Euan Stainbank MP: speeches

Speeches

• 15 Sept 2026 · Civil Service Pension Scheme · Hansard source

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  Capita and MyCSP have failed public servants and ground lives to a halt. Derek tragically lost his wife Julie last year. We found that vital information in relation to Julie’s pension had been lost by Capita, and despite raising this in a previous debate, that case is still unresolved. Despite Capita’s supposed priority to death-in-service cases, it is Derek’s sincere and despairing belief that he will never get what he is entitled to. Tim retired in May. He sent everything he needed to immediately to Capita, which quickly confirmed it had received everything it needed, only to come back to Tim two months later requesting documents it did not initially send him. I could go on and on—terminally ill people waiting for hours on the phone; prison officers mentally battered and left for months without any updates from Capita. The fact that a single penny has been earned by Capita’s shareholders since it took on the contract is shameful. The fact that that contract was transferred to Capita on the cheap in 2023 is shameful. Minister, enough is enough. Insource this contract.

• 10 Sept 2026 · Business of the House · Hansard source

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  Heavy goods vehicle drivers such as my constituent Peter Cunningham are vital to Falkirk’s local economy. The Driver and Vehicle Licensing Agency has directly risked Peter’s livelihood by requesting duplicate medical information a month after he already submitted it in full. Will the Leader of the House arrange for a statement from the relevant Minister on how DVLA and Driver and Vehicle Standards Agency delays are being addressed, and will he support my representations to help Peter get his licence back?

• 10 Sept 2026 · Topical Questions · Hansard source

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  The Prime Minister was right last week to say that too many buses are being bought from abroad. The 10% social value commitment from combined mayoral authorities following the conclusion of the bus manufacturing expert panel earlier this year will not be enough to protect British bus building as China continues to scale up its automotive dumping. Will the First Secretary of State work with devolved mayors, the Department for Transport and the Department for Business, Innovation and Skills to bring social value requirements in line with the 20% she has rightly set for major Government contracts?

• 8 Sept 2026 · Fuel Duty: Cost of Living · Hansard source

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  I welcome the Government’s fuel duty freeze for working families, alongside the road tax holiday for hauliers and the diesel fuel duty cut. Fuel costs for businesses in my constituency, such as Northfield quarry near Dunipace, have nearly tripled due to the Iran war and the previous Government’s tightening of eligibility for red diesel. In the Budget, will the Chancellor consider extending fuel duty reductions for industries such as quarrying, which is essential for house construction and provides good local jobs for working families?

• 3 Sept 2026 · Business of the House · Hansard source

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  Following years of closures of community spaces, places of worship have become increasingly precious to communities across my constituency, especially across the Braes villages. The SNP learned 20 months ago that it was responsible for support grants for places of worship, but has only now delivered a paltry scheme, with seemingly half the resource proportionately as that committed to the scheme down here, top-sliced from the already significantly reduced Historic Environment Scotland budget. Will the Leader of the House support a debate on the importance of places of worship to our communities?

• 2 Sept 2026 · Representation of the People Bill · Hansard source

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  Our democracy is precious but faces significant challenges, and if we want to protect our system, it must change with the times. The turnout for the 2024 general election was far too low, at below 50% in the poorest areas. Property ownership was still dictating representation, with renters voting at a rate of 38%, and owner-occupiers at a rate of 71%. The delta between younger and older voters is still too high. Expanding participation and trust in politics is an issue of equality, but also one of social, economic and generational fairness, and I am proud of the Government’s efforts to address that in the Bill. No Member who has spoken today is under any illusion about the limited trust in our current political system, and the bandwidth of that system to enable meaningful democratic participation, especially among those who need it most. MPs elected with increasingly fractured minority votes, and a Parliament that is sometimes unrepresentative of the voting intentions of the country, repel the trust, participation and engagement that our elected representatives in government need. It is not a party political point to state that; this is about every person stepping up to participate and seeing their vote reflected in this place. When MPs and Governments are enabled with a low share and turnout of the vote, increasingly fewer people see their ballot as meaning anything in this place. If that is their first experience of voting, they are far less likely to vote again. I believe that the Government can give us a route that starts from the first principles of enabling a system to become fairer and more representative and that sustains public confidence through an independent national commission. That is not something that the Government will do today, but they ought to do in the future so that the next Parliament does not start from scratch on long overdue reform to our electoral system. New clause 68, in the name of my hon. Friend the Member for Glasgow West (Patricia Ferguson), to which I have added my signature, requires registration officers to accept postal and proxy vote applications that are received after the deadline when there is proof of timely posting. That is a meaningful effort and step to prevent people from losing their votes after having made reasonable steps to submit it. It is not reasonable for voters to lose their say in an election because of the potential—and quite common—unreliability of the postal system, and the new clause would empower returning officers to count the votes of people who have made an effort in good faith to vote. Sadly, we see amendments from Opposition parties that would limit postal voting, such as Reform’s new clause 108, which would have created serious issues, especially in Scotland. For example, when the last general election was called, the last Tory Prime Minister called it for the first Thursday of the Scottish school holidays, and under new clause 108 thousands of people would have been made ineligible to vote through no fault of their own. In the last wheeze of parliamentary effort, amendments have been proposed to stop votes for 16 and 17-year-olds. I have to thank Conservative Members, because their arguments have only compounded my belief that this is the right step for the Government to take. It is ludicrous that amendment 6 and subsequent amendments link the voting age to the age that people can buy alcohol as a way of getting around the Government’s manifesto commitment in the Bill to extend the franchise. Perhaps Members would have been persuaded to support the amendment if we were to allow 16 and 17-year-olds to vote if they then went to a licensed restaurant for a sit-down meal accompanied by an adult. Sadly, that seems to have been omitted in the amendment. If there is a serious concern about where we draw the line on the age of capacity, I make the principled point that allowing 16-year-olds to vote so that they can have their democratic say in how the taxes that they contribute are spent and how the conditions of their labour are regulated is a far more rational place to tie that milestone than whether they would be able to have a pint at 8 o’clock while watching the Scottish premiership. The Government is right on this principle and I am glad that we will be able to achieve this milestone today. Opposition Members have made a lot of references to vote rigging. I find that ludicrous, principally because when votes for 16 and 17-year-olds were passed in Scotland it was with cross-party support, including from the Scottish Conservatives, and because engagement has been increased among 16 and 17-year-olds ever since. I cast my first vote aged 16 in the 2016 Scottish Parliament elections. I was not grateful for the Government of the day. I went out and enthusiastically voted for the SNP—a ludicrous proposal considering how much time I spend in this place opposing SNP measures. I voted because it was the right thing to do and it was recognised by the Scottish Parliament. I am glad that we have that cross-party consensus today: even if it is a majority and not the unanimity that we had in 2016, it is going to get this over the line. Sadly, the Conservative and Reform amendments have been about restricting political participation; comparatively, what we have heard from Government colleagues has been about expanding political participation. I hope the Government will go further and set up a national commission, but I look at this Bill as the first stage of our political reform agenda.

• 16 Jul 2026 · Business of the House · Hansard source

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  Many constituents have reported significant delays in requests from the DVLA for medical information. My constituent Graham, for whom it took five months from first contact with the DVLA to resolve his inquiry, reported that the delay has had a significant impact on his mental health due to the loss of independence. Behind each of these statistics is a person, so I add my name to the welcome call made by my hon. Friend the Member for Erewash (Adam Thompson). Will the Leader of the House arrange for a statement after the recess, so that Transport Ministers can hear about DVLA waiting times from hon. Members and update the House on what they are doing to resolve them?

• 16 Jul 2026 · Bus Manufacturing: Scotland · Hansard source

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  As legal action is taken against the SNP Scottish Government for the ScotZEB3 grant scheme, which inexplicably saw more expensive orders go to Chinese manufacturers and cheaper ones to Falkirk—no wonder SNP Members have not showed up this morning—the Government and mayoral combined authorities must take heed of the exponentially rising Chinese market share, which has destroyed 115 Scottish jobs in my constituency off the back of the grant scheme. What more will Transport Ministers do, alongside their colleagues in the Cabinet Office and the Department for Business and Trade, to send an explicit message to those who are purchasing buses with taxpayer cash that they should be buying British?

• 16 Jul 2026 · Bus Manufacturing: Scotland · Hansard source

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  11. What steps she is taking to support bus manufacturing in Scotland.

• 13 Jul 2026 · Immigration and Asylum Bill · Hansard source

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  In Falkirk, discussion of asylum policy has taken unprecedented command of our local debate. What has occurred in our community is an example of the failure of the past Government to provide solutions that work in the best interests of communities across the country, or the best interests of asylum seekers fleeing persecution and conflict, to put it mildly. The previous Government’s lack of control over the asylum system has almost destroyed public confidence in the system. The number of applicants rose from tens of thousands to hundreds of thousands from 2020 onwards, which led to Ministers in a panicked state directing the acquisition of town-centre hotels for use as accommodation. They placed asylum seekers, who are unable to work, as Members have mentioned, into goldfish-bowl hotels across the country. They ground processing to a halt. They forgot about asylum seekers, and forgot, or simply did not care, about communities like Falkirk, which hosted them. We saw costs balloon, and we failed to stop the rise in the number of people coming through illegal routes. Under this Labour Government, on the other hand, Tory asylum hotels are down by over half since the peak of 400. Crossings came down 41% in one year, and claims came down by 12% in one year. We have also seen the grant rate fall from 45% in July 2024 to 39% today, enabling £1 billion a year to be saved in accommodation costs. Where the previous Government lost control, this Government have taken steps to restore it. The challenge that the Bill presents us with is finding a way to re-establish public confidence in an asylum system that many of my constituents have told me they are questioning. We cannot let the palpable anger—and there is anger out there, in certain corners of our community—irrevocably push us towards breaking the rights-based order that we have had for 80 years. We must demonstrate that we can control the asylum system without sacrificing our constituents’ rights, as many from opposition parties have suggested. The tone that the Government have used to communicate our record has caused, I will admit, reasonable concern in my constituency. There are concerns about the measures that we are considering today, and the measures that we have to acknowledge we are not considering today. I do not believe that we can deal with those concerns tonight by abandoning the essential objectives that the Bill seeks to pursue. If we vote against the Bill, we throw away an opportunity for asylum appeals reform. The backlog left by the Conservatives has been rapidly reduced, but many cases have been displaced into the appeals system. We must be quicker, imminently, to resolve appeals. If we vote against the Bill, we are throwing away a chance to build a system of controlled routes, which is the only sustainable solution to boat crossings, but one that requires the public to have confidence in the basic norm of an asylum system, which is being threatened. We also throw away a chance to align with our partners in the Council of Europe on article 8 interpretation, as we did in May in Chi inău, as we seek to resolve an international humanitarian crisis, instead of being pushed to the more extreme solutions that others offer. There are several areas where we could improve the Bill, and I will bring those up with Ministers in Committee. However, I will not be indulging Conservative Members, who broke my community’s confidence in the asylum system; I will support the Government in making a good faith attempt to resolve it.

• 13 Jul 2026 · Topical Questions · Hansard source

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  I welcome the Minister’s explicit statement last month that he wants to see the Cladhan hotel, which was opened by the Conservatives, closed. When any hotel closes, will he confirm that the vast majority of those being moved out will have their accommodation needs met within existing capacity?