Cat Smith MP: speeches

Speeches

• 15 Oct 2025 · Jhoots Pharmacy · Hansard source

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  Jhoots pharmacy moved into the village of Knott End in 2023, and it was not long before constituents were getting in touch with me to explain that they could not access their prescriptions because pharmacies were closed and unreliable. We do have the very good Over Wyre medical centre, which has dispensing rights, but it is restrained by the one-mile rule, which means that it cannot dispense prescriptions within one mile of a pharmacy, whether that is open or closed. I feel like we are in a Catch-22 situation. What help can the Minister give my constituents to ensure that those who are within one mile of the Jhoots pharmacy that is never open can access their prescriptions from the dispensing Over Wyre medical centre?

• 14 Oct 2025 · Middle East · Hansard source

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  As an officer of the all-party parliamentary group on Christianity in the holy land, I was fortunate enough to be on a delegation in Jerusalem and the west bank last week, and it was clear to our delegation from speaking to Palestinian Christians that they are delivering hospitals and schools for Palestinian communities. Given that education and healthcare are a key part of long-term peace, what conversations are the Government having with the Christian community in Israel and Palestine to ensure that they are part of the conversation as well?

• 14 Oct 2025 · Postural Tachycardia Syndrome · Hansard source

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  I thank my hon. Friend for that intervention; I will take another.

• 14 Oct 2025 · Postural Tachycardia Syndrome · Hansard source

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  I very much agree.

• 14 Oct 2025 · Postural Tachycardia Syndrome · Hansard source

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  I agree with my hon. Friend; I will address that point later in my speech.

• 14 Oct 2025 · Postural Tachycardia Syndrome · Hansard source

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  Absolutely. Those clinical guidelines need to change, and I will address that later in my speech.

• 14 Oct 2025 · Postural Tachycardia Syndrome · Hansard source

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  The lack of services across the UK is part of my speech; I look forward to discussing it.

• 14 Oct 2025 · Postural Tachycardia Syndrome · Hansard source

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  I beg to move, That this House has considered the matter of support for people with postural tachycardia syndrome. It is a pleasure to see you in the Chair this morning, Sir Desmond. I am grateful for this opportunity to look at a health issue that is often overlooked, misunderstood and under-resourced within our national health service: postural orthostatic tachycardia syndrome, or PoTS for short. It is not a rare disease, yet for too long people living with PoTS have fallen through the cracks of a system that was never designed to recognise or support them. My notes are based on the heartbreaking reality faced by my constituents and the tens of thousands of people across the UK who have PoTS. I must declare, Sir Desmond, that I have had a diagnosis of PoTS since 2012, so some of what I will say is taken from my own experience as well.

• 14 Oct 2025 · Postural Tachycardia Syndrome · Hansard source

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  The hon. and learned Gentleman has picked up on a theme later in my speech, which I hope he will enjoy.

• 14 Oct 2025 · Postural Tachycardia Syndrome · Hansard source

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  I thank the hon. Gentleman for his intervention; I recognise that a lot of hon. Members are here for this debate, more than I have ever seen for a 30-minute debate before. Hopefully, next time I make an application, I might be granted a bit more time. I am happy to take early interventions from colleagues, if anyone wants to make them.

• 14 Oct 2025 · Postural Tachycardia Syndrome · Hansard source

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  I will address that issue in my speech too.

• 14 Oct 2025 · Postural Tachycardia Syndrome · Hansard source

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  There is a particular crisis in London, which I will address later in my speech and which my hon. Friend might be very interested in.

• 14 Oct 2025 · Postural Tachycardia Syndrome · Hansard source

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  I very much agree.

• 14 Oct 2025 · Postural Tachycardia Syndrome · Hansard source

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  I very much agree.

• 14 Oct 2025 · Postural Tachycardia Syndrome · Hansard source

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  Absolutely; that is a very good point. When someone is not believed by medical professionals for so long, it can affect their mental health—I recognise that.

• 14 Oct 2025 · Postural Tachycardia Syndrome · Hansard source

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  Absolutely—I thank my hon. Friend for that intervention, and I very much agree with him.

• 14 Oct 2025 · Postural Tachycardia Syndrome · Hansard source

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  I thank the hon. Lady for that intervention; I will address those points in my speech if there are no further interventions. One of the most difficult things for someone with PoTS is to have to sit and stand up repeatedly, so hopefully I will get to the end of my speech. Colleagues have been really helpful in highlighting that the average time taken for diagnosis is seven years. Indeed, the fight for a diagnosis is one of the first and the longest fights that a sufferer of PoTS will have to go through in order to begin to consider accessing services, although that is a different matter altogether. During that devastating period, where sufferers have huge uncertainty about whether or not everything is all in their head or they really are fainting and feeling dizzy, they struggle to access any support and are often disbelieved. That leads to many sufferers of PoTS having to drop out of education, losing employment and withdrawing from social settings, which also has an impact on mental health, as hon. Friends have mentioned. I do not believe that that is because doctors do not care; I think it is because awareness of PoTS remains astonishingly low within the medical profession. Most GPs will never have encountered the term in their training, and even among cardiologists and neurologists expertise in autonomic disorders is scarce. As a result, patients often find themselves being referred to different specialists, bouncing from cardiology through neurology to endocrinology and psychiatry, without there being any one clinician to join up the dots and provide the diagnosis. The crisis in accessing specialist services has been brutally highlighted this week: we have learned that in London a major teaching hospital clinic has closed its doors to new PoTS patients and a second has reduced its capacity, so that it will see only local patients. All the rejected referrals are now being forwarded to a third London clinic, which is already totally overwhelmed and has a two-year waiting list. Those referrals will put extra pressure on that clinic and leave patients in the south-east without any access whatsoever to healthcare pathways. This is blatantly a postcode lottery, whereby someone’s access to diagnosis and care depends entirely on where they live. This situation is summed up in an email that I received from a woman last week: “I would like to note that I got involved with this as I am still unable to get a formal diagnosis of PoTS while suffering the symptoms, as the only specialist we had in Plymouth retired and my GP said they were currently unaware of where to send me for help. Please. I am begging. Please help.” That is the desperation that many people experience: they can recognise their symptoms, they can use the internet and are quite confident that their symptoms match those of PoTS, but they have no way to get a diagnosis and then to access support. The crisis has been made even more urgent by a recent surge in PoTS cases associated with long covid. Clinics that were already stretched thin are now being overwhelmed by more referrals, which is adding further pressure to a system that was already struggling to cope pre-covid. Ultimately, these challenges point to a systemic gap, which is a lack of clinical understanding of the autonomic system. That system sits awkwardly between medical disciplines and is often overlooked in medical education. Until that changes, thousands of people with PoTS will continue to fall through the cracks—dismissed, misdiagnosed and left without the support they need to live well with a complex and chronic condition. The challenges I have described are not simply matters of medical complexity; they are also matters of policy and system design. People with PoTS are not falling through the cracks by accident. They are falling through because the system was never built to recognise or support them. PoTS predominantly affects women, which contributes significantly to the fact that it takes seven years to be diagnosed. The delay in diagnosis of PoTS is a stark example of a concerning gender health gap in the UK, where many women receive poorer healthcare than men. I welcome the Government’s 10-year plan, but have serious questions for the Minister about its ability to help the PoTS community. It focuses heavily on prevention rather than diagnosis, yet that is not a coherent strategy for chronic multi-system conditions, such as PoTS, which often have genetic or variable causes. The NHS cannot focus just on prevention; there also needs to be adequate access to diagnosis and ongoing aftercare for chronically ill patients, such as those with PoTS, when there is currently no cure. We need an explicit commitment on the Government’s plan to overhaul education and training curricula to create 1,000 new speciality training posts. Although those changes are welcome, will they include dedicated education and training on PoTS for frontline clinicians, and will the new posts include specialists in autonomic disorders? Finally, with the plan’s commitment to health data research service investment and making wearables standard in chronic care, I ask the Minister whether that investment will include dedicated research into PoTS. Will PoTS patients be explicitly included in the initiative to provide wearables, which are vital for monitoring a heart-rate driven condition? It is clear we need change and a clear co-ordinated strategy that brings together awareness, research, clinical care and social care. My ask of the Government is clear, but it is fivefold. First, we need national guidelines, ideally from the National Institute for Health and Care Excellence, to provide the evidence-based framework that clinicians, including our overstretched GPs, need to diagnose and treat the condition. Secondly, the Government must require and ensure that commissioning bodies and integrated care boards execute their statutory duties to understand the prevalence of PoTS in their communities and provide for the needs of those patients. Thirdly, we need to ensure that every ICB has a clinical pathway and that all patients requiring secondary care have access to a high-quality service regionally and not just in central London—ultimately, the postcode lottery must end. Fourthly, we must fully support existing specialist services, which are currently overwhelmed and under threat from closure by hospital management. That includes immediately intervening in the London crisis and protecting every single specialist across the country. Health is devolved in some countries of the United Kingdom, so that is more challenging, but this is a UK-wide issue—although I recognise that the Minister is responsible only for England. Finally, I ask the Government to make PoTS and related disorders a health and social care priority to ensure that affected people have equitable access to the NHS healthcare and social support that they deserve. We have an opportunity to fix a long-standing wrong. We must not allow the thousands suffering with PoTS to remain invisible any longer. I thank hon. Members for coming out in numbers that I did not expect to support this 30-minute Westminster Hall debate; I hope that demonstrates to the Minister the strength of feeling across the country. All our constituencies have many people suffering from PoTS who are struggling to get diagnoses or to access services, and ICBs are letting down people with PoTS right across these islands. I urge the Minister to use this opportunity to take decisive action and set out how the Government are going to take people with PoTS seriously and ensure that they are no longer invisible.

• 14 Oct 2025 · Postural Tachycardia Syndrome · Hansard source

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  On the point about ICBs, many have zero options in terms of pathways. What steps will the Minister take to ensure that they are forced to do that by NHS England? I thank her for her comments.

• 14 Oct 2025 · Postural Tachycardia Syndrome · Hansard source

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  That intervention was an important one; sport was not included in my speech, but as someone who has PoTS and has run three London marathons, I can say that people can have PoTS and be sporty—it is just a lot harder.

• 16 Sept 2025 · Court Estate: Restoration and Renewal · Hansard source

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  19. What steps he is taking to improve the court estate through restoration and renewal.

• 16 Sept 2025 · Court Estate: Restoration and Renewal · Hansard source

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  Since 2019 my constituents in Lancaster have had to look at a ring of steel fencing around the Lancaster courthouse in our city centre as it awaits maintenance work to make it more sightly. The fencing has been there since 2019, so how much longer will my constituents have to wait for this maintenance work?

• 16 Sept 2025 · Topical Questions · Hansard source

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  For six years, Lancaster courthouse has been surrounded by temporary fencing as it awaits maintenance. How much longer will my constituents have to wait?

• 21 Jul 2025 · Victory over Japan: 80th Anniversary · Hansard source

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  I feel very moved to intervene on my hon. Friend because she is making such a powerful speech. As someone who previously represented part of her constituency, I know how much this will mean to her constituents. My grandfather had a Burma Star and he had scars all over his body. He never spoke of it but the long-lasting trauma these veterans faced lived with them throughout their lives and we do not recognise that enough. I would like to put that on the record.

• 21 Jul 2025 · Redundancies at Lancaster University · Hansard source

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  I rise to present a petition on behalf of my constituents, specifically those who are members of the University and College Union, Unite and Unison, whose representatives I met recently. In that context, I draw the House’s attention to my entry in the Register of Members’ Financial Interests. My constituents are concerned about potential job losses at Lancaster University, and the petition states: “The petitioners therefore request that the House of Commons urge the Government to take immediate action to ensure universities are supported to ensure security of employment for staff and a high-quality learning experience for students. And the petitioners remain, etc.” Following is the full text of the petition: [The petition of residents of the constituency of Lancaster and Wyre, Declares that Lancaster University is currently considering a series of staff redundancies, initially voluntary, which could see the University lose around 450 jobs, with compulsory redundancies not ruled out. Staff trade unions, UCU, Unite and Unison, are consulting with their members and are concerned about the job losses as well as the impact on the wider area with the Lancaster District benefiting from having a successful university in its footprint. The petitioners therefore request that the House of Commons urge the Government to take immediate action to ensure universities are supported to ensure security of employment for staff and a high-quality learning experience for students. And the petitioners remain, etc.] [P003100]

• 8 Jul 2025 · Alcohol and Cancer · Hansard source

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  I thank all hon. Members for making time to take part in the debate. I am disappointed that there are no plans from the Government at this stage for a national alcohol strategy. I urge the Minister to take a message back to the Department that such a strategy would be an important tool for improving health outcomes and reducing cancer diagnoses. The debate has been specifically about alcohol and cancer and how to prevent that link. Many hon. Members have personal reasons for taking part. My hon. Friend the Member for Blackpool North and Fleetwood (Lorraine Beavers) has been a good friend for 20 years. I know her family well and the impact on them. She is not the only person to come to the debate with a personal motivation to drive down the harm caused by alcohol in our communities. I welcome what the Minister said about labelling, which is an important first step to reducing alcohol harms. At the moment, alcohol needs to display only alcohol by volume, product volume and allergen information; even the pregnancy warning is optional for the industry to add. Anyone going into a pub or bar in this country today to buy a bottle of beer and a Fruit Shoot, will find that the latter provides more nutritional and health information than the beer, which is unsustainable. Labelling should be clear that there is a link between alcohol and cancer, because it is easy to play that down. I believe in freedom of choice—I am not trying to restrict anyone’s right to drink alcohol, but that needs to be an informed choice. We should know that there is no safe level of drinking alcohol when it comes to its potential to cause cancer. At the moment, with only 7% of our constituents knowing that fact, they are not able to make that informed choice. I hope the Government’s actions on labelling that the Minister is taking forward will see that figure of 7% massively increase, so that our constituents will make informed choices about what they put in their bodies. I again thank everyone for making the time this morning to take part in this important debate, and I thank you, Mr Stuart, for chairing it so ably. Question put and agreed to. Resolved, That this House has considered alcohol and cancer.