Claire Young MP: speeches

Speeches

• 9 Jun 2025 · Winter Fuel Payment · Hansard source

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  While the Government buried their heads in the sand, countless pensioners suffered, such as my constituent who, despite having a terminal disease, had to cut back on heating and food, and spent the winter “freezing cold”. Can the Minister explain why no impact assessments were conducted last year before winter fuel payments were stripped from millions of pensioners?

• 5 Jun 2025 · Maths: Contribution to the UK · Hansard source

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  It is a pleasure to serve under your chairship, Mr Vickers. I thank my hon. Friend the Member for St Neots and Mid Cambridgeshire (Ian Sollom) for securing this debate. Like him, I have a deep affection for maths. In fact, I would probably go further and say that I am a maths nerd. And, like him, I believe that it still influences my thinking now, including here in Parliament. I love maths for its own sake. I was inspired as a child by watching shows such as Johnny Ball’s “Think of a Number”, I was only too happy to get a scientific calculator for my 11th birthday—I am not sure many 11-year-olds would be—and I went on to study maths at university, so I could not pass up the opportunity to contribute to this debate. Having said that I love maths for its own sake, though, I want to make the case that mathematics does not just contribute to our country in the headline-grabbing ways highlighted by my hon. Friend, such as AI innovation, although those are obviously very important. I believe that having a mathematically literate population can contribute to our society in myriad smaller ways, too, by ensuring that we can all think critically about what we are told, and make better decisions about our own lives. There is a somewhat old-fashioned idea that, as long as people can work out their change when shopping, that is all the maths they need. It is true that basic numeracy is important, even in a world where we are more likely to wave our cards at a machine than to pay with cash, and where, contrary to teachers’ expectations in the 1980s, most of us do carry calculators around with us. From working out how long it is until the train or bus, or measuring whether that flat-pack furniture will fit in our living rooms before we buy it, to scaling up a cake recipe, there are plenty of ways in which basic arithmetic matters, but I think the importance of mathematics to every one of us goes way beyond that. In a world where we are bombarded with information and misinformation daily, mathematics is vital to the critical thinking that stops us getting scammed and helps us to make truly informed decisions on matters such as healthcare and our personal finances. I will illustrate that with an example from a few years ago, when the BBC reported: “Teenagers whose parents smoke are four times more likely to take it up themselves, experts have warned.” There was an absolute bombardment of people saying that that was rubbish because their parents smoked and they did not, but let us look at the figures. What the article said was that “4.9% of teenagers whose parents smoke have taken it up too. By contrast, only 1.2% of teenagers whose parents do not smoke begin to do so.” It was absolutely right to say “four times more likely” but, even with parents who smoke, the vast majority—more than 95%—will not go on to smoke themselves. Those misunderstandings reoccur across many examples of scientific and medical stories in our mainstream press. If we do not understand numbers, how can we make truly informed decisions about medical treatment? Do we really understand what a one-in-a-thousand risk of a side effect is? What does it mean if a contraceptive is 95% effective? What does it mean, in absolute numbers, for a treatment to carry a 10% increased risk of a type of cancer if the original risk was extremely low, and how does that compare with the risks of not having the treatment? I think it became evident during the pandemic that people—including some at the highest levels of Government, apparently—did not understand the concept of exponential growth. We heard from Lord Vallance in the covid inquiry that the Prime Minister at the time had been “bamboozled” by graphs. He apparently wrote in his diary: “Watching the PM get his head round stats is awful. He finds relative and absolute risk almost impossible to understand.” Most of us will not have to lead the country through a pandemic, thank goodness, but we do need to make decisions about our own lives. When it comes to school education, I can understand the sentiment of those who wanted to extend maths, but doing another two years of what has already not been working does not make any sense. I would rather see a focus on rebalancing the curriculum to 16, and ensuring that we have specialist maths teachers to deliver that and inspire our young people today. I often speak on the subject of special educational needs, so before I finish, I will briefly say something about dyscalculia. Schools in England have a responsibility to identify and support students with special educational needs arising from specific learning difficulties, and that includes dyscalculia. But there is no requirement for teachers to learn about it; it is poorly understood and awareness is very low among both professionals and parents. Given that maths is so important to our lives and that dyscalculia is about having difficulty with understanding number-based information, I make a plea that it should be taken more seriously.

• 5 Jun 2025 · Free School Meals · Hansard source

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  Vulnerable children spend many weeks each year—during the holidays—not at school. My own Liberal Democrat-Labour partnership local authority provides funding in the form of vouchers during the school holidays. Will the Government take this opportunity to end holiday hunger and provide funding for food during the holidays?

• 5 Jun 2025 · Business of the House · Hansard source

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  My constituent Olivia is fighting for Archie’s law—new legislation to improve the quality of care for critically ill infants and children—after tragically losing her baby boy Archie. I have raised the matter with the Secretary of State, but the responses so far have failed to specifically address Archie’s law, and I have waited for the latest since February. Will the Leader of the House raise the matter with the Health Secretary, and ensure that Archie’s law gets a fair hearing?

• 4 Jun 2025 · Regional Growth · Hansard source

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  The Chief Secretary says that west of England funding will increase services between Bristol city centre and Brabazon. I have been pressing Ministers to extend the funding for half-hourly trains at Yate, which is due to end next year. That is vital to provide a service to the new Charfield station, which is due to open in 2027. Both places are, of course, in the city region. Will this funding support or even improve those services, or is this more about the city than the region?

• 3 Jun 2025 · Dementia Care · Hansard source

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  Absolutely. It is a very frightening situation for people to find themselves in. For carers who have to do all that I have described Richard having to do, having to battle their way to find the services available just adds to the problems. My constituent says that mental health services are the Cinderella of the NHS. There is a lack of staff and resources, and such services need more financial support so that they do not abandon people the minute they think they can get away with it. A number of Members have highlighted the importance of voluntary initiatives, and I would like to take this opportunity to thank all those in my constituency, including Time 4 Carers, the memory cafés in Yate and Thornbury, and the Charfield memory group. However, voluntary initiatives are not enough to provide the support that dementia patients and their carers need. The cross-party commission on social care is welcome, but unpaid carers such as my constituents cannot wait three years—they need a fair deal now. That means respite breaks, so that they do not get to breaking point and can carry on caring for their loved ones, as they want to. It means ongoing support from health services, regular check-ins and not being abandoned when the immediate crisis is over, and it means having the confidence that when they do need to turn to paid carers, those carers will be available, they will have dementia training, and cost will not be a barrier to using them.

• 3 Jun 2025 · Dementia Care · Hansard source

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  Everyone deserves high-quality care when they need it—that is particularly the case for those with dementia, who often have some of the most complex needs—but the sad reality is that social care services in this country are in crisis. The disease has a huge impact not only on the patients, but on their family and friends as they struggle to care for them. Richard wrote to me about his experience of being a full-time carer for his wife of 55 years. She has ataxia, compounded by dementia. She is losing her ability to walk or talk, write or use the phone, or follow simple instructions, and Richard has to be with her 24/7 to ensure her safety. The daily routine starts with getting his wife out of bed; transporting her to the bathroom; helping her with the toilet; getting her into the shower and then getting in the shower to shower her; helping her clean her teeth; getting her back to the bedroom to dry her hair and dress her; taking her downstairs via their self-funded stairlift; getting her into a wheelchair to transport her to the dining table for breakfast; and then taking her back to the lounge. She may sleep for a little bit, but sooner or later there will be a call for help to go to the toilet, so it is back into the wheelchair, back on the stairlift and back on the toilet. Richard will clean and dress her, and then she will go back on the stairlift, back into the wheelchair and back into the lounge, where the whole palaver will repeat after five minutes, as she has forgotten that she has already been to the toilet and cannot be convinced otherwise. That is just one small part of a day, and it sounds relentless. Owing to a recent back injury, Richard has had to employ a carer for two mornings a week to help. He wants to care for his wife as long as he can, but one day he may have to move her to a nursing home, and that worries him. He reckons it will cost approximately £1,800 per week and rising due to the increase in national insurance, and he is now worried that in pandering to populism on immigration, the Government may make it even harder to recruit carers. He says: “Once again, it is the least fortunate and needy of us who will bear the cost.” Another constituent wrote: “When my wife was first diagnosed with Alzheimer’s in 2019, we were given a couple of booklets and told to prepare for the inevitable.” He went on to explain that for a couple of years, including during the covid lockdown, they saw no one apart from the occasional surgery visit, until a crisis in 2023 led to the community mental health team being involved. For a while, his wife got a fair amount of support, but when the mental health team deemed her stabilised, that support was withdrawn, leading to another crisis in January 2024. He is very worried that the whole cycle will play out again and again.

• 2 Jun 2025 · Bus Services (No. 2) Bill [Lords] · Hansard source

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  One of the consequences for my constituents of losing services like the 84/85, the T2 and the 622 is that they are cut off from health services. Does my hon. Friend agree that such access should be a priority for investment, and that a focus on the increase in passenger numbers when judging investment choices disadvantages rural areas?

• 2 Jun 2025 · Draft Contracts for Difference (Miscellaneous Amendments) (No. 2) Regulations 2025 · Hansard source

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  It is an honour to serve under your chairship, Mrs Hobhouse. In 2009, the then Climate Secretary, the right hon. Member for Doncaster North (Ed Miliband), announced his plan to ramp up the use of wood-burning power stations while also ensuring sustainability. Fast forward to today and the right hon. Member—now the Secretary of State for Energy Security and Net Zero—is attempting to paper over his legacy by forcing through an extension of subsidies until 2031. That is being done despite broad cross-party opposition to the move, as the previous Government took the decision to refuse the extension. There are alternatives. Since that so-called ramping up 15 years ago, six times more trees than in the entire New Forest have been cut down. Disapproval is so strong that it undermines trust in the Government’s entire package of net zero policies. Key investments in our energy infrastructure will be squeezed if we persist in chopping down North American forests and shipping them across the Atlantic in diesel freighters. There are far better and smarter ways to power our homes. We have already heard about the comments from the Public Accounts Committee, and this month the Lords Secondary Legislation Scrutiny Committee agreed that this is not value for money. It also expressed deep concerns about the true purpose of the draft regulations and stated that Parliament needs to see key documents about them, including legal evidence, the National Energy System Operator report and the Ofgem audit. Rather than reflect on those grave issues, the Government chose to announce on the first day of recess that they would convene a Delegated Legislation Committee on the first day back. That is despite the fact that the draft regulations would enable Ministers to extend the subsidies to burn trees for four years from 2027, when the current subsidies run out, to 2031. Liberal Democrats strongly believe that biomass is not a form of renewable energy and should not be subject to any exemptions or Government support. It is an incredibly inefficient method of producing electricity, and there are far better methods we should be investing in. We note the concerning comments in the Climate Change Committee’s seventh carbon budget recommendations, which confirmed that there is “no role for large-scale unabated biomass generation at high load-factors in the pathway beyond the expiry of existing contracts in 2027.” Yet the Government are choosing to go ahead with just that. Liberal Democrats want to see the contracts for difference scheme used to benefit renewable energy production and reduce the UK’s dependence on fossil fuels in the hands of authoritarian regimes. Investing in renewable energy will cut bills, lower emissions and improve our energy security. We have been calling on the Government to keep the cap on the dedicated biomass plants and end support for all new biomass plants. We want to ensure that 90% of the UK’s electricity is generated from renewables by 2030, with biomass not a part of that because the wood often does not come from renewable sources and in many cases the emissions are worse than coal. We therefore oppose the draft regulations and urge the Government to think again.

• 22 May 2025 · Access to NHS Dentistry · Hansard source

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  I do. We also need solutions for people like my constituent in the meantime; they have already had to pay £1,400 for treatment and they face another £2,000-worth of work to be able to eat normally. That is a stiff fee when you are reliant on personal independence payment and your spouse’s pension. My constituent feels that they have nowhere to turn. To sum up, patients like my constituents deserve access to an NHS dentist. We need an emergency scheme to guarantee access to free NHS dental check-ups for those already eligible: children; new mothers; those who, like my constituent’s wife, are pregnant; and those on low incomes. We need a dental rescue package that brings dentists back into the NHS from the private sector by fixing the dental contract and using flexible commissioning to meet patients’ needs in the meantime.

• 22 May 2025 · Access to NHS Dentistry · Hansard source

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  I thank the hon. Member for Great Grimsby and Cleethorpes (Melanie Onn) for introducing this debate. Thornbury and Yate is a dental desert. According to a recent newspaper report, not a single dentist in Thornbury and Yate is taking on new NHS patients for the third year in a row, leaving people having to travel long distances for care, or forced to pay for private treatment. I am sure, as a fellow south-west MP, the Minister will be as concerned as I am to hear that in September 2024 the NHS dental activity delivery rate was lowest in the south-west, at 61.6%, compared to the highest in London, at 94.7%. Not surprisingly, in the south-west, around one in every 460 people had to be taken to A&E with a dental problem in 2023-24. That was substantially higher than in London, where the figure was only one in every 860 people. The area covered by the NHS Bristol, North Somerset and South Gloucestershire integrated care board is the worst of all worlds, with fewer dentists, adjusted for population size, and lower dental activity delivery rates alongside higher numbers of A&E visits with dental problems. I want to highlight two cases that show the impact that is having on vulnerable people. One constituent wrote: “Despite contacting more than a dozen dental practices in and around South Gloucestershire and Bristol, I have been told by every single surgery that no NHS appointments are available. However, I have been offered private appointments if I am willing to pay…The situation is even more distressing as my wife is currently pregnant and requires urgent dental care, which is crucial for her health and that of our unborn child. Pregnant women are entitled to free NHS dental care, yet this right is rendered meaningless when no NHS appointments are available.” Another constituent wrote to me: a cancer patient who needed major dental treatment ahead of intense radiotherapy. Bristol dental hospital advised them they would need lifelong follow-up care, but during covid that treatment was stopped and they were discharged back to their NHS dentist. Soon after—surprise, surprise—the practice ceased to provide NHS dentistry and they could not find another, so they were forced to pay for their essential treatment.

• 22 May 2025 · School Teachers’ Review Body: Recommendations · Hansard source

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  The Minister has admitted that not all schools will be fully funded, but blames that on the choices that schools have made about their staff. Does she accept that schools cannot fully control the profile of their staff, and that in some cases—I make this point in a letter to the Minister—schools choose to pay people in higher bands because of the increasingly high needs that they are expected to support? Will she meet me to discuss how she will protect schools with particularly high staffing budgets from having to make excessive cuts?

• 22 May 2025 · Business of the House · Hansard source

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  Businesses in Thornbury and Yate are crying out for change on business rates, from the Play Shed, which has seen its relief cut from 75% to 40%, to the company told it would have to wait at least a year to get a revaluation after it subdivided some units. Will the Leader of the House ensure that the Government bring to this House a statement setting out how they will review business rates?

• 19 May 2025 · Topical Questions · Hansard source

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  I welcome last week’s written statement confirming that the cases of many of the Triples—the Afghan commandos who served shoulder to shoulder with UK special forces—will be reviewed. What guarantees can the Minister offer that those individuals will be protected, wherever they are, and that their evidence will be heard by the public inquiry relating to Afghanistan?

• 19 May 2025 · Mental Health Bill [Lords] · Hansard source

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  One of my constituents waited more than eight hours in a mental health crisis for 111 to get back to them, in which time their mental health deteriorated. Previously, they accessed a dedicated local support line, which gave them prompt access to professional support. Does the hon. Member agree that prompt access to support in a crisis is vital to reducing the need for the greater degrees of intervention covered by this Bill?

• 15 May 2025 · Economic Growth · Hansard source

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  The Transport Secretary recently refused to commit to keeping the £3 cap on bus fares outside London beyond the end of this year, leaving many in rural areas worried about how much more they will end up having to pay to get to work. Residents across my constituency have already seen vital routes scrapped or scaled back, holding back economic growth. Can the Transport Secretary explain what support will be made available to not only keep rural fares down but restore lost services?

• 15 May 2025 · Business of the House · Hansard source

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  Flooding is an increasing concern across the country. Only last month, I met agencies involved in tackling flooding on the railway at Old Sodbury, which impacts on the surrounding farmland and caused homes in Yate to be flooded during Storm Bert—yet the Government have made no funding commitment for flood protection beyond next April. Will the Leader of the House ask the Flooding Minister to bring to the House plans for longer-term flood protection funding?

• 6 May 2025 · Dedicated Schools Grant · Hansard source

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  It is an honour to serve under your chairship, Ms Butler. I thank my hon. Friend the Member for Tewkesbury (Cameron Thomas) for securing the debate. Investing in education is investing in our future, so we need to get it right. The national funding formula creates huge discrepancies in how children are supported in different authorities. My local authority, South Gloucestershire, has long been at or near the bottom of the funding league table, and that lack of investment is having a real impact on children. Thornbury and Yate is largely rural, but most of the rest of South Gloucestershire is urban. Generally, with all sorts of Government funding, when taken as a whole, it has suffered through not being rural enough for rural support but not having the concentrations of deprivation seen in some urban areas. Even within my constituency there is huge variation in the demographics of school intakes. I recently wrote to the Minister about the case of one primary school in my constituency that I visited. It provides a good example of the pressures caused by the unfairness in the existing funding system. Staff at the school told me that it has developed a reputation for being particularly supportive of children with SEND, and thus has an unusually high proportion of children who require extra support. On top of that, it is being asked to support increasingly high levels of medical needs, which its already overstretched staff are not trained to meet. It also has a high number of children with English as a second language, and a third of its pupils qualify for pupil premium funding. In many ways, the school’s intake is comparable to a school the staff visited in London, yet that school gets much higher per pupil funding simply because of the local authority it is in. That shows in the services that the London school is able to provide, from having specialist art and music teachers to having two teachers per class. Our children in Thornbury and Yate deserve more than what the funding currently provides. The disparity is undermining the work that our local schools do and leaving them worse off. We need a fairer national funding formula that supports disadvantaged and rural schools, not just those in more affluent and urban areas, and recognises the wide variation within local authority boundaries.

• 6 May 2025 · Dedicated Schools Grant · Hansard source

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  I absolutely agree. It is a particular problem for small rural schools, which often have small class sizes because the schools are small overall. We need action on funding for special educational needs and disabilities, as too many children are being left without the support they need. For years, schools in South Gloucestershire have had to ask the Government to allow them to take money from the schools block to supplement the high needs block. That reduces the funding available for early intervention which, as we know, is so important for better outcomes. It also makes the funding situation worse as more children need higher-cost interventions at a later stage. The high needs block must be protected and expanded to reflect the growing demand and rising complexity in children’s needs. South Gloucestershire is one of the authorities with a safety valve agreement, which is intended to help councils to manage large deficits in their high needs budgets. It was signed pre-covid, with targets that are unachievable thanks to the impact of the pandemic. Next year, when the agreement ends, the council faces a cliff edge in funding. It, and other councils in that position, face impossible choices between balancing budgets and supporting vulnerable children. Furthermore, in the case of South Gloucestershire, the previous Conservative Government failed to provide the requested £30 million of funding to provide an additional 200 special school placements locally. As well as being better for the children, that would have reduced costs. Earlier this year, I had a meeting with the Minister and South Gloucestershire’s council leadership in the hope that this Government would take a more sensible approach, but the focus seems to be on providing spaces in mainstream settings. We support that as a goal, with extra funding for early intervention to make it possible, while recognising that there are children who need support now and did not get that early intervention. We also need funding for them. I ask the Minister to think again about what works now, because otherwise another generation of our children will miss out. Without a solution to the ending of the safety valve agreement, the whole system could collapse, leading to longer waits, reduced provision and more children out of school. We need sustainable, long-term funding for children with high needs, and an end to short-term financial firefighting.

• 30 Apr 2025 · Energy Grid Resilience · Hansard source

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  I thank the Minister for advance sight of his statement. Our thoughts are with all those affected by these power outages, which are a stark reminder of how key our energy security is to our national security. That is why it is vital that the Government learn from this latest incident by acting now to boost our home-grown energy by supporting community-owned projects and increasing supply chain capacity. Our constituents will be concerned to know about preparations in this country. What conversations has the Minister had across Government to ensure that the UK has robust plans in place in the event of similar situations occurring here? In particular, can he outline what contingency plans are in place to protect our transport network, our hospitals and urgent healthcare settings and our emergency communication capacity? The latter currently relies heavily on the mobile network for our emergency alert system, as well as being the primary way that most people stay up to date.

• 30 Apr 2025 · Global Deforestation · Hansard source

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  It is a pleasure to serve under your chairship, Mr Vickers. I thank the hon. Member for Brent West (Barry Gardiner) for securing this debate and for giving us such an educational introduction. It is notable that all Members have spoken not just with passion but with rare unanimity on this topic. Forests are not merely scenic landscapes; they are the lungs of our planet, absorbing more than 7.6 billion tonnes of carbon dioxide annually. They house more than 80% of our biodiversity and support the livelihoods of more than 1.6 billion people globally, including many of the world’s poorest communities, yet the World Wide Fund for Nature estimates that we are losing around 15 billion trees every year. That is a direct threat to our climate targets, our food security and our global stability. World Animal Protection notes that, as president of COP26, the UK introduced the Glasgow leaders’ declaration on forests and land use, but has made little progress in the years since. At COP29, leaders reaffirmed the goal to end deforestation by 2030. We were proud to support that pledge, but words must become action. A number of my constituents, including the children of Old Sodbury primary school, have contacted me to express their concern about deforestation. They highlighted the plight of orangutans and the damage being done by people who are destroying forests in order to grow palm trees for the palm oil used in soap, shampoo, chocolate and many other toiletries and food. I am sure that they will be pleased to have heard a number of hon. Members express concern about orangutans in this debate. A number of hon. Members, including the hon. Members for Leeds Central and Headingley (Alex Sobel) and South East Cornwall (Anna Gelderd), set out clearly the damaging impacts of deforestation, including soil acidification, vast carbon emissions and the damage to people who depend on those forests, including some of the poorest in the world. The new Labour Government have pledged stronger regulations to prevent UK businesses from fuelling illegal deforestation through their supply chains but, as the hon. Member for Rotherham (Sarah Champion) set out, every day of delay allows more trees, and the species that rely on them, to be destroyed. Will the Minister tell us when the Government will put forward the regulations? The Liberal Democrats would support the introduction of a business, human rights and environment Act to require companies to take adequate measures and conduct due diligence to prevent and manage the impacts of activities on people and the environment, both in the UK and around the world. Will the Minister go further and introduce a general duty of care for the environment and human rights to require companies, financial institutions and public sector agencies to exercise due diligence in avoiding specified products, such as commodities produced with deforestation, in their operations and supply chains, and to report on their actions? The right hon. Member for Herne Bay and Sandwich (Sir Roger Gale) raised the issue of Drax. I had a robust conversation with proponents of biomass energy production at one of the many drop-ins in Parliament. That case illustrates why we need to look at whole-life-cycle emissions, not simply consumption emissions, as the hon. Member for Hexham (Joe Morris) pointed out. Under the previous Conservative Government, the UK continued to subsidise biomass energy production, particularly at the Drax power station. It burns the equivalent of 27 million trees a year and, although it is classed as renewable under current definitions, that is both inefficient and ecologically damaging. The Lib Dems oppose the continued classification of biomass as renewable energy and would like the Government to change that so that we can focus on genuine renewables such as wind and solar. We should not forget the problems on our own doorstep, and I thank the hon. Member for Strangford (Jim Shannon) for giving us a Northern Ireland perspective on this. The Woodland Trust has said that, here in England, we have some of the lowest woodland cover in Europe at just 10%, far behind the European average of 38%. In my constituency, where the Liberal Democrats lead on the climate and nature emergency, the council is part of a partnership that has won a bid for the western forest to become a new national forest. It will serve more than 2.5 million people, and the aim is to plant 2,500 hectares of new woodland in the first five years, with an aspiration to plant 20 million trees by 2050. Last year, the Liberal Democrats committed to doubling woodland cover by 2050, and I hope that aspiration will make a contribution to our policy. The hon. Member for Kilmarnock and Loudoun (Lillian Jones) made the good point that the types of planting are important. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has said that protecting and restoring forests is essential to limiting warming to 1.5°, and organisations from the World Wildlife Fund to the Tree Council have warned us that delay is no longer an option. Forests do not recognise borders, and neither does climate change. To protect nature, we must act globally, act boldly and act now. According to the UN, we lose approximately 10 million hectares of forest a year—an area roughly the size of Portugal. As a result of the previous Conservative Government’s policies, the World Wildlife Fund and Global Forest Watch rank the UK in the bottom third of G7 nations for its overall progress on halting imported deforestation. The COP29 declaration reaffirmed the global goal of ending deforestation by 2030. This is not a distant crisis; it is happening now and it threatens us all. I call on the Government to act with urgency and vision, stop subsidising environmental destruction, implement rigorous supply chain standards and work with global partners to safeguard forests around the world. The world cannot afford half-measures. We need real action to stop deforestation now.

• 29 Apr 2025 · Renewable Energy Sector: Job Creation · Hansard source

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  Through my work on the Select Committee, I have heard repeated concerns from industry leaders that existing workers in their 50s and 60s see no point in retraining because they believe they will see out their careers supporting old technologies. That has a knock-on impact on young entrants to the workforce, who have traditionally learnt their skills from more experienced workers. Will the Secretary of State outline what steps he is taking to incentivise retraining to support growth in the renewable energy sector?

• 29 Apr 2025 · Topical Questions · Hansard source

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  Following the publication of the Severn estuary commission report on tidal power, will the Government produce a national policy statement to support tidal range energy, and will they publish a review of the available opportunities?

• 28 Apr 2025 · Football Governance Bill [Lords] · Hansard source

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  I want to focus on the distribution of revenues through the pyramid. Thornbury and Yate is a largely rural constituency with no league clubs, but it does have a number of clubs with passionate supporters in steps four to seven—otherwise known as levels eight to 11 of the men’s football pyramid—as well as teams in levels five and 10 of the women’s pyramid. I have already had the pleasure of watching Tytherington Rocks and Yate Town. I congratulate Yate on clinching the southern league division one south title on Saturday. I wish them well in the premier division. Tyrone Mings played for Yate before he played in the premier league and for England, and he illustrates one reason why investment in the grassroots is so important. The benefits go far wider, though. For supporters, it can be an affordable way to watch football and feel a connection with their community, and many of them contribute to their clubs through volunteering. Players of all abilities have a chance to find a level at which they can play, with all the health and wellbeing benefits that football brings, as well as the opportunity to progress to the professional game for the most talented. The wider community benefits are community outreach programmes and fans using local services and shops. Sadly, although there is great wealth at the top of the game, in recent years the share of revenue making its way even to football league teams has decreased, never mind to grassroots teams such as those in my constituency. Grassroots teams are outside the scope of the proposed regulator, and I feel that is a missed opportunity. The issues that keep non-league managers awake at night are more likely to be fundraising drives, or the difficulties of securing finance for ground upgrades. Making a ground safer at the next level up can be a real challenge when a club cannot secure funding. That has prevented at least one local club from taking up its rightful place. It would be fair to say that football has given me long periods of resilience-building interspersed with moments of sheer joy—an experience common to many supporters. The Bill has the potential to ensure that those emotions are tied to actions on, rather than off, the pitch. I am astonished that some people are trying to pretend that everything is currently fine. I would not be so blasé, as an Oxford United fan who lived through the Maxwell years, which included his bizarre proposal to merge the club with Reading FC and the entire first team being put up for sale after his death. We cannot rely on the benevolence of owners in what is a cutthroat business. If we are to make football in this country truly sustainable, it must be done from the ground up. I urge the Minister to think again about the scope of the regulator to ensure fairer funding throughout the pyramid.

• 24 Apr 2025 · Business of the House · Hansard source

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  Businesses across my constituency, the wider west of England and south Wales were given a rather glum Easter present in the news that heavy goods vehicles will be banned from the M48 Severn bridge from the end of May. That will lead to expensive and environmentally damaging diversions, and one local haulier called it a “hammerblow”. National Highways estimates that the bridge will cost between £300 million and £600 million to fix. Will the Leader of the House ensure that the Department for Transport brings forward a clear plan of action as soon as possible?