Sam Rushworth MP: speeches

Speeches

• 10 Jul 2025 · Educational Attainment of Boys · Hansard source

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  What a great example. I thank the right hon. Gentleman for that. I will speed through the rest of my speech, because I am conscious of time and the contributions of other people. We want young boys to go to university too. I declare an interest: I used to tutor for the Brilliant Club in schools in the north-east. That was about young people whose parents may not have gone to university and helping them to have that aspiration and realise what they could do. On early years, as I said at the beginning, a lot of attainment is set before the age of five—we know that even by the age of five, boys are behind girls. This Government are doing some significant things that are important in that regard, including the Best Start family hubs, which were announced just this week. Those are about not just children, but parents being able to access support. As a parent myself, I know that I raised my seven-year-old son much better than I raised my 18-year-old son, because I made so many mistakes in knowing how to help him. Too often, I tried to use a carrot-and-stick approach and did not understand well enough how to help him to reflect on his behaviour, although they are both wonderful boys. The free breakfast clubs initiative is about so much more than just breakfast. I recently visited Cockfield primary school in my constituency, where, since it was an early adopter of the scheme, attendance went from about 10 or 12 children to 60 children every morning. I met children who used to have difficulty being on time or who were regularly absent, and I was told how they are now coming and thriving. A wise headteacher there was using that scheme not just to feed the children, but to engage them in meaningful activities that help develop their social and emotional skills. Before I was elected, I was a governor at Benfieldside primary school in County Durham, where we introduced a specialist social and emotional learning programme. That was about helping children to develop so-called 21st century skills, such as emotional self-regulation, recognising what they are feeling, self-awareness, social awareness, empathy and how to build healthy relationships. The teachers reported remarkable differences within a year of the programme’s introduction, and parents were coming in and saying, “Something is happening to my child, because they are so much calmer and better able to manage their behaviour.” There are real opportunities for us to grasp this issue in the breakfast clubs, in free school meal provision and in the Best Start family hubs. This is about not just increased funding, but content. If I have one ask of the Minister today, it is to give 30 minutes of her time, either by herself or with officials, to meet with me and people I used to work with in this field who have developed these really useful tools that can be introduced in any classroom setting. I believe we urgently need a national strategy for boys’ attainment that is cross-party, evidence-based and rooted in fairness. It should invest in teacher training that recognises gender bias and engages boys more effectively. It should embed social and emotional learning throughout the curriculum, especially in early years and transition stages. It should expand vocational and technical pathways, recognising different routes to success. It should promote leadership opportunities for boys in school life and, most importantly, ensure transparent, gender-disaggregated data to hold ourselves accountable nationally and locally. This is a debate not just about attainment, but about dignity. It is about who we see and who we invest in. I do not want boys in Bishop Auckland, Bootle, Barry or Basingstoke to feel that the system has no place for them; I want them to feel seen, supported and believed in, because when we raise the floor for those who are struggling, we lift the whole classroom. Let us act with some of the clarity and courage we showed a generation ago for girls—our boys and our society deserve nothing less.

• 10 Jul 2025 · Educational Attainment of Boys · Hansard source

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  One hundred per cent. That is another good example of why we need to create those pathways. Let me say that I am not calling for us to stop encouraging young men to go to university. I am a working-class lad, and I was much better suited to going the academic route than I was to working as a mechanic or something, as those who have seen me put up a shelf will attest. I am calling for greater parity of esteem, respect for all skills and earlier opportunities for people to feel valued, as my hon. Friend the Member for St Austell and Newquay (Noah Law) just pointed out.

• 10 Jul 2025 · Educational Attainment of Boys · Hansard source

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  I will keep this brief, because I am conscious that the next debate is also of great importance. I thank everybody who has attended and contributed to the debate; they were excellent contributions. I am grateful for the cross-party support on this issue. I look forward to reading the Government’s White Paper on school standards, to be published in the autumn, and engaging with them on that. I will write to the Minister on how we can do more to embed social and emotional learning in early years settings. Question put and agreed to. Resolved, That this House has considered the attainment and engagement of boys in education.

• 3 Jul 2025 · NHS 10-Year Plan · Hansard source

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  I thank the Secretary of State for this wonderful statement, delivering on a commitment that we made together at the Richardson community hospital in Barnard Castle two years ago to move services back into the community. I want to ask him about the use of bank staff in the NHS: not only is it a massive waste of money, but it has created a situation where only one in five of this year’s midwifery graduates feels confident of getting a job. On behalf of Mrs Rushworth, who is one of those, her friends, and nurses and midwives in the north-east who have contacted me about this issue, what will the Secretary of State do to ensure that those who have given 2,300 hours of unpaid labour to the NHS and are graduating with tens of thousands of pounds of debt can get a job?

• 30 Jun 2025 · Driven Grouse Shooting · Hansard source

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  I thank the Minister for his balanced approach to this subject and for protecting the livelihoods of my constituents. I agree with him that we need to look after animal welfare. I do not think the economic arguments we have been making today apply to trail hunting. Will he confirm today that it is still the will of this Government to set out a timetable for banning trail hunting?

• 30 Jun 2025 · Driven Grouse Shooting · Hansard source

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  I have supported animal welfare since I was a teenager, when I first visited the Redwings horse sanctuary in Norfolk, where I learned about battery farming. At college, I set up an animal welfare group, and I used to work for an animal welfare charity. I care about the welfare of all animals and birds, including grouse. I have no interest in shooting grouse. I believe—although some may challenge me on this—that I represent England’s largest grouse moors, in Teesdale and Weardale. I have never shot an animal in my life. I have shot a gun—during a short period in Canada, I greatly enjoyed target shooting—but I am not interested in grouse shooting. That does not mean we should ban it. I am here as a Labour MP to represent my constituents. My first priority will always be the jobs and livelihoods of the people I represent. At a conservative estimate, 500 jobs in the Bishop Auckland constituency—in Teesdale and Weardale—rely on revenues from grouse shooting, including the gamekeepers, those who run gun shops, provide hospitality during shoots, maintain dry stone walls, look after the lodges and train dogs, and the young people for whom being a beater is a great way to earn a seasonal wage. I am here to speak for them. As the former Prime Minister, the right hon. Member for Richmond and Northallerton (Rishi Sunak), noted earlier, I really find it insulting when these people’s wages are talked about as “economically insignificant”. Others may consider it economically insignificant in the context of the national economy, but if someone is doing a job that their dad did before them and their grandfather did before him, if they grew up on that land and that is the job they want to do, their livelihood is not economically insignificant; it is what puts food on their table. To talk about conservation, I recently had the pleasure of attending an event called Let’s Learn Moor with primary school children from my constituency. It was a wonderful day out, and I really enjoyed it. The children learned about the conservation of peat bogs, as well as all the various fantastic birds and wildlife that we have. Anyone can come to Teesdale and Weardale and see it for themselves; they will find no other place in the country where they can stand and within an hour observe curlews, lapwings and oystercatchers flying past. Those birds are there because they are preserved by predator control. While I do not shoot grouse and never would, I have got up with friends at 4 am and gone out to the most remarkable and spectacular lek to see the black grouse that come together to the same spot every year to find their mate. We should be doing more to encourage eco-tourism in my part of the world, so that more people can enjoy the wonderful wildlife that we have because we live in a managed landscape. At Let’s Learn Moor, the children met the Bishop Auckland fire brigade, who had come up to the top of the moor to demonstrate how they put out a moorland fire. They had a pump down in the river, and the children had a wonderful time spraying a firehose, which nearly hit us. I asked the firefighters about the method for managing and putting out moorland fires, and they said, “Well, the first thing we do is call the gamekeepers. They’re the experts at managing the fires, and they are normally first on the scene.” A local gamekeeper talked to me about his responsibility to manage not only predators but the land around him. He talked about his experiences moving on campers, including one occasion when he discovered people who had created a circle of stones and lit a fire; he moved them on to camp in a local pub’s garden. To echo the point made by the right hon. Member for Richmond and Northallerton about regulation, the gamekeepers also talked about how carefully they must tread when they come across foolish tourists who did not learn the countryside code in school. They told me, “If there is one allegation against us that we have been in any way aggressive, they will whip our guns away straightaway, because it is so tightly regulated.” They did not deny that there is occasional bad practice, and they were as disgusted as me by the criminality that sometimes occurs on the moorland, but the point is that it is criminality; we already have laws against such practices. Perhaps we need to look at how we enforce those laws; we do not necessarily need to create a whole new set. Of course there are questions about how we manage the environment, and how we stop criminality and animal cruelty, but simply banning a sport that people have engaged in for generations will not solve those problems. It is vital that we keep the money flowing into our community. If we lost that revenue, we would lose jobs, and we would even lose primary schools, which would have to close. We are already seeing far too many families leaving the tops of the dales because of the lack of work. We would also lose the wildlife; it is not there by chance. With respect to those who signed the petition, and with a heartfelt understanding of their motives, I have to oppose it today.

• 30 Jun 2025 · Road Safety Powers: Parish and Town Councils · Hansard source

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  I do not know if my hon. Friend needs a crossing in his constituency because I am not local to that area. But I will tell hon. Members who does know: his parish council and the people who live there. If that is what they are asking for, they should be listened to.

• 30 Jun 2025 · Road Safety Powers: Parish and Town Councils · Hansard source

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  My hon. Friend makes an excellent point about communities where there are schools. Toft Hill primary school, in my constituency, is on the A68, and children have to cross the road in difficult conditions—the school lost its lollipop person who had been helping the children to cross.

• 30 Jun 2025 · Road Safety Powers: Parish and Town Councils · Hansard source

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  Thank you for your wisdom, Mr Deputy Speaker. I will move to the end of my speech. I have a simple ask. It is about the power that we give, but it is also about funding. I recognise that sometimes the reason the answer is no is that decisions have to be taken, and I have two thoughts on that. First, could we look at ways to make the decision-making process less expensive? One way of doing so would simply be to trust local knowledge more than we do. If necessary, could we not also mandate that councils put aside more funding for this area? As we have heard from interventions, this is clearly and evidently one of the top issues that our constituents raise with us. Residents have a right to know that when they speak with a collective voice, that voice gets heard and respected at all levels of government, from this place down to their parish councils. Councils are democratically elected, accountable and rooted in their communities. Residents’ lived experience offers better long-term insight than one-off traffic monitoring snapshots. The current system prioritises administrative thresholds over genuine local need. The Government’s commitment to localism and community empowerment should apply to road safety too, and I genuinely welcome their commitment to giving back control to the British people over many parts of their lives; this is another area where people are asking to have more control. Before I finish, it would be remiss of me not to put one more road safety issue on record, having unsuccessfully bobbed through two lots of Transport questions and the spending review. That issue is the future of the A66—an important piece of national infrastructure—and that future is decided not by parish councils, but by the Treasury. I would be grateful to know the timeframe for getting a response on that, because the dualling of the A66 is uncertain. It is an important piece of national infrastructure for the north of England—for people crossing the Pennines from east to west. Dualling would reduce the time it takes to get to the Lake district and would mean far fewer road closures, which really impact on people’s lives. There have also been far too many fatalities in the area. I wanted to steal those last few seconds to put that on the record. I thank Members for their time this evening.

• 30 Jun 2025 · Road Safety Powers: Parish and Town Councils · Hansard source

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  We are all here and have all stayed late because we are the voices of the people we represent, and clearly they are all telling us the same thing. It falls to the Government to do something about the challenges we are raising tonight. Let me quickly mention two or three other places, because I love my constituents, but they are jealous—I know that I will get grief if I neglect to mention places such as Fleet Street in Bishop Auckland, where there are just no road markings at a four-way stop and people do not know who to give way to. That is a regular source of concern for parents in the Cockton Hill area. I will mention Stanley Crook and a lot of the hilltop villages where the traffic just does not want to slow down as people pursue their journey through residential areas. Let me also mention Kinninvie, where two years ago a car crashed into someone’s dining room—the family was lucky not to be in the dining room at the time. That is an area where for donkey’s years people have said it is a dangerous junction. People knew that, and eventually a serious accident happened.

• 30 Jun 2025 · Road Safety Powers: Parish and Town Councils · Hansard source

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  I hear that same anecdote far too often for it not to be true. People are told, “Due to a lack of fatalities, we cannot intervene.” That is not how we risk assess. We do not wait for someone to die before we ascertain that there is a risk.

• 30 Jun 2025 · Road Safety Powers: Parish and Town Councils · Hansard source

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  I welcome that intervention. Parish councillors do sterling work, and all who volunteer and give their time for speed watch schemes are making life that bit better for people in their communities. Nonetheless, people get frustrated when often that data is not taken where they want it to be taken. In the village of Hamsterley in my constituency, the traffic through to Hamsterley forest on the weekend is often a cause of concern. Villagers there have asked if the village could be made a 20 mph zone, which sounds to me like a reasonable request. In fact, they have often asked me, “Why can’t we be more like Wales?” Welsh villages are allowed to be 20 mph zones, and my constituents get frustrated that they do not have that option.

• 30 Jun 2025 · Road Safety Powers: Parish and Town Councils · Hansard source

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  That is exactly the point I am making and I welcome my hon. Friend’s intervention.

• 30 Jun 2025 · Road Safety Powers: Parish and Town Councils · Hansard source

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  That is an excellent point that I had not considered, so I will tack it on to the end of my speech. I welcome that intervention. There will be a lot of interventions tonight, but I say to the Minister that perhaps we could have some sort of deal whereby if she gives in to my demands 30 minutes in, we will not take the debate to the full two and half hours that we could have.

• 30 Jun 2025 · Road Safety Powers: Parish and Town Councils · Hansard source

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  That is an excellent point about local knowledge. I think back to High Grange, which I talked about, where only the local people understand the importance of the allotments and the park and the difficulty of crossing the road. Both those places are just outside the village, on the other side of the main road.

• 30 Jun 2025 · Road Safety Powers: Parish and Town Councils · Hansard source

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  On the matter of parish councils, I recently met members of Staindrop parish council, who have been asking for more than a decade to have two crossing points at the entrance and exit to their beautiful village, which is on the main road between Bishop Auckland and Barnard Castle. Traffic often does not drop its speed down to 30 mph. Pensioners in Staindrop have said that they feel put off from doing something as simple as crossing the road to attend a social function because of their fear of crossing that road. It is a travesty that Staindrop parish council can ask for the same thing over and over again, but the highways authorities just keep saying no.

• 30 Jun 2025 · Road Safety Powers: Parish and Town Councils · Hansard source

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  It is difficult to disagree with that excellent intervention. Another example is Howden-le-Wear, where Hargill Road comes down a fast lane. I spoke to a gentleman there recently who told me that he no longer feels safe going out in his electric scooter and going up the road, because of the speed at which traffic comes hurtling down the bank. People there have been asking for traffic enforcement measures, as was mentioned in earlier interventions.

• 30 Jun 2025 · Road Safety Powers: Parish and Town Councils · Hansard source

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  That is what I am calling for tonight: for parish and town councils to be able to decide the speed limits on the roads within their boundaries. They represent the voice of the people in those areas. I will move on from the tour of my constituency—although you are all welcome to visit some of these lovely villages sometime.

• 30 Jun 2025 · Road Safety Powers: Parish and Town Councils · Hansard source

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  I give way to my hon. Friend the Member for Harlow (Chris Vince).

• 30 Jun 2025 · Road Safety Powers: Parish and Town Councils · Hansard source

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  Before I begin my speech, let me pay my respects to my constituent Curtis Davies, who was a resident of Shildon and worked for Durham police, who sadly died yesterday in difficult circumstances. I know that he will be missed by his colleagues in the police force and by his family. My thoughts and prayers are with them all. Like many in this place, I spend a lot of my time knocking on doors and listening to residents. One thing that has never ceased to impress me about the people in Bishop Auckland is the way that they love their community and neighbourhoods, and the pride that people take in the little things such as the physical appearance and beauty of the local environment, but also the safety of our roads. I want to use this debate to highlight some examples of where people in villages and towns across my constituency are fed up and frustrated. They feel disempowered by the number of times they ask for simple changes to road safety to enhance their community, only to be knocked back by bureaucrats who apparently know better than the people living on those streets what their experience is.

• 30 Jun 2025 · Road Safety Powers: Parish and Town Councils · Hansard source

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  I agree 100% with that assessment. It seems that it does not really matter who is in power; councillors do not seem to be listened to either. I think it is a problem for democracy that so many people are saying the same thing, only to be ignored over and over again, so I welcome that intervention. I am grateful that so many colleagues have attended this debate, which is testament to the frustrations we all feel. The experience that my hon. Friend expressed is probably one that we will hear several times. Indeed, I have deliberately kept my speech short so that I can take as many interventions— [ Interruption. ] I will give way.

• 30 Jun 2025 · Road Safety Powers: Parish and Town Councils · Hansard source

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  That is a fair point. Again, I pay tribute to all the people who serve at that level of government, particularly people who give their time freely to serve in residents’ associations just to make life better for their neighbours and the people who live around them. I will mention two more places before I move on. There is Chapel Lane in Evenwood, where residents often complain about speeding, as well as High Etherley. We have a bypass running through Bishop Auckland. A year ago, we had a new shopping area built on one side of it, and for a year people have been dangerously crossing the bypass from one side to the other. It is in the section 106 agreement that there is supposed to be a safe crossing point, but it seems to be the last thing on the developer’s mind, with everything else coming first. Every week, people are taking risks as they cross over at that bypass; we have a petition out about that. Further up the bypass, lots of children cross the road at Bracks Farm.

• 30 Jun 2025 · Road Safety Powers: Parish and Town Councils · Hansard source

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  Any way you want to come. For me, this started out as hearing one anecdote, and then I would hear another and another, until it became obvious that this is a serious issue. It is about not just fatalities—I accept that fatalities are low, thank goodness—but the quality of people’s lives. It is about the fact that too many children are missing out on play, and that too many older people are missing out on social activities, because they do not feel safe crossing their roads. I have looked at the regulations that these faceless bureaucrats are using when they so regularly say no to people, and it turns out that the Road Traffic Regulation Act came into effect in 1984. That is the year I was born, so it is as old as me, and it does not give powers to parish and town councils—they have no statutory role beyond advisory consultation.

• 30 Jun 2025 · Road Safety Powers: Parish and Town Councils · Hansard source

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  My hon. Friend makes an excellent intervention. I have mentioned High Grange and Hamsterley—I have only got to “H” on my list, so I had better move on. The residents in Coundon Gate, in my constituency, have to put up with 60 mph traffic driving past just 2 metres from their front windows, and they have asked for traffic calming.

• 30 Jun 2025 · Road Safety Powers: Parish and Town Councils · Hansard source

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  I welcome the hon. Gentleman’s point about joined-up thinking. I will make some brief progress in my speech, because at the heart of what I am asking for is for town and parish councils to be listened to. I meet them so often, and they are the most local level of government and the closest to people who live in those neighbourhoods. Time and again they ask for the same basic things and they are not listened to. I will give some examples. The village of High Grange in my constituency has two 60 mph country lanes that run either side of it. I am speaking tonight on behalf of the children who ask, “Mam or dad, can I go across the road to the park?”, but whose parents do not feel safe letting them cross that 60 mph lane to get there. I speak also for the pensioners on the other side of the same village who want to get across the road to the allotments, but who do not feel safe crossing over.