Sarah Russell MP: speeches

Speeches

• 11 Mar 2025 · Employment Rights Bill · Hansard source

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  I could talk about NDAs at some length, but I do not have time to today. They are definitely problematic, and they are definitely concealing the extent of the problems that women suffer when they announce their pregnancies. The second element I like in the legislation is the improvements to the right to request flexible working. Those on the Conservative Benches have questioned why we would do this. The answer is that the term “part-timer” is still a term of abuse in this country. While that is still something that people say fairly regularly within workplaces and popular parlance, we still have a problem, so this legislation should help to improve that. Conservative Members have talked a lot about clause 17 and the third-party harassment elements, and it is worth getting into some of the detail. The defence for an employer for failing to protect their staff from third-party harassment is taking all reasonable steps to prevent that harassment from occurring. Employment tribunals have been interpreting the meaning of “reasonable” for a long time, and in a discrimination claim there is essentially a three-part judiciary: a judge with legal experience, someone with employer experience, and someone with employee experience—sometimes from a trade union, but sometimes from elsewhere. When they talk about “all reasonable steps”, it is only reasonable steps; it is not every single step in the entire history of the universe that anyone could ever dream up or imagine.

• 11 Mar 2025 · Employment Rights Bill · Hansard source

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  My primary concern is that those on the Conservative Benches talk about employees as if they are, as I said, unexploded bombs, and they talk about employers as if they are unlikely ever to recruit anyone ever again, and I just do not believe that to be true. Most employers will make a sensible assessment of whether having an additional member of staff will benefit their business and then they will recruit them. [Hon. Members: “Hear, hear!”] Thank you. It is really important that we cut through the disinformation and scaremongering, and that when we take the legislation forward, ACAS has good information ready to go. It already has great information online— I encourage employers who are worried to look up ACAS information videos on YouTube and look at its factsheets. We must make it clear to people that they have access to sources of free advice, which is important for small businesses, so that they can see what is and is not required of them. The position being stated today is bluntly exaggerated and quite damaging as a result.

• 11 Mar 2025 · Employment Rights Bill · Hansard source

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  On a point of order, Madam Deputy Speaker. The shadow Minister is in danger of misleading the House. Nothing that he has referred to is a crime. Sexual harassment, as dealt with in this Bill, is a civil matter dealt with by tribunal.

• 11 Mar 2025 · Employment Rights Bill · Hansard source

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  The hon. Lady will appreciate that there is a defence here if an employer has taken all reasonable steps. It is only reasonable steps.

• 11 Mar 2025 · Employment Rights Bill · Hansard source

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  I spent 13 years as a solicitor working in employment rights, predominantly for employees and periodically for employers, and I assure the hon. Gentleman that flexible working is not working for many mothers in this country. Many women are giving up jobs and becoming self-employed because their employers will not agree their flexible working requests.

• 11 Mar 2025 · Employment Rights Bill · Hansard source

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  I assure the hon. Gentleman that women absolutely do know about the right to request flexible working, and that is not the source of the problems they are facing.

• 11 Mar 2025 · Employment Rights Bill · Hansard source

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  Will the hon. Gentleman give way?

• 11 Mar 2025 · Employment Rights Bill · Hansard source

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  It appears to be quite commonly overlooked by Opposition Members that flexible working will still be available to people on fixed-term contracts. Does the hon. Member agree that such contracts can be used to manage seasonal fluctuations?

• 11 Mar 2025 · Employment Rights Bill · Hansard source

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  I know from experience that it is a practice of employment lawyers who work for employers to go on to Google Maps and look at the houses in which complainants live, to assess the assets that they are likely to have and whether they are likely to be able to afford to continue their defence to tribunal, or whether they could be offered a smaller amount as a settlement. Does the hon. Lady agree that NDAs are providing cover for that?

• 6 Mar 2025 · International Women’s Day · Hansard source

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  I thank my hon. Friend the Member for Penistone and Stocksbridge (Dr Tidball) for her incredibly powerful speech, all the women who I have heard speak today, and those who have formed such a supportive group as new MPs in this House. However, the people I primarily want to thank today are the women who look after my children, and all the women who look after all of our children. Of course, childcare is not solely the provenance of women, but the overwhelming majority of the childcare workforce in this country are women. It is some of the most undervalued work in our society—it is often paid at minimum wage—and other parents cannot work without it. I know that nursery providers are currently deeply concerned. Labour is putting £1.8 billion into the early years, and we want 75% of children to be school-ready. That is an ambitious target, and I am proud of it, but the people who will deliver that work are our childminders and our nursery staff. Childcare is key national infrastructure, for which we need a stable and well-trained workforce. If we do not fund early years and childcare well enough, the risk is that the only businesses that will survive in this sector will be major chain nurseries backed by private equity. Those are the businesses that can manage economies of scale, which will enable them to thrive in most environments. There is nothing wrong with those nurseries—I do not wish to suggest that the staff who work in them are anything other than committed, or that their owners are working for anything other than the greater good. However, I do not want to see small, passionate, women-owned businesses squeezed out of the sector, which might happen. That is partly because that is the kind of childcare I had for my children in the early years, so I want it to be an option for all children, but it is also partly because in Australia, when the ABC nursery chain went bust, 19,000 families lost their childcare overnight. I guarantee that it was predominantly women who did not go to work the next day, not those children’s fathers. A consolidated sector is an inherently fragile one. As such, I hope that in the upcoming spending review, we will look at the rates that we pay for three and four-year-old childcare, as I understand that that is part of what is causing concern. I also hope we will make sure that our breakfast club places are kept for as long as we can possibly manage, and that they are well funded, so that their uptake is—as we all need it to be—100%. I want to say thank you to all the women who have inspired me, both in this Chamber and beyond, and all those women who have helped me. Most of all, though, I want to say thank you to the women who looked after me and the women who look after my children.

• 26 Feb 2025 · Child Maintenance Service · Hansard source

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  I thank the hon. Gentleman for giving way. Does he agree that we need more enforcement, more accurate assessment of non-resident parent income, and better joined-up working between His Majesty’s Revenue and Customs and the Department for Work and Pensions? Furthermore, if we saw that, it would help not just his constituents, to whom he has referred so passionately, but parents such as my constituent whose ex-partner is avoiding paying any ongoing child maintenance despite owning multiple properties.

• 24 Feb 2025 · Social Media Use: Minimum Age · Hansard source

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  It is an honour to serve under your chairmanship, Mr Stringer. I did a lot of research in preparation for my speech today and, as a parent of three primary-age children, what I found really alarmed me. The National Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children reports that there were more than 7,000 offences of sexual communication with children last year, which was a significant increase on the year before. It says that typically in those offences, the perpetrators start to talk to children on fairly mainstream web services, and then encourage them to communicate instead on more private messaging services such as Snapchat, WhatsApp and Instagram. I was pretty shocked. I did not appreciate that this was such a widespread problem. We all know that if there were 7,000 offences reported to the police, a considerably larger number will have happened. I also discovered the prevalence of dating app use among children. Children experience terrible offences when they go to meet people who were, in fact, adults preying on them. Fundamentally, we need to understand that when we talk about social media, children are a product. If anything that we use on the internet does not cost any money, the gain for the provider is access to our thoughts, feelings and communications—in this case, our children’s thoughts, feelings and communications with their friends. We have a generation now for whose entire lifespan those thoughts, feelings and communications with friends can be monetised and tracked across multiple different websites or social media apps. The complex picture that those companies have of our children is incredibly sophisticated, and their ability to target content at them is like nothing we have ever even imagined. There is also a problem with parents inadvertently facilitating some of this stuff. I would count myself within that description to some extent, so it is certainly not judgmental. When a parent naively says that when a child is 13, they can access something that they would broadly consider uncontroversial—such as WhatsApp so they can chat to their friends—that creates an ageing risk throughout the lifespan of that app use. As was mentioned previously, children subsequently appear to be 16 or 18 before they actually are, and therefore obtain access to services that are unsafe for them much younger than they otherwise would have done. The parents do not appreciate the ageing risk that they are creating, potentially several years down the line. The NSPCC says that we have a fundamental problem. We now have the Online Safety Act, introduced by the Conservatives, and we are working hard as a Government to bring it into force. Ofcom has been given a significant role in looking at child risk assessment by online providers. We all know that if those people had children’s best interests at heart, they would already have done a lot of the things that Ofcom requires. The fact that Ofcom is having to do an investigation into OnlyFans, and its ability or willingness to prevent under-age children from seeing sexualised content, does not sit comfortably—that is the minimum I will say about it. [Martin Vickers in the Chair ] If I am honest, I am not quite sure what the right solution is to those problems. If we do not get societal consensus on the right solution, we will, for instance, carry on seeing parents helping children to circumnavigate age restrictions, and children using VPNs to circumnavigate them themselves. Plenty of teenagers are sophisticated enough to do that. I am not sure what the right answer is. I am not sure that preventing under-16s from accessing such content will solve it. There is a risk that it will create a false sense of security and enable providers of the facilities and apps to say, “Well, under-16s can’t use it. We don’t have to put any safety features in because children are not allowed it anyway.” They will completely abdicate responsibility. It is important that we keep talking about these issues, and that we move forward on a cross-party basis. These are sophisticated problems and I am not sure whether we have a sufficiently sophisticated response to them. The Online Safety Act provides us with a lot of tools, and I can see that its potential fines of 10% of global revenue are quite high. That has the potential to drive some behaviour change, provided the companies involved really see that the tools have teeth. I hope that we will monitor very heavily how Ofcom gets on with the new legislation; I am sure that Members of all parties will be interested in that. My hon. and learned Friend the Member for Folkestone and Hythe (Tony Vaughan) said that he spoke to his children before the debate to tell them that he was going to raise these issues. I did so with my children over breakfast this morning, and one of them berated me for not having been in her online safety assembly. We have to be realistic about the capacity of both parents and schools to manage these issues without making it a blame game between different organisations—parents versus schools versus major corporations. These corporations have a huge vested interest in exploiting our children, and we have to figure out how better to protect them.

• 6 Feb 2025 · Business of the House · Hansard source

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  My constituent Alison Parr has had the most appalling time trying to obtain free prescriptions on the NHS, to which her profoundly disabled daughter, Ruby, is perfectly entitled. Please may we have a debate in Government time on how the NHS and all public services can be made fully responsive to the needs to disabled people?

• 5 Feb 2025 · Engagements · Hansard source

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  Q14. Some 54,000 women a year lose their jobs when they are pregnant or on maternity leave, and one in 10 human resources managers say that they would be reluctant to hire a woman who they even thought might start a family. The law has not solved this, so will the Prime Minister please meet me, The Dad Shift and Pregnant Then Screwed to discuss the ringfenced paid paternity leave that is needed to bring about change?

• 28 Jan 2025 · Road Safety: Young Drivers · Hansard source

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  I thank my hon. Friend the Member for Shrewsbury (Julia Buckley) for securing this debate. In the words of my constituents Mark and Mandy Ogden, whose daughter Georgia died on 26 June 2020: “The last thing we want is to parade our grief, but we need people to understand the devastation these road deaths cause.” Georgia, known as Gee to her family, was 17. She had been out for the evening and was in a car with another teenage passenger, driven by a third teenage girl. They were all wearing their seatbelts. Mandy talks about the pain of four years now without hearing Gee’s voice, her cute laugh, her silliness and random outbursts of singing, her tantrums over something and nothing, her sassiness, her incredible dancing and performing. She speaks of a gaping hole at the loss of her daughter and of the loneliness and emptiness that she has left. It is indescribable. Mandy told me of the knock at the door and the immediate realisation of what had happened, and that the day that Gee was killed will haunt her for the rest of her days. Sadly, there are several tributes on A roads around my constituency to other young people who have been killed in surprisingly similar circumstances. Roads in our area are dark, fast and dangerous. We cannot change the entire rural road network, certainly not in the short term, but we can change the law. Mark and Mandy are now part of Forget-me-not Families Uniting, the campaign group alluded to by previous speakers, which is calling on us to save young lives through the introduction of graduated driving licensing and through the creation of an expert panel to advise the Government on how graduated driving licensing in the UK should look. The Department for Transport’s 2019 road safety statement noted there is evidence that graduated driving licensing schemes, where they have been introduced elsewhere, have proved very effective at improving the safety of young drivers. For example in California, where drivers aged under 18 cannot take passengers under 20 unless supervised, and in New Zealand where young and newly qualified drivers go on to a restricted licence, which means—

• 28 Jan 2025 · Road Safety: Young Drivers · Hansard source

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  Mandy Ogden said to me: “Often, the main argument against this change to driver licensing is that it restricts freedom, but our daughter’s freedom has been taken away forever.” Does the hon. Gentleman agree that that, too, is an important point?

• 22 Jan 2025 · Certificate of Common Sponsorship · Hansard source

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  It is a pleasure to serve under your chairwomanship, Dr Huq. I thank my hon. Friend the Member for Poole (Neil Duncan-Jordan) for securing this debate. Two sets of people are being abused and exploited. The first set are workers in the care sector. I agree with everything that my hon. Friend said about the extent of abuse in the sector, and I have seen it myself in my employment law practice. However, I have also always been aware that there was a need for more advice in the sector than we could ever provide, for exactly the reason that he raised: people are too scared to come forward. The other set of people for whom this situation is deeply unjust are my constituents who receive care, who are spending their life savings on care, and who would be absolutely horrified to discover the circumstances in which many of the people who give that care are living. The Gangmasters and Labour Abuse Authority has talked about this as a massive growth area of concern—I have spoken to the Minister about that previously, in this exact room, so I will not go into precisely the same points again. The Gangmasters and Labour Abuse Authority could potentially have a licensing scheme for care workers but, bluntly, its licensing schemes in other sectors do not seem to be eliminating abuse, so a certificate of common sponsorship is the way to get better rights and behaviours within the sector. At the moment, some councils are putting out tenders for care at payment rates of around £17 an hour. Care representative organisations tell me that the actual cost of providing care with staff paid in a legally compliant way is £22 an hour. That does not include any management costs whatsoever; it is just the cost of the member of staff being provided. We have, at minimum, a £5 an hour gap between legally compliant care workers and what local councils are offering, although the gap is more than that because companies will, of course, want to make some degree of profit—that is not, per se, illegitimate—and will naturally need to charge for some management costs. A gap that big is enriching non-compliant employers in the sector. Compliant employers are withdrawing from the market because they cannot manage to compete, or provide services, for the amounts of money available. There is an urgent need for a wider reform of the care sector, and pay within the sector. We are, of course, all looking forward to sectoral bargaining, to better protect workers and make it clearer to people what their rights are. However, unless workers have the capacity to enforce those rights, and unless they can move between employers as the rest of us can, they will continue to be exploited. We already have a significant problem in the sector. The problem is getting worse and will continue to get worse but this is, I hope, one of a number of measures that could really improve working conditions for people in this country.

• 20 Jan 2025 · Crewe Railway Station · Hansard source

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  I want to take a moment to raise the issues around Sandbach station. There is no accessibility at the station, which serves approximately 20,000 people. The only route to Manchester for Sandbach residents is to take a train to Crewe, where they can change accessibly —assuming that everything is working—and then take a train back to Manchester. Does the Minister agree that this needs addressing?

• 20 Jan 2025 · Crewe Railway Station · Hansard source

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  My constituents in Alsager, Holmes Chapel, Sandbach and the surrounding villages either drive directly to Crewe or take trains and transfer there. Does my hon. Friend agree that my constituents, like his, want more reliable journeys through an improved station and, moreover, that better transport links could bring economic growth for passengers and others?

• 13 Jan 2025 · Hospice and Palliative Care · Hansard source

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  Let me begin by paying tribute, as others have done, to some local hospices. Both St Luke’s and East Cheshire do a spectacular job, and are very well loved local institutions. I want to say a particular thank you to the staff, of course, but also to the volunteers, and the donors who are literally keeping the lights on. I greatly welcome the £100 million of capital that the Government are providing for hospices, and I ask the Minister to meet me, along with my hon. Friends the Members for Crewe and Nantwich (Connor Naismith), for Mid Cheshire (Andrew Cooper), and for Macclesfield (Tim Roca), to discuss a potential local project. On revenue funding, it would be remiss of me not to mention that St Luke’s and East Cheshire hospices receive 15% and 16% respectively of their funding from the NHS. May I ask the Minister to review that, and commit himself to a funding floor that is transparent, fair and consistent across the country? The quality of the experience that my constituents and their families have at the end of life should not depend on the generosity of individuals.

• 9 Jan 2025 · Debt Advice Services · Hansard source

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  It is a pleasure to follow my hon. Friend the Member for Walthamstow (Ms Creasy), who spoke incredibly passionately about the difficulties of debt. There is a lot of debt in my community, which appears, on the face of it, to be relatively affluent, but one of the problems is that people feel a huge compulsion to maintain that appearance. I have spoken to a lot of people on the doorstep, and in the course of the submission that we made as a constituency to the Social Mobility and Child Poverty Commission, about the fact that people are really struggling and finding it incredibly difficult. In areas such as mine, where there is not a perception of poverty, there are simply no services to assist people who need help. My constituency has no citizens advice bureau anywhere, no law centre—nothing. When people have difficulties, they therefore do not know where to turn. We need to do the best we can to improve civil legal aid. Citizens advice bureaux were partly funded by local government, which was cut, and partly through the legal advice work they did that was charged at legal aid rates. Unfortunately, since those are now so difficult to work under, all those advice services have been decimated. My local citizens advice bureau spoke to me—I say local; it is not in the constituency, though it can occasionally do some in-person transitory work—about how important it is to see people face to face. It said vulnerable people, older people and others might in theory have online access, but actually cannot go through a complex system to resolve their debt without that consistent face-to-face assistance. We need to aspire not just to improve telephone and online services, but to ensure that in-person advice is provided. My hon. Friend briefly touched on the quality of advice that people are receiving and the fact that although the Financial Conduct Authority regulates the products that people are being sold around debt reduction—they are products—there is a real problem of mis-selling them, despite the theoretical regulation. Unfortunately, regulation is only as good as the enforcement. It is important that we keep discussing the matter and that we bring real change to the advice landscape because our residents need us to.

• 9 Jan 2025 · Violence against Women and Girls · Hansard source

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  I understand that there may be some difficulties with the criminal law in relation to people being followed. In the event that they have been actively harassed and threatened, there is a potential crime in the threat, but there may be a gap in the criminal law for those who are simply followed, with that not being part of a continuing course of conduct. Will the Minister commit to looking into that, please?

• 8 Jan 2025 · Children’s Wellbeing and Schools Bill · Hansard source

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  My experience as an employment lawyer is that academy schools generate large amounts of employment rights litigation because they tend not to treat their staff very well. [Interruption.] Some do, of course, but litigation is not in the best interests of children, and ensuring that children have teachers who are adequately paid is a key consideration for Labour Members.

• 8 Jan 2025 · Children’s Wellbeing and Schools Bill · Hansard source

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  There are so many fantastic provisions in this Bill that it is quite hard to know where to start. However, the first thing I want to say is that the move to restrict the number of branded school uniform items will, I know, be so welcomed by parents in my Congleton constituency. So many of them who have spoken to me are struggling and finding it really very difficult to make ends meet, as they have done for many years. I have spoken to parents who are working two jobs and desperately trying to put food on the table. I know that those parents will also strongly welcome the provision of free breakfast clubs. I have spoken to the Secretary of State about the importance of children with special educational needs being able to access those breakfast clubs and holiday provision. I know she looked at that in the pilot of free breakfast clubs, and I we will continue to emphasise it. The other thing I would like to mention about free breakfast clubs is toothbrushing, which we certainly talked about during the general election. I believe there are pilots for toothbrushing in breakfast clubs, and I would love to see that rolled out widely. Toothbrushing is so crucial, and working parents who drop children off early of course find it difficult to ensure that their children’s teeth are brushed before school. It is best done every day, so I would welcome our extending that as far as possible. My favourite thing about the Bill is that it really demonstrates our commitment to all the children in our communities, in all schools, having the best possible opportunities, both because it is morally imperative and because the education of today is the national productivity of the workforce tomorrow. We all have to keep that in the front of our minds, and I know that the Minister absolutely does. I would like to say one or two things about the identifier system we are bringing in with this Bill. Many colleagues have referred to some horrific situations that this seeks to avoid, and to the position of children who are outside school. I want to reassure parents in my constituency that those who have chosen to home-school absolutely have my support. This is not about penalising parents who make that choice, or about restricting freedom of choice; it is about protecting children who are already identified as extremely vulnerable. I know that everyone here supports that, or I would hope they do. I want to mention the use of the single identifier to track the potential educational outcomes of children in temporary accommodation. I have spoken before in this House of my significant concerns about how, when children lose their accommodation, they often lose their school place and may spend considerable periods outside the education system. Some children lose their accommodation repeatedly during their childhood, and therefore move schools on multiple occasions. I think the capacity to track that, and to track the outcomes for those children, is really important. That is a hugely important power in the Bill, and I hope we will use it in that way. Lastly, thank everyone for the intelligent and constructive points they have made today, and the Liberal Democrats for their constructive support for the Bill—there are others in the House who really could learn from their example.

• 8 Jan 2025 · Children’s Wellbeing and Schools Bill · Hansard source

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  The right hon. Lady has referred repeatedly to command, control and consistency, as if the latter were a problem. Presumably, she was part of the Government that sought to use academies as a mechanism by which to control individual schools from Whitehall, rather than having the individual involvement of local authorities.