · Hansard source

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  Many of us in this place have fought alongside parents of severely disabled people, not least against our broken SEND system. Can the Secretary of State reassure those parents, who may be looking at the proposed changes to UC health eligibility for under-22s and feeling deeply dismayed right now?

• 12 Mar 2025 · Employment Rights Bill · Hansard source

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  The hon. Member has referred a number of times to yesterday’s proceedings. I am sad that he was not able to join us in the Division Lobby in voting against the amendments and in favour of the Bill, given that 73% of his constituents in Farnham and Bordon support statutory sick pay for all workers from day one, and 67% of his constituents support banning zero-hours contracts.

• 12 Mar 2025 · Employment Rights Bill · Hansard source

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  Thank you, Madam Deputy Speaker. I thank my fellow member of the Business and Trade Committee for his intervention. As he will have seen from the amendment paper, the Government are not proposing the return of secondary picketing. New schedule 2 will give unions greater protection from unfair practices during a recognition process and make winning it more likely. I wish that Ministers had gone the whole hog and deleted the three-year lockout; perhaps there will be an opportunity to take that forward. In conclusion, as a whole, this package of modern industrial relations will lead to more sitting roundtables sorting out issues, fewer picket lines, fewer strikes, more productive relationships, more long-termism across our industrial base, better jobs, higher wages, higher skills and higher productivity. That is why the changes in this Bill to both collective rights and individual rights are so crucial, and so opposed by the Tories and the absent Reform party. This is the type of growth that my party stands for—the type of growth where proceeds are shared by all. It is time to make work pay.

• 12 Mar 2025 · Employment Rights Bill · Hansard source

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  I care about the people of Scotland.

• 12 Mar 2025 · Employment Rights Bill · Hansard source

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  indicated dissent .

• 12 Mar 2025 · Employment Rights Bill · Hansard source

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  I proudly draw attention to my membership of the Unite union and my declaration in the Register of Members’ Financial Interests, and I thank my friends at the GMB and ASLEF for their support of my election campaign. I am in this place to stand up for working people, and that is what I will do. The best protection anyone can have at work is the support of their workmates, organised together in a union, and bargaining with management, sitting down with them as equals at the table, and making sure that the business grows and thrives, and that everyone takes home a fair wage. This Bill and the Government amendments will make it easier for working people to choose their union, be represented by their union, and get all the benefits of being in a recognised union, so that we have an economy where better terms and conditions at work go hand in hand with the growth that we need. Let us be clear: this Bill supports growth. It could add £13 billion to the economy through improvements to employee wellbeing, reduced stress, improved national minimum wage compliance, reduced workplace conflict, and increased labour market participation. That is the type of growth that we want.

• 12 Mar 2025 · Employment Rights Bill · Hansard source

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  I do acknowledge that, every single of which will go into the pocket of a working person in improved rights and higher wages, alongside £13 billion of increased productivity, reduced stress, better employee wellbeing and reduced conflict in the workplace. On the amendments, I will start with access to workplaces, which are the key to getting more workers into unions. I strongly welcome provisions to give unions the right to access workplaces for meeting, representing, organising, recruiting and collective bargaining. I am glad the Government amended the rules to ensure they cover digital as well as physical access, and I am glad to see the Central Arbitration Committee oversight and penalties when employers do not comply, as is sometimes the case. Once a union has established membership in a workplace, it will want to seek recognition. Most employers do not have to be forced to recognise a union—it is just what they do as a responsible employer—but where employers refuse, statutory recognition can be triggered. Until now that process has been absolutely mad and totally dysfunctional, and the cards are stacked against the working people and their union at every turn. The worst example of this in recent years is at BHX4 in Coventry where a company dedicated to keeping unions out of its warehouses brought its US-style industrial relations to the UK, and took on its own workers who wanted no more and no less than for management to have to sit down and negotiate with their union, the GMB. Amazon is a £27 billion company in the UK yet its sales are growing three times higher than its frontline workers’ wages and it has had 1,400 ambulance call-outs in just five years. BHX4 in Coventry is not a safe workplace, with fulfilment centre workers getting injured, being asked to pick up too much, to load from the back of vehicles on their own, and to lift heavy weights above their heads. Those workers at that Amazon plant were forced to take 37 days of industrial action over poverty pay. At the Select Committee, the company’s badly briefed, evasive executives could not bring themselves to acknowledge that. Recognising the GMB is a modest request, something 1,000 companies would have accepted without question, but not Amazon. At the Select Committee, the GMB organiser, Amanda Gearing, told us that Amazon flooded the bargaining unit; there were 1,400 workers when the GMB first sought statutory recognition but, strangely, just 27 days after that application went in the number went up to 2,749. Amanda told us how Amazon delayed the access agreement— 52 days to agree access to the workplace, a chance for the company to swamp the workers with anti-union propaganda. All the screens in the warehouse and the app used for work allocation were anti-union, threatening to close the site if workers unionised. When the access scheme was finally agreed, the GMB got a tiny number of screens and one 45-minute session with each worker, while Amazon had five one-hour sessions and screens everywhere. It induced GMB members to leave the union and in every way impeded access. I pay tribute to the GMB leaders at Amazon in Coventry: Ceferina Floresca, Garfield Hylton, Paramanathan Pradeep and Mohammednur Mohammed—heroes, all of them. Standing up to huge intimidation and under huge pressure, they ran a brilliant campaign, but the deck was stacked against them, and they lost the ballot by a heartbreaking 29 votes. The GMB’s general secretary, my friend Gary Smith, is clear: if the legislation we are debating today had been in place, the GMB members at Amazon would have won their fight.

• 12 Mar 2025 · Employment Rights Bill · Hansard source

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  The hon. Member may not have had a chance to look at the Government website and encounter the document entitled “Next Steps to Make Work Pay”, which sets out a programme of continuing work to improve rights at work and parental leave and the review of employment status to come. I am sure he will be glad to hear that.

• 11 Mar 2025 · Employment Rights Bill · Hansard source

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  Does the right hon. Member accept that someone choosing to take on an irregular contract when they are at the high end of the pay scale with significant professional skills and expectations for the future is very different from the endemic insecurity at the bottom of the labour market, which is where zero-hours contracts are concentrated? Some 83% of people on a zero-hours contract—

• 11 Mar 2025 · Employment Rights Bill · Hansard source

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  I will help the hon. Gentleman to come back to the point. Two in three young women have experienced sexual harassment or verbal abuse in the workplace. It is important that where they are in customer-facing roles, they are protected from abuse both by their colleagues and managers and by their customers. That is particularly important if they work in a university bar, another sort of bar or a shop or retail setting. I was very pleased to have taken the first piece of evidence about the nature and extent of workplace sexual harassment when I worked for the TUC in 2015, and I am sad that it has taken us a decade to get to the point where we say, “No more sexual harassment by customers and clients.” The Conservative party could have achieved that much more quickly if it had just accepted the private Member’s Bill put forward by the hon. Member for Bath (Wera Hobhouse).

• 11 Mar 2025 · Employment Rights Bill · Hansard source

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  The hon. Member and I both serve on the Business and Trade Committee. The statistics show that the vast majority of young people do not have two years’ service and therefore have no protection from US-style “fire at will” policies. In hospitality and catering, which are industries that the hon. Member has massive concerns about, vast numbers have no protection from fire at will—overnight firing for no reason and with no process—and the Bill will outlaw that. I know that she supports fair process and fair reasons for firing, so I hope that she will support the Bill today.

• 11 Mar 2025 · Employment Rights Bill · Hansard source

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  Will the hon. Member give way?

• 5 Mar 2025 · Antisocial Behaviour and Illegal Bikes · Hansard source

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  It sounds like there is really good work going on in Stoke that the rest of us can learn from, and I encourage everyone to think about doing so. Back in my area of Friar Park, the police got petrol stations to report when bikers bought fuel. They put up temporary CCTV to spot where bikes went and when they met, and the police stepped up patrols. Our police and crime commissioner sent out his new bike team officers on new Honda CRFs, funded by cash seized from criminals, so the bikes cannot just disappear off into the woodland. All that intel meant that police could go to addresses linked to nuisance bikes, and guess what they found? Not just illegal bikes to seize and riders to arrest, but stolen goods and criminals wanted for robbery, burglary and road traffic offences.