Westminster Hall

Wednesday 17th April 2024 Westminster Hall

Wednesday 17 April 2024

[Clive Efford in the Chair]

Flood Recovery Framework

Wednesday 17th April 2024 Westminster Hall

09:30

[Philip Dunne (Ludlow) (Con)]

I beg to move,

That this House has considered the Flood Recovery Framework.

It is a great pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mr Efford. I look forward to the debate, which is important because flooding remains a highly topical issue for many of our constituents who have suffered the appalling consequences of flooding this winter. I regret to predict that many more may suffer that fate during the years ahead as climate change provides more rainfall events of more persistent duration and at unpredictable times of the year.

However, I am not here to forecast the weather or to dwell on the causes or impacts of climate change. There are plenty of other opportunities to do that, not least through the work of the Environmental Audit Committee —which I have the honour to chair—and our latest, recently launched inquiry on climate and security. The consequences of flooding for national infrastructure are one of the issues being considered.

I will offer a few initial words of context on the flooding challenge we face. The Met Office’s “State of the UK Climate” report in 2022 confirmed how the UK has become wetter over the past few decades, albeit with significant annual variation. The third UK climate change risk assessment in 2021 identified flooding as one of the most important climate change adaptation challenges facing the UK. Six of the 10 wettest years on record in the UK have occurred since 1998, and this past year has seen the most rainfall for any 18-month period in England since Met Office rainfall records started in 1836.

[Darren Henry (Broxtowe) (Con)]

I thank my right hon. Friend for securing the debate. My constituency saw devastating flooding to homes and businesses during Storms Babet and Henk. Each time such storms occur, the same areas of Broxtowe are severely damaged. Does he agree that we must act now, not just to compensate, but to ensure that we mitigate against that level of damage occurring in the future?

[Philip Dunne]

I will go on to talk about multiple flood events involving the same properties, but my hon. Friend is absolutely right: there is an obligation on the Environment Agency, as the lead on this issue, to identify preventive measures that can be taken to stop flooding of properties. Few things are more devastating for a householder than to see their home get flooded, but one can barely imagine what it must be like to live through that multiple times. Most of us in the Chamber do not need to use our imaginations to know what that means—we have seen it at first hand in our constituencies, as my hon. Friend has just identified.

About 5.7 million homes and businesses in England are at risk of flooding, and more than half of the best, most fertile farmland in Britain is on flood plains. That is particularly relevant in the River Severn catchment, which crosses Shropshire. The River Severn Partnership—whose parliamentary caucus is ably chaired by my neighbour, the hon. Member for Shrewsbury and Atcham (Daniel Kawczynski), who I am pleased to see in his place—has formed to work with local authorities and MPs along the length of the catchment, and with the Environment Agency and others, to seek holistic solutions to adapt to those conditions and reduce flood risk.

Flood risk is a real and present danger. Latest estimates suggest that, by the end of this century, the River Severn will be 0.85 metres higher on average across the year and up to 1.5 metres higher during winter flood levels, although it is expected to be lower in summer, with 25% less water available for abstraction by as soon as 2050. In the past three years, we have already experienced three of the five worst floods ever recorded along the River Severn and, as yet, no climate allowance has been built into the considerable defences installed.

Regrettably, the River Severn catchment accounts for a disproportionate degree of flood events. In February 2022, 44 of the 80 flood warnings put out nationally were for the River Severn. Even when the catchment is not at the centre of storm events, we are often affected in Shropshire. Properties along the River Severn have been flooded twice in the past six months. In October, Storm Babet flooded 109 properties internally and 28 businesses, and in January, Storm Henk flooded 74 properties and 32 businesses. Those figures almost certainly understate the impact, as some people do not report to their local authority or insurer for fear of losing access to insurance in the future.

Putting in place the right preventive measures to reduce the risk of flooding is what the River Severn Partnership is all about, but that is a discussion for another day, unless my hon. Friend the Member for Shrewsbury and Atcham wants to intervene on that topic, given that I mentioned him.

[Daniel Kawczynski (Shrewsbury and Atcham) (Con)]

This is the first time in 19 years that someone has encouraged me to intervene on the, so I am very grateful. I pay tribute to my right hon. Friend—my constituency neighbour—who has been one of the most active in the caucus of 37 MPs along the River Severn, which I chair, and I very much welcome his debate. Does he agree that it is essential that we work in collaboration with the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs to continue to lobby the Treasury on the £500 million business case we submitted to finally manage and maintain Britain’s longest river?

[Philip Dunne]

I am very pleased to have created a first in my hon. Friend’s parliamentary career, and I am sure it will not be the last. I invite him to apply for a Westminster Hall debate to discuss the work of the River Severn Partnership; I would be happy to support it. We did indeed submit proposals to the Treasury—in fact, to the Chancellor himself—on the River Severn Partnership bid for significant funding to look at a whole range of remediation and adaptation options upstream, going as far as the source of the River Severn in Wales.

This morning’s debate is about ensuring that the right support mechanisms are in place for those who have been affected by flooding. A range of measures offer financial and practical help, including schemes for householders, businesses and farmers. Some are of long standing, such as the Bellwin emergency relief scheme, and others were introduced more recently by the Conservative Government in 2017 through the flood recovery framework to provide more targeted support.

However, the support is a complex patchwork, as one glance at the House of Commons Library briefing for this debate shows: there are several elements of support, with different eligibility criteria, applicable to different entities that have suffered flood damage. Home and business support is primarily managed through local authorities under schemes for which the Department for Levelling Up, Housing and Communities has lead responsibility. They include the community recovery grant, council tax reductions, the business recovery grant and business rate reductions.

[Duncan Baker (North Norfolk) (Con)]

In my constituency, flooding has been absolutely appalling for the past 18 months. As my right hon. Friend said, the level of rainfall has been virtually double the average virtually every single month. I have the broads in my constituency, great swathes of which are still under water, and the water table is very high. That leads to multiple problems, including groundwater from the amount of rainfall and erosion. My right hon. Friend spoke about the patchwork nature of the schemes and the lack of co-ordination. What can be done to bring together the stakeholders—the water companies, the county councils, the internal drainage boards and the Environment Agency—so they work in a more co-ordinated fashion? At the moment, the response is often slow and there is a lack of funding, so there should be an overarching body that co-ordinates the response far better.

[Philip Dunne]

I am very grateful for that important intervention from my hon. Friend, who is a valued member of the Environmental Audit Committee. He is right to point out how complex it is to get to grips with the situation, given that different responsibilities fall in different places. I encourage him to consider the work being led by my hon. Friend the Member for Shrewsbury and Atcham in the River Severn catchment in creating a partnership involving all the local authorities in the area, the Environment Agency and the non-governmental organisations that have an interest in the issue, such as the Wildlife Trust and the various broad and fen groups, as well as the internal drainage boards, which have a vital role to play. In many cases, such groups find it hard to come together regularly; there may even be a role for an enterprising and experienced MP to provide some leadership in order to cut across some of those institutional boundaries. I commend that partnership model to my hon. Friend.

[Daniel Kawczynski]

On that point, I would like to ask my right hon. Friend for his views on one matter. Now that we are out of the European Union, we do not need, for the first time in my life, to comply with the common agricultural policy. That means that we can, for the first time, pay farmers and landowners to hold on to water. My right hon. Friend referred to how our friends and neighbours across the border in Wales will be pivotal in helping us to do that. I would like to put on record the fact that my right hon. Friend the Member for Montgomeryshire (Craig Williams), who is the Prime Minister’s Parliamentary Private Secretary, has made very positive statements about that in his local newspaper. Does my right hon. Friend agree that this is a huge opportunity to strengthen our Union between Wales and England?

[Philip Dunne]

My hon. Friend tempts me to conclude my speech before I get to the point about farmers and sustainable farming incentives. There are provisions in the existing support arrangements, post the CAP regime, which will allow for mechanisms to help reduce flood risk.

My hon. Friend referred to the cross-border challenge. He will know that, on the English side of the border, in Shropshire and Herefordshire, there is a developing partnership with the equivalent counties of Powys and Monmouthshire, on the Welsh side, to provide practical schemes to allow them to co-operate across borders, which has been a problem. As we know, the environment is a delegated matter, but the environment, as we also know, does not respect administrative boundaries. The situation is a bit of a nonsense, and the responsible bodies can grapple with it only by working together. That includes the Welsh Government and Welsh local authorities, as well as the UK Government and English local authorities. My hon. Friend is quite right to draw that issue out.

I was going on to talk about the support arrangements for farmers and about the internal drainage boards, which my hon. Friend the Member for North Norfolk (Duncan Baker) referred to. Those support arrangements are managed by the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs. Measures include the welcome introduction of a farming recovery fund, as a swift response to Storm Henk, with its eligibility criteria recently and pragmatically extended.

I should put on record my entry in the Register of Members’ Financial Interests as a partner in a farming business. I am particularly pleased that the Minister for Water and Rural Growth is here to listen and respond to the debate. I know he cares deeply about water management issues, and has throughout his time in Parliament. I hope to suggest some pointers to him regarding the challenges facing farmers with flooded land.

I have just mentioned my entry in the register, and my farm is on the Herefordshire-Shropshire border. Part of it is within the Severn catchment and, as it is on the watershed, part of it is in the River Wye catchment. We have fields that, even this morning, in the middle of April, are still too wet to work. They have yet to dry out sufficiently, having effectively been waterlogged since last autumn. We did not have a specific flood event in the fields through either Babet or Henk, other than at the margins, but the water table has risen to such a level that we have not been able to get machinery on to some of our fields.

Before I turn to the specific farming measures that I would ask the Minister to look at, I would like to touch on the impact on properties, and particularly homes that have been flooded or are at material risk. Like many others in the House, I spent time earlier this year with homeowners, business owners and farmers in my constituency who had had their lives turned upside down by the impact of flooding. Some have been flooded more than once in the past year alone. I sympathise enormously with those who have had to deal with flooding, however it has affected them, having seen the damage and disruption it causes.

I visited one couple in Highley on the banks of the River Severn a couple of days after Storm Henk, who were still only able to access their home wearing waders, because flood waters had reached as high as the door handle on their back door. The heartbreaking devastation of that impact on their home was matched only by the anger and frustration of being told in the days that followed that they might not have been part of a sufficiently serious flood in their area to be able to access financial support, since fewer than 50 property owners had at that time come forward to report internal flooding of their properties across the local authority of Shropshire. That seems an arbitrary threshold. When visiting their premises, it was difficult to explain why the support mechanism did not apply to them, not least because it is at the discretion of the Secretary of State whether to invoke the mechanism at all.

The threshold is determined by local authority boundaries on a map rather than by the river system or catchment that has flooded, and it can take weeks or—as in the case of Storm Henk in Shropshire—months to establish whether the threshold has been reached, given the reluctance of some householders to report a flooding incident for fear of the impact on their subsequent insurability. Flood Re has significantly reduced but not eliminated that issue.

I appreciate that the eligibility criteria for the flood recovery framework is not the responsibility of my hon. Friend the Minister, but I urge him to impress on ministerial colleagues in DLUHC, as they undertake a review of the scheme this year, that they should consider how to improve access to the scheme to make it more fair. It is at present hard to comprehend why access can be denied to someone whose home or business is on the wrong side of the local authority boundary when, just upstream or downstream on the same river, properties affected by the same storm are awarded financial support.

As part of the review, I also urge Ministers to look at the per-property limits for support, as those are likely to leave people subject to multiple floods without further help once their property has reached the upper limit. If a property has changed hands between floods, the new owners might not be eligible for support even if their property has been flooded.

My second point concerns the administrative burden of implementing support under the flood recovery framework, which falls on local authorities. Everyone in this House is aware of the pressures that councils are already under, with limited resources for flood and water management. When a flood occurs, the community bands together incredibly quickly to support each other. I pay tribute to the efforts of local volunteers, flood action groups and local councillors who do so much to help when flood warnings are issued. Support from the local authority to help with prevention and then clean-up remains vital.

[Alex Sobel (Leeds North West) (Lab/Co-op)]

The right hon. Member, the Chair of the Environmental Audit Committee, is making a great speech in a really important debate. On Boxing day 2015, we had the greatest flooding event in a century in Leeds on the River Aire catchment. All council members—I was a member of the council at the time—went to help the clean-up operation. Since then, the West Yorkshire flood risk partnership has created a new partnership between the local authority and local businesses. Local businesses are supporting, for instance, tree planting in the Upper Aire catchment and have been a full partner in the flood alleviation scheme on the River Aire. Such partnerships can help prevent future flooding and also come together when a flooding event happens to ensure domestic and business recovery.

[Philip Dunne]

I am grateful to my hon. Friend—I will call him my hon. Friend because we have worked together on the Environmental Audit Committee for some years—for making that point. He perhaps was not in the room when we talked about a similar partnership that exists in the River Severn catchment. He is absolutely right that when a flood event happens there is a sense of community spirit that comes together and acts—it is unfortunate that it should need to do so—as a mechanism to drive those who want to try to do something about it to form flood action groups, which have been a very successful community-led initiative across the country and are well supported at a national level by the flood action group and the Environment Agency. Those are good examples. My hon Friend the Member for North Norfolk referenced what should happen in Norfolk; he might like to look at the York experience as well.

On the burden on local authorities, Shropshire Council has one and a half full-time equivalent members of staff to deal with flooding issues and they do a great job. But asking them to take on the additional work of helping more than 50 households deal with the impact of flooding, and the significant work needed to act quickly to remedy flood damage or prevent recurrence, places a considerable burden on the team. That inevitably takes immediate priority over their long-term work to create lasting flood prevention schemes in their locality. They cannot do both tasks at once. I therefore urge the Minister to look at including provision within the flood recovery framework to award a revenue funding amount—perhaps as little as £50,000 to £100,000 per managing entity, which at the moment would be the local authority —to enable it to recruit suitable resource to help staff the activation and deployment of funds under the scheme, so that this time-critical support can be provided to those who properly need it.

I turn to flooded farms, for which the Minister does have some responsibility. The farming recovery fund has been a useful means of support to farmers in those counties declared eligible, but, as the Minister knows, that does not apply to Shropshire, despite it being in the same river catchment as Gloucestershire and Worcestershire, which are eligible.

I must tell the Minister that in a meeting with farmers and National Farmers Union representatives in south Shropshire last week, it was made clear to me that many farmers in Shropshire were affected by Storm Henk, and many more have been affected by the volume and duration of rainfall we have had since Storm Babet last October, yet they remain ineligible for the farming recovery fund. That is hard to fathom given that there are waterlogged farms across the county. I appreciate that the scheme applies to all land parcels that are flooded contiguous to a river that had notably high river level gauge readings during the 10 days following Storm Henk in January, provided that they registered under the rural payments service.

Payments of between £500 and £25,000 will have been a much-needed lifeline after the impact of the storm, compounded by the wettest March in over 40 years. Many colleagues raised similar concerns about the initially narrow scope of the support for farmers affected by flooding, and I commend the Minister for acting quickly to remove the limit—land had to be 150 metres from the centre of eligible rivers—so that all land flooded was covered as long as it was contiguous to an eligible river, as the NFU and others had called for.

I hope that today the Minister will be able to address whether further steps can be made and whether he would be prepared, in parallel to DLUHC’s review of its flood support measures, to encourage DEFRA officials to undertake a review of the criteria for support for farming businesses, so that badly affected counties, including Shropshire, will not miss out in future.

I encourage the Minister to speak to officials and ask them to take a holistic approach to the way in which farmers are encouraged through the sustainable farming incentive, as touched on by my hon. Friend the Member for Shrewsbury and Atcham, to undertake work to alleviate flood risk downstream; I am thinking of the various measures to slow the flow in upland areas to create wetlands and the like. Yet when land becomes flooded from major events or waterlogged through persistent rain so that it is less usable to grow food, the support mechanism may not be there to access.

I also hope the Minister might listen to calls from the NFU and others to change the way in which farming support becomes available. For example, there is some confusion during exceptionally wet weather, when many acres of farmland may be flooded without 50 properties suffering the same fate, whether farmers apply through the flood recovery framework if their home or business premises are flooded or the farming recovery fund if the impact is on flood water on farmland. Are they, or should they, be eligible for both schemes? Because the scheme is new, it is not crystal clear where they should go. Providing a means of aligning the different schemes or understanding in what circumstances which scheme applies would be extremely helpful to everybody.

Given the recent wet weather and, as I have explained, that the water table rises, farmland can flood in the absence of significant named storms. I ask the Minister whether his Department would review, alongside the review undertaken by DLUHC, the workings of the flood support schemes that apply to flooded farmland.

There has rightly been a refocus on food security recently, given the threats we face in a volatile world. I know my farm will have lower yields this year as a result of the planting conditions this winter. I suspect the same will apply in many areas of the country. We will therefore see either a reduction in available home produce or an increase in prices—or both. That will be in large part down to the impact of weather conditions, for which I can readily see the Minister is not responsible. Finding mechanisms, however, to ensure that farmers are there to plant next year and are there for future years to produce the food on which we all rely is really important. I urge the Minister to take the opportunity to support farmers in these challenging times, just as we ask our farmers to support our country in times of uncertainty.

09:55

[Richard Foord (Tiverton and Honiton) (LD)]

It is a pleasure to serve with you in the Chair, Mr Efford. I am very grateful to the right hon. Member for Ludlow (Philip Dunne) for securing this debate, and particularly for his words on farming. I too had a meeting with members of the National Farmers Union a fortnight ago. At the outset, I thanked them very much for sparing the time to raise their concerns with me. One of them said that this was no problem at all, because he was fed up with staring at the walls. I take that as slightly tongue in cheek; I am sure that farmers remain very busy even in times when their fields are flooded. It illustrated the point, however, that this has been a very challenging eight months for many farmers. In a place like rural Devon, this is illustrative of just how much flooding affects our communities.

My postbag is never short of people reporting flooding. It is especially true in eastern and mid-Devon, where our residential properties have really suffered of late. Sadly, there is a feeling among councillors that when a flood hits, many people are caught on the back foot. Indeed, it seems a little bit as if authorities are caught on the back foot. Often, local councillors are unclear what support might be forthcoming from central Government.

I support the idea of a flood recovery framework, which I was very keen to hear more about just shy of a year ago. On 9 May last year, several communities along the River Otter, including Newton Poppleford, Ottery St Mary and Tipton St John, were hit by very serious flooding, which saw several homes flooded and the school at Tipton St John forced to close for several days. Despite the huge damage and disruption, the local authority had no idea what support would be coming down the track from central Government. This came at a time when the council was already grappling with a budget deficit and was at risk in provision in other areas.

I visited Newton Poppleford the next day, on 10 May, and spoke to the village’s district councillor about what could be done. He told me that there was a sense from people whose properties had been flooded that they did not know what support would be coming, and so would be left to battle with the clean-up for days and weeks after by themselves. The right hon. Member for Ludlow is absolutely right that in these circumstances communities tend to rally and people come together to support their neighbours, but when they feel like they are doing that alone and in the absence of any support from Government, it is a crying shame.

I wrote at the time to the DEFRA Minister responsible for flooding, the hon. Member for Taunton Deane (Rebecca Pow), saying:

“Speaking to community leaders and councillors, there is a sense that we need a framework to provide post-incident support to those who experience this kind of flash flooding.”

She replied to me a month later and explained that the flood recovery framework was a potential avenue of support. Later in the letter, however, she went on to say that despite 113 properties having been affected by the floods on the River Otter,

“the scale of the flooding does not reach the required level to activate the Flood Recovery Framework and give access to central Government funding.”

We might say that there need to be thresholds with central Government funding; we might even say it is fine that this does not meet that threshold. When Storm Henk, however, hit our shores earlier this year, the same Department set out that local authorities must have 50 or more properties affected to qualify for emergency funding.

Hon. Members can imagine the frustration of people in the River Otter catchment, in places such as Newton Poppleford, on hearing that news, because when the storm hit in May last year it did affect more than 50 properties—indeed, 55 properties were damaged by flooding in the village of Newton Poppleford alone. It may be that the criteria have been revised since the flood recovery framework was launched and since the DEFRA Minister responsible for flooding wrote to me last May, but surely the Minister can imagine how the situation looks to people who live in the Otter valley.

At this point, we perhaps need to zoom out and think about how much bigger an issue this will be in the decades to come. More extreme weather and expanding house building would see the number of properties in high-risk areas of England rise from 325,000 today to more than 600,000 in 2055. That is what the National Infrastructure Commission projects the increase will be if no further action is taken.

The flood recovery framework is a good idea, but its extension is not broad enough at the moment. Local authorities do not know enough about it or have sufficient access to it when flooding strikes. When flooding is anticipated and the Environment Agency is warning communities about flooding, sometimes the only thing on offer to local residents are unfilled sandbags. That was the comment from my constituents in Axminster: all they were being offered, as they watched the water level rise up through their gardens to surround their homes, were unfilled sandbags. Prevention is not where it needs to be. Central Government need to deal with the harms caused by flooding, so that people can have faith and trust in their authorities.

10:02

[Daniel Kawczynski (Shrewsbury and Atcham) (Con)]

I pay tribute to my neighbour, my right hon. Friend the Member for Ludlow (Philip Dunne), with whom, in May, I will have had the privilege of serving for the last 19 years. This may be one of the last times—I hope it is not the last time—that we will be in a debate together, because my right hon. Friend is standing down at the next election. I take the opportunity to pay tribute to him and all the work that he has done, in a very collegiate way, with me and other Shropshire MPs. Over the last 19 years, there has not been a cigarette paper between us; the only time we have ever disagreed was over the referendum on our membership of the European Union. Apart from that, we have been as one in fighting collectively to secure resources for Shropshire.

The devastation that flooding causes, to which my right hon. Friend referred, is an extraordinarily emotive issue. Towns such as Shrewsbury were built at a time when we were fighting with the Welsh; they were fortifications that were built along the border. Shrewsbury therefore has a beautiful castle, and we have more listed buildings than any other town in England—that is our USP. It is a beautiful, historic town. Of course, the problem is that, for fortification and defence purposes, it was built right in the middle of a river loop. We would not do that now, obviously, because of the consequences of flooding. That is the historical context that we are grappling with.

In February 2019, I brought the then Secretary of State for DEFRA, my right hon. Friend the Member for Surrey Heath (Michael Gove), to a very flooded Shrewsbury. The anger, misery and frustration from the business owners that the Secretary of State met was palpable. We met with a local butcher, a local hairdresser and local residents. Those people are now being flooded annually. When I became MP for Shrewsbury 19 years ago, floods happened perhaps every five or 10 years. That is why I invited the Secretary of State to see at first hand the difficulties that we were facing.

As a result of the visit, we secured £50 million to help us with some small flood defence schemes, as well as an intention to set aside resources and work together to find, as my right hon. Friend the Member for Ludlow indicated, a long-term solution to managing the River Severn—Britain’s longest river. I have formed a caucus of 36 Members of Parliament who have the River Severn flowing through their constituencies. If there is one thing that I have learned as a Member of Parliament over the last 19 years, it is that it is difficult to achieve anything when operating in a silo by oneself. My strongest advice to the next generation of politicians who come in at the next election is if they really feel passionately about something, they should form a caucus and go in mob-handed and with large numbers to lobby DEFRA and the Treasury. That is why we have that caucus of 36 or 37 Members of Parliament who represent communities all the way down the River Severn.

Bizarrely but fortunately, our local Shropshire Council has done the same thing, reaching out to all the councils further downstream to form a consortium of councils that represent communities all the way along Britain’s longest river. We are therefore in a unique situation. We have a parliamentary caucus of all the Members of Parliament representing the communities in Parliament and we act collectively and in tandem here in the House of Commons. Our council has also taken control and is leading and managing, in a collaborative spirit, other councils along the River Severn to promote the River Severn Partnership and its work with the Environment Agency.

I want to thank the Minister for coming to Shrewsbury just before Christmas for an extremely welcome visit. He had the opportunity of visiting the Frankwell flood defences right in the heart of Shrewsbury and meeting the Environment Agency and River Severn Partnership representatives who included Mark Barrow and others from Shropshire Council. I was extremely grateful to the Minister for his remarks and his thanks to the hardworking people at the Environment Agency who do so much to alleviate and help my local residents. I hope that he will get a chance to visit Shropshire again before the end of this Parliament.

As my right hon. Friend the Member for Ludlow said, after four years of work we have finally submitted a business case to the Exchequer. We are not just asking DEFRA for a little bit of the money that has already been allocated to the Department, competing with other communities for that money: no, we are doing something different. We feel so strongly and so passionately about the issue that we are going above DEFRA and putting a business case directly to the Treasury. We are not pleading for money. We are not pleading for the £500 million required to tame Britain’s longest river. Rather, we are putting a methodical, carefully scripted and watertight—if hon. Members will pardon the pun—business case, worked in conjunction with the River Severn Partnership and the Environment Agency, which explains why and how Britain’s longest river can be managed and tamed for the benefit of all the communities in the catchment area, for that £500 million.

The Chancellor has asked me to continue to engage with one of his most senior civil servants, Simon Finkelstein, and I have had the opportunity of presenting that business case to him in conjunction with my right hon. Friend the Member for Ludlow. The Chancellor has said to me that we are unique, to his knowledge, in the sense that we have created a cross-party caucus and that our councils are operating as a consortium. Some other Member of Parliament may contradict me here—I would be interested to see what they are doing—but according to the Chancellor, there is no other project of this kind, where all the MPs and councils along a river are working together to put forward a business case to manage it holistically. I think that is extremely important.

It is important to point out that the business case outlines a gross value added uplift for the west midlands and our region of between £100 billion and £150 billion, if we tame the River Severn. You do the maths, Mr Efford—I am sure your maths is better than mine—but that is for an investment of £500 million. Yes, some people say to me, “My goodness me, £500 million sounds like a lot of money. Crikey! Are you realistically going to extract that much from the Treasury?” Well, look at the business case: for an investment of £500 million, we get a GVA uplift of £100 billion to £150 billion.

Where will that GVA uplift come from? I can take the Minister to hotels in my constituency that cannot get insurance because they flood every year—all the goods have to be thrown out and cannot be replaced through insurance. I can take him to huge areas of land in my constituency that are ripe for development, such as the brownfield sites that we simply cannot touch because of flooding. I can take the Minister to many residents who are flooded every single year, or to see the council so that it can explain the sheer cost of the clear-up every single year. I believe that Shropshire Council, just in the last flooding alone, spent £2 million on clear-up. If we add that up along the whole of the River Severn, we start to see how that number grows.

Only a few of us here in the House of Commons have done business studies at university and worked in the international commercial world. I am one of them, and I am very proud to have come from commerce into the House of Commons. I am passionate that more people from business come here. As somebody who has studied business studies and worked in commerce, I feel very strongly that lobbying Government should be done from a commercial, business-case perspective. That is why I very much hope the Minister will look at our business case and work in conjunction with us to secure that funding from the Treasury.

We need a holistic solution to managing the River Severn, which could of course be replicated across the whole of the United Kingdom. If we succeed on the River Severn, and we demonstrate that we can manage and tame a river by paying farmers and landowners further upstream to hold on to that water, they will be incentivised. A key concept of emotional intelligence is interdependence. From an interdependence perspective, we need to give a financial incentive to people further upstream to hold on to water by paying them for that.

Of course, we have all built little flood defences in our constituencies, but think about how counter-intuitive it is to say, “I am going to protect myself and push the problem further downstream and let you deal with it.” That is not interdependence—“I’m alright, Jack. I’m going to protect myself, but you can deal with the problem.” No, that is wrong. We have to think in a more interdependent way for the whole of our communities. Hold on to water further upstream, and pay those farmers and landowners to protect the whole of the area.

If we succeed in Shropshire and on the River Severn, it would not just be a prototype for the rest of the United Kingdom; it could be a massive export opportunity. I went to places in the world when I worked in commerce, as I am sure the Minister has, such as Bangladesh and others. I have seen not only the sheer devastation of flooding in countries such as Bangladesh, but the sheer number of people who have lost their lives as a result of flooding in communities and societies even more vulnerable than our own. I would like to see greater collaboration between the Minister’s Department and the Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office on how our aid budget is used for scientific research and technology development, not only to help ourselves here in the United Kingdom, but for that work to then be either exported or given in international aid to other countries. I would be interested to see if the Minister agrees and if he can give any additional information on that.

Finally, I pay tribute to Mark Barrow from Shropshire Council, who takes the lead on the River Severn Partnership. He has been enormously supportive to me, my team and the River Severn caucus here in the House of Commons. Having represented a border community, as my right hon. Friend the Member for Ludlow has done, for the last 19 years, I am extremely cognisant of the importance of the Union, as I have already alluded to. I am one of those politicians who fundamentally believes in the Union of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland. We should not cut up the individual parts of this island, but do everything conceivable to bring it together. I believe that this is one of those projects where working in conjunction with our friends and neighbours across the border in Wales could send a very powerful signal that we will transcend the artificial borders between us and work collaboratively to find solutions for helping our residents.

10:16

[Rachael Maskell (York Central) (Lab/Co-op)]

It is always a pleasure to see you in the Chair, Mr Efford. This debate is clearly about risk, who carries that risk, when it is shared, and who pays for it. I will start by congratulating the right hon. Member for Ludlow (Philip Dunne). He has worked on issues to do with rivers for a considerable time, and that is really appreciated.

Flooding has been on the agenda I have had to deal with in York since I first came to this place. York floods—it is part of our history—but this year we had the greatest floods since 1872. We had more water for a more sustained period of time, and of course that had a devastating impact on part of our city. The mitigation that was put in after the Boxing day floods in 2015 has had a massive impact on our city, preventing flooding along the River Foss and the River Ouse, and I am grateful for that. The conclusion of that work is welcome. There is a bit more work being done on water storage; eyes are turning upstream to address the upper catchment and the water storage issues, which must be looked at.

The Minister has come to my constituency and seen for himself some of the challenges that our city faces. I want to talk about one cell, as the Environment Agency terms it, that floods with great frequency, impacting the businesses there. Yes, those businesses trade well in the summer, when the sun is out and people come down to our riverfront and enjoy that space, but their frustration is that the logic on which the flood recovery framework works—or does not work, in their case—means that it looks not at individual businesses and the cost to them, but at a much broader geographical area.

I met the hon. Member for North Dorset (Simon Hoare), the Minister in DLUHC, to look at the framework and why it does not work. In his letter to MPs on 8 January, he set out that the Government were going to trigger the framework, but there is no logic to say how it will be triggered or not triggered, so we need some consistency to ensure fairness. He also listed a number of counties where the framework would apply, and stated that authorities had to have more than 50 flooded properties to be eligible. That means that it does not apply to everyone. For us the story is bittersweet, because we no longer have 50 flooded properties, but none the less, for those properties that do flood—usually businesses—it is incredibly costly. I urge the Minister to look at a per-capita scheme rather than one that focuses on a geographical area and is not applied in a logical fashion.

I have met Yorkshire Water, the Environment Agency and City of York Council to look at what is happening in our city. We have a major choice to make. Do we shut water out and have the continual battle of keeping it away, as the hon. Member for Shrewsbury and Atcham (Daniel Kawczynski) suggested, or do we learn to live with water? It is a very difficult choice, given the climate changes we are seeing; Members from across the House have articulated how much more frequent flooding is and the extent to which water levels are rising. I have praised our flood defences, but we know that we do not have long in relative terms until they will be challenged. What do we do at that juncture? We have been looking across the globe, as the hon. Member mentioned, but this is very real for us now. We have to make strategic choices about how we manage water, while remembering that flooding is not our greatest threat—drought is—so we also need to think about what we are doing on storage for the long term. York does not have one river; we have two. Of course, many of our towns and cities were built along rivers, which were traditionally trading routes. We have to deal with that.

I have several requests of the Minister. First, can we have some consistency in the application of the flood recovery framework? Secondly, can it apply to all businesses affected? At the moment, businesses, and some property owners, are carrying all the risk. Thirdly, can the suspension of council tax payments and business rates for the owners of flooded properties for the period that they cannot trade be not optional, but determined from the centre by the Government? That would really help, and it has not happened yet in York. I have been meeting with the council to urge for that. However, that transfers the risk to local authorities, and they have got no money at the moment. They are having to balance their books with other risks, so I ask that that comes down from the centre. I discussed that with the DLUHC Minister, the hon. Member for North Dorset, earlier in the week.

Can we also have another look at insurance? The Flood Re scheme has been a real success. My constituents have certainly praised it, and it has meant that they are eligible for an insurance scheme that they can afford. However, the clock is ticking on Flood Re. It is only a 25-year scheme; it ends in 2039. We need to think about what happens after that, because the risks are increasing and there will still be need and demand. These issues need to be addressed now, or certainly by the incoming Government, to ensure that we have resilience built into our insurance system.

We also need an insurance scheme for businesses. There is no reason why businesses are in the “too difficult” box. We need minds to come together to work that through, and I call on the Minister to have those discussions, because it is not working at the moment. There are businesses in my constituency that are uninsurable. They are not insured and not getting flood recovery framework funding; they are out there on their own, forgotten by this Government. I really hope that the Minister has a response to that.

I am conscious of time, so the last issue I will address is that of sewage in our water. The effluence coming into our water system is making things even worse for businesses. Last year in York, we had 1,414 sewage releases. That is going to increase. Having an open sewer running through the middle of our city is obviously massively unpleasant, but we need to look at our whole drainage system. Running our system off Victorian sewers is not the way forward.

[Daniel Kawczynski]

Sewage going into rivers is an important issue that has not been touched on. I hope the Minister is aware that Severn Trent recently announced a special programme to clear up the water around Shrewsbury, but this should be a cross-party issue. The Lib Dems have, I am afraid, tried to politicise it by putting on their little leaflets, “Local Tory MP votes to pour sewage into the River Severn.” That is extremely inappropriate, given the talk about anger with Members of Parliament and the denigration we all face. That is an issue that I have faced, and it has been really unpleasant. We have to be very careful about what we say on this issue.

[Rachael Maskell]

I am grateful to the hon. Gentleman, but the point I want to make is that we need a strategic plan for managing sewage in our country. Clearly, the Victorians got it right and got on with the job, but we have turned our eyes away from the sewage system for the best part of 200 years. We really have to turn our eyes back. We have to think about hygiene and good sanitation. At times as I walk around wonderful medieval York, it feels that we are trying to bring that experience even more to life with the state of our rivers. I urge the Minister, and indeed the shadow Minister, my hon. Friend the Member for Kingston upon Hull West and Hessle (Emma Hardy), to have a plan for sewage.

Sewers are underground, but that does not mean they can be ignored. Increasingly, we are seeing the impact of that. Here in London, the Tideway project is an incredible investment; we need to see that across the country, including in the north, so I urge such investment to be part of the plan. It would take away some of the difficulty if there were fresh water running through our cities, even when they are flooded.

[Several hon. Members rose—]

[Clive Efford (in the Chair)]

Order. Two more Back Benchers want to speak. I want to bring in the first of the Front Benchers at 10.38 am in order to give them 10 minutes each and Mr Dunne two minutes to wind up.

10:27

[Tim Farron (Westmorland and Lonsdale) (LD)]

It is a pleasure to serve under your guidance, Mr Efford. I congratulate the right hon. Member for Ludlow (Philip Dunne), who has championed these issues for some time, and I pay tribute to him and thank him for his contribution.

We talk about the weather an awful lot in this country, because it is never boring, although we sometimes wish it was, and that is especially so for those who live in England’s wettest county. Yes, we have to keep our breathtaking lakes topped up, but there is a limit, and we fear that we may have reached that limit. I simply want to ask the Minister briefly whether he will he keep a close eye on the flood relief schemes in Kendal and Appleby, and listen to local residents to ensure that those schemes are completed in accordance with the wishes of the residents and businesses there.

We do not blame the Government for the weather, but the flood recovery framework is a welcome attempt to help us cope with the consequences, and I want to focus my few moments on the Government’s failure to use the framework well to defend farmers. Cumbria did not qualify for any of the support coming through the framework, despite the fact that farms across our county are still dealing with the consequences of Storm Henk.

The complaint of farmers across the country is that, despite having the building blocks of a reasonable scheme in the form of the flood recovery framework, in practice the Conservatives have left farmers, families and businesses to fend for themselves, threatening their livelihoods and our food security. The Government response has been sluggish, acquiescent and inadequate. Farmers tell me that they feel that the Government simply do not care.

To be fair to the Government, they activated the flood recovery framework after Storm Babet in 2023 and Storm Henk earlier this year, but to qualify for funding at least 50 properties have to be affected by internal flooding, and many communities in Cumbria—Meathop, for example—are much smaller than 50. There are further concerns about the Government’s cut-off date for grant payments and whether resilience measures can be built in time, given how hard it is to bring things on stream.

I have worked very closely over the past several years with farmers in the Lynster Farmers’ Group, the Grange-Over-Sands Golf Club, businesses and other residents to try to tackle the flooding caused by channel movements in Morecambe bay and the silting- up of river channels, which has led to flooding in the Winster and Lyth catchments. All those problems are exacerbated by increased heavy and persistent rainfall and storm events. The farmers have called for more effective, proactive collaboration, with a plan for management and investment. Although that has had my active support, to date the Government and their agencies have failed to act. Incidentally, it is highly likely that that failure to take action may have contributed at least in part to the subsidence of the track and the shocking derailment of a train on the Furness line near Grange station last month. That event could easily have led to serious loss of life. Storm Babet led to farmers’ crops rotting underwater after a devastatingly wet 2023. That flooding means that no planting is possible this year in many areas. Grazing is limited and spring lambing is much harder.

At the same time, 100% of those farmers will lose 50% of their basic payment this year, and only one in eight will get anything from the sustainable farming incentive. The Government’s policies mean that our farmers simply cannot afford to endure the consequences of these unprecedented flooding levels. Meanwhile, farmers do not receive compensation when the Environment Agency effectively floods their fields to protect downstream houses and villages, despite the harm to crops and livelihoods. That is all happening against the backdrop of huge cuts to the Environment Agency’s budget since 2015, which have reduced its capacity to meet basic flood management requirements. There has been a litany of incompetence and poor choices, and farmers are paying the price.

It is not just farmers. The Government’s failure to tackle these issues means that Britain’s fragile food security is at even greater risk. We already produce only 60% of the food we eat in this country. We have the madness of a Government with an agricultural policy that actively disincentivises the production of food, and our flood recovery framework not being used for its express purpose and failing to protect land that could and should have been producing food to feed us. On top of that, lower crop yields will mean higher prices in our supermarkets and higher prices for animal feed, pushing up costs for consumers who are already under unbearable pressure. In short, the flood recovery framework is just that: a framework. The fact that it exists is to be welcomed, but the Government are dragging their feet, underfunding it and bogging everyone down in bureaucracy.

We say we need a proactive management plan for the Environment Agency to control watercourses and defences, and we should bring forward the funding we need to keep our farmers farming. We say that the environmental land management budget must be increased by £1 billion so that farmers are rewarded properly and provided with the support they need to transition to the new scheme, recognising that farmers should be rewarded for the service they provide in protecting places such as Kendal, Appleby-in-Westmorland, Staveley and Burneside from flooding. Investment in new schemes to support farmers in delivering natural flood defences is absolutely essential. Let us remember that this is, at least to some extent, about producing food to feed us all. Surely that must be considered a public good.

The failure to protect our farmers from flooding and to adequately compensate them is dangerously undermining our ability to feed ourselves. A country that cannot feed itself is destined to fail, and a Government who cannot protect and support their farmers in order to do that must be removed.

10:33

[James Heappey (Wells) (Con)]

It is a pleasure to speak on something other than defence for the first time in five years in either Chamber. Flooding is a great subject on which to reopen my account, given how important it is to my low-lying Somerset constituency.

Somerset is no stranger to water, so I hope the Minister understands that when Somerset MPs grumble about flooding, it is never unreasonable or alarmist. We are very used to water being on the fields and coming into our homes relatively frequently, but sometimes it happens more than is acceptable. When that happens, it is important that the Government listen.

As has been mentioned—I will not go back over this winter—fields have been underwater for months, which means they will not be as productive this summer as they would have been. They are not ready to be used, so farmers will need support. Some homes in villages in my constituency have been flooded four or more times in the past five or six months. Is this the one-in-100-years winter about which all the worst-case scenarios are written? My suspicion is that it is not and that such events are increasingly common.

In the brief time I have available—three minutes or so—I want to make a couple of points about what is playing out in my patch. My suspicions are similar to those expressed by others. The first concerns big housing developments built upstream. I do not want this to become a nimby argument against a development that is needed, but I am far from convinced that, in the just under 10 years in which I have been an MP and during which time these developments have been built, the full consequence of the speed at which water comes down from Shepton Mallet and Wells and down the rivers beneath was properly modelled.

If that was modelled, I am certain that the capital improvements to watercourses downstream were never made, to allow for that increased speed of water as it comes off the greater amount of tarmac upstream and into the valley beneath. The villages that are worst affected—Coxley, Croscombe, North Wootton and others —sit immediately beneath a number of new housing developments in Wells and Shepton Mallet.

My second point is on the Environment Agency budget. The operations team in my constituency tells me that it has about 60% of what is needed as an operational budget for the Wessex area. Clearly, there is an argument to give the EA more money, but everybody argues for more money. I was on the radio this morning saying there should be more money for defence. There cannot be more money everywhere. My suspicion is that the Minister needs to be clearer with the EA on its priorities. Some of that will be politically difficult. There are things the EA does around environmental matters, for example, when in extremis—I argue we are there—its priorities should be the operational management of waterways and flood defence, at the risk of some of those other activities. I wonder whether the Minister could offer some thoughts on that.

There is also an issue around local authority budgets and highway maintenance. ’Tis the season for middle-aged politicians in suits to crowd round a pothole and point at it earnestly. I think the Minister and the roads Minister could do a roaring trade, going round the country pointing earnestly at clogged-up culverts, because that is definitely an issue in my constituency. If he wants to road-test that photo opportunity, I am only too happy to host.

We need support for farmers whose livelihoods have been challenged, and also for homeowners. The grants are there, they just have not been forthcoming. In the west country, there has been a lot of politicking, with the Lib Dem county council blaming Conservative-led central Government, and Conservative central Government blaming the Lib Dem county council. If all that hot air dried out the fields and homes, we would be doing some good. The reality is that we are changing nothing with the arguments. It would be great if the Minister could confirm in his summing-up whether that money is available.

Finally, in three seconds, there is a point about resilience. Government cannot do it all. Flood Re is fantastic, but the more we can invest capital in flood defences, pumping infrastructure, watercourse improvement, and thus ease the pressure on the Environment Agency’s revenue budget, the better.

10:38

[Emma Hardy (Kingston upon Hull West and Hessle) (Lab)]

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mr Efford. This has been an enjoyable and informed debate. I begin by paying tribute to the right hon. Member for Ludlow (Philip Dunne) who is hugely respected for his knowledge of environmental issues. The years he has devoted to further and create better policy are admired. I am grateful to him for bringing this debate to the Chamber and lending his expertise on flooding, I hope not for the last time before the end of this Parliament. Of course, I completely agree about the complex patchwork of support.

I would also like to mention the hon. Member for Tiverton and Honiton (Richard Foord). I completely agree with his comment about being caught on the back foot when flooding occurs, and the difficulty in getting urgent support out there. I cannot resist the opportunity to mention sustainable urban drainage systems; I managed to get it into a “Politics North” programme the other day. There are ways to build homes and mitigate flooding, but that requires a different Department to answer questions. If the hon. Member is a keen supporter of flood recovery, he should have a look at sustainable urban drainage.

The hon. Member for Shrewsbury and Atcham (Daniel Kawczynski) was really interested in the River Severn Partnership, which sounds fascinating. I would be keen to know how the business case goes and get a little more information on that. I agree that it cannot operate as a silo. Water does not care about which Member of Parliament it is or which political party they are in, or even which boundary; water will go its own way. I am quite interested in the sound of that.

I am interested in what my hon. Friend the Member for York Central (Rachael Maskell), who is definitely one of the hardest-working Members of Parliament from any party, has to say and her level of knowledge. If at any time I want an invite to York—

[Rachael Maskell]

You are always welcome.

[Emma Hardy]

Thank you very much. I would really like to—it would be great to go and see that.

I completely agree with the hon. Member for Westmorland and Lonsdale (Tim Farron) on the importance of food security. It is good to see the right hon. Member for Wells (James Heappey) in a debate that is not a defence debate. There was an amusing Twitter account on politicians pointing at potholes that I used to look through and giggle at; it is nearly as good as the Twitter account on angry people in local newspapers, which I highly recommend.

The effects of flooding are profound and lasting. When we talk about property or farming flooding, we must bear that in mind. I highlight that the people least able to afford it are the people who are often the most badly impacted, because they are the ones who do not have insurance. I understand that the framework is under review and the Government expect to complete it, but can the Minister tell us if they are consulting stakeholders? The Chartered Institution of Water and Environmental Management was not aware that the review was happening, nor was the National Farmers Union.

As has been mentioned, the lead local flood authorities, the county or unitary level councils, must have 50 or more properties affected by internal flooding to qualify for emergency funding, but that was not always the case. I have two written parliamentary questions waiting for answers on this: when was the current threshold increased from 25 properties, and what assessment was made at the time to make it 50 properties? It always seems slightly odd when people come up with these rounded numbers and say, “It is 50 properties.” Why is 50 the magic number? Why is it not 48 or 53? Why have we chosen an arbitrary number and said that it must be 50 properties?

As the Minister will understand, flooding is the result of natural features in the landscape, not local authority boundaries. Any threshold will therefore exclude councils where areas of flooded homes are split across council boundaries. The threshold of 50 can mean that if two councils are impacted and there are 49 properties in each council boundary, they do not meet the criteria because they do not have 50 properties in one council boundary. They are arbitrary numbers. I return to my written parliamentary question and ask again: why was the threshold increased? Hopefully something a little more sensible will come out of the review.

As the MP for and a resident of west Hull and Hessle, I know only too well the scale and impact of flooding on thousands of properties. For some councils, the scale of flooding is a challenge; they must deal with grant applications from hundreds of property owners. The Government’s cut-off date for grant payments is mid-2025, and councils are concerned about the capacity of the industry to install property resilience measures in the funding window and, importantly, the availability of qualified surveyors. A CIWEM survey found that only a third of risk management authorities have a full complement of staff to deliver surface water management, and three quarters of RMAs are struggling to recruit new staff. Greater flexibility on the deadline for claims would be helpful to avoid the risk that councils have to step in and fund the costs of householders who could not claim within a specified period.

As has been mentioned in the debate, I will mention the impact of that on affected farmers. The NFU informs me that its members have struggled to get any information on the flood recovery framework schemes and eligible areas before they closed for applications. It said that a significant number of farmers have missed out on the deadline and have been turned away by their respective councils, which are either not aware of the scheme or believe that farmers can access only the farming recovery fund. Another thing that came up in the debate was understanding which scheme applies to whom and who needs to apply for them.

I will also mention bureaucracy. The application process is littered with difficulty. I have left out some parts for the sake of brevity, but to be successful a homeowner must apply to their council to check that they are eligible, if they know that the council has the funds to begin with; decide whether they want to undertake flood recoverability or flood resilience measures; pay for a pre-installation survey, the cost of which can be claimed back, but which must be paid for up front; and obtain three quotes for the proposed work—the grant will cover only the cost of the cheapest quote. Once the quote is approved by the council, the property owner must sign a memorandum of understanding setting out the responsibilities of both the homeowner and the council, get the work done in line with the specific conditions of the scheme—again, paying up front—and get a post-completion survey done and submitted to the council, at which point the council will go through the survey. Only if all the criteria are met will funds up to the value of £5,000 be transferred to the homeowner. The whole process takes about 18 months, with no guarantee for the homeowner that the council will release the funds. That is difficult both for the local authorities to administer and for households to access. Will the Minister therefore look at streamlining and simplifying the process?

I am aware that I am running out of time, but I am always keen to discuss flooding and I hope for more debates on the subject. I want to quickly mention that while we need a more effective and equitable flood recovery framework, what we actually need is fewer properties flooded in the first place. The number of properties to be better protected from flooding by 2027 has been cut by 40% and 500 of the 2,000 new flood defence projects have been abandoned, according to the recent National Audit Office report. That means that 136,000 fewer homes will be protected from the risk of flooding.

I have asked parliamentary questions about where the abandoned flood defence projects are and have yet to receive a clear answer. I have been told that they are not abandoned and that some have just been deferred. I have therefore gone back to the Department asking how many projects, if not abandoned, have been deferred and how long the deferral process will be. To say that the answer has been evasive would be kind. We want to know how many of the flood projects promised by Government are on track to be delivered and where are the ones that are not. Residents have a right to know. The Government seem to be hiding behind language at the moment. That is not fair and it is not transparent.

The Government have committed more than £5 billion for new flood and coastal defences by 2027, but they are failing in their delivery while also failing to maintain the defences we have. Labour has a plan, not only to ensure that budgets committed to flood defences are used to the maximum effect, but to bring together all those involved in flood prevention and resilience to ensure that everyone works together to protect our communities, farmers and businesses now and for the future. Labour will establish a flood resilience taskforce that co-ordinates flooding preparation between central Government, local authorities, local communities and emergency services. It will ensure that vulnerable areas are identified and protected, and provide accountability for the progress of the projects. It will be chaired by a DEFRA Minister and bring together senior civil servants, Ministers from across Government—including a new Minister for resilience, who would sit in the Cabinet Office—regional flood and coastal committees and other frontline agencies, including the Environment Agency and fire and rescue services. It will work with the Environment Agency to ensure that its formula to protect communities considers potential damages to rural communities and farmland when identifying areas to protect.

DEFRA appears to have given up. Its flagship flood defence scheme is slipping further and further behind, and it has lowered its targets for maintaining flood defences. That is symptomatic of a Government who are out of ideas and know that time is up. Labour has a plan and the energy and commitment to make the changes this country needs to meet the challenges of increased flood risk in the face of a changing climate.

10:48

[The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Robbie Moore)]

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mr Efford. I thank my right hon. Friend the Member for Ludlow (Philip Dunne) for securing this important debate and all hon. Members who have contributed. It has been good to hear about everybody’s experiences of the flood recovery scheme roll-out and how it is helping their constituents, while also hearing about some of the challenges, which I hope to address in my speech. I also thank my right hon. Friend and other colleagues for sharing their experiences with me when I met them through the River Severn caucus just last month. That follows on from my first ministerial visit to Shrewsbury, to see the case being made by my hon. Friend the Member for Shrewsbury and Atcham (Daniel Kawczynski) for more funds for the wider River Severn catchment. I assure him that his case is noted and that conversations are happening with the Treasury.

The Government and I sympathise with all Members’ constituents, households and businesses that have experienced flooding. Through visits to Gloucestershire, Nottinghamshire, Lincolnshire, East Yorkshire, Northumberland and Cumbria—to name but a few of the counties I have visited over the course of the last few months to see at first hand households, businesses and farms that have unfortunately been flooded—I understand the impact those experiences have on people.

Climate change means that the number of people at risk from flooding is, unfortunately, likely to grow. The storms we experienced over the autumn and winter brought that into sharp focus, as more than 5,000 properties were flooded. More importantly, however, nearly a quarter of a million—241,000—properties were protected as a result of the continued investment in flood defences. The Government are acting to drive down flood risk from every angle. Our long-term policy statement published in 2020 sets out our

“ambition to create a nation more resilient to future flood and coastal erosion risk.”

We continue to invest public money in this important area. The Government are investing £5.2 billion between 2021 and 2027 to better protect communities across England from flooding and coastal erosion. Since 2010 Government investment has meant that more than 600,000 properties have been better protected, which is a significant achievement, but we all recognise that there are homes and businesses that still suffer from flooding.

To pick up on the point kindly made by the hon. Member for York Central (Rachael Maskell), I am pleased she recognises that since the Boxing day floods in 2015 in her constituency, businesses and homeowners across Yorkshire have benefited from Government support and funding that has specifically gone into York. It was good to visit her constituency, where I saw at first hand some of the improvement measures that have been implemented, particularly in relation to the Foss barrier.

Through the visits I have made, I understand the impact on people of such experiences, whether it has been damage to or loss of property, over the autumn and winter following Storm Babet, Storm Henk, Storm Ciarán and the wet period that we have experienced. That is why, following Storm Babet and Storm Henk, the Government announced a significant package of support for areas in England that experienced exceptional localised flooding. Together, the Departments for Levelling Up, Housing and Communities and for Business and Trade activated the flood recovery framework at speed following those storm events. That provides the community recovery grant, where eligible local authorities receive funding equivalent to £500 per flooded household to support local recovery efforts.

The business recovery grant provides up to £2,500 to eligible local authorities for each eligible small and medium-sized enterprise that has suffered severe impacts of flooding that cannot be recovered from insurance. Under the council tax discount and business rate relief the Government have reimbursed local authorities for a minimum period of three months for eligible flooded properties. Alongside that framework, the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs has implemented the property flood resilience repair grant, which offers grants of up to £5,000 per property to install flood resilience measures.

To pick up on the point kindly raised by my right hon. Friend the Member for Wells (James Heappey)—it is good to see him contributing in a Westminster Hall debate after being so eloquent and efficient in his role for many a year in the Ministry of Defence—I assure him that Somerset County Council’s residents are eligible to receive money through the property flood resilience repair grant due to the threshold of 50 units being met. I think 106 properties were flooded in Somerset. His constituents are able to receive that money.

[Darren Henry]

In Nottinghamshire we had Storm Babet and Storm Henk in quick succession. The Minister mentioned that businesses were able to receive grants, but they were not able to receive them twice. Had the storms happened in two separate years they would have done. What are the Government doing to address that?

[Robbie Moore]

I thank my hon. Friend for consistently raising that point and others with me in my role as Minister. I assure him that all measures and schemes will be reviewed. Having requested a visit from me to come and see some of his businesses in Stapleford, I look forward to coming very soon to address the flooding issues that he and his constituents have experienced.

As my right hon. Friend the Member for Ludlow is aware, Shropshire County Council, which includes his Ludlow constituency, is eligible to receive funding following Storms Babet and Henk. The Government have recently opened the farming recovery fund, currently in nine areas, to support farmers who have suffered uninsurable damage to their land as a result of Storm Henk. Farmers will be able to receive grants of up to £25,000 towards reinstatement costs for farmland adversely affected by exceptional flooding. I fully recognise right hon. and hon. Members’ concerns about the announcement that the Department made last week. I assure all Members, and indeed those outside this place, that Ministers are actively reviewing the Department’s announcement last week.

My right hon. Friend also voiced some important questions about the schemes. He rightly raised the concern that holding the eligibility count at the lead local flood authority level, which is unitary or upper-tier councils, poses a problem for some local authorities, and that the threshold of 50 internally flooded properties as an eligibility criterion could be considered unfair to smaller local flood authority areas. I assure right hon. and hon. Members that that will be reviewed.

Let me address the concerns raised by the shadow Minister, the hon. Member for Kingston upon Hull West and Hessle (Emma Hardy) that the threshold was actually increased. Following flooding in 2020, and on the back of representations from local authorities, the flood eligibility criterion was reviewed. Previously, the eligibility criterion set by DLUHC for the flood recovery framework to be activated was 25 internally flooded residential units over a district local authority area. Following feedback, that was reviewed and reduced to a threshold of 50 properties, whether commercial or otherwise—not just residential properties—over a unitary authority area, which is a bigger geographical area. The threshold was therefore reduced, not increased, as the hon. Member wrongly claimed.

[Emma Hardy]

I believe that that was the point I made: the threshold had gone from 25 to 50. I am happy to check Hansard and correct any mistake if I made one— I am not sure that I did—but that does not resolve the point that I was making, which was about where the arbitrary number of 50 came from. If there are 49 properties on each side of a border, there will be no actual impact. It has been increased, and there has not been a consultation to explain exactly why.

[Robbie Moore]

I reassure all Members that the threshold was changed so that we could get much more support out to business and households. As I have already said, however, I have asked for alternative geographical boundaries to be considered for future activations, and discussed with the Department for Levelling Up, Housing and Communities the appropriate threshold for future events. That is under review with stakeholders, including the National Farmers Union. I spoke to the president of the union at several events in previous weeks, so the union is aware. Unfortunately, I think that the shadow Minister slightly misquoted that.

My right hon. Friend the Member for Ludlow also asked about extra funding to staff local authorities so that they can deliver framework schemes. The Under-Secretary of State for Levelling Up, Housing and Communities, my hon. Friend the Member for North Dorset (Simon Hoare), is considering that matter as part of the post-activation review that is currently under way.

I thank all Members for their contributions. I look forward to further conversations with Members regarding this important matter, to ensure that the Government are getting as much support as possible to those impacted by flooding.

10:58

[Philip Dunne]

I am encouraged by the Minister’s closing remarks. Before I address them, I thank all Members who took part in the debate, including those who intervened and have since left. I particularly welcome my good friend, my right hon. Friend the Member for Wells (James Heappey), making his inaugural speech from the Back Benches following his period as a Defence Minister. It is good to see him here.

The hon. Member for Tiverton and Honiton (Richard Foord), my hon. Friend the Member for Shrewsbury and Atcham (Daniel Kawczynski) and the hon. Member for Westmorland and Lonsdale (Tim Farron) referred to the lack of fairness that results from the way the thresholds and criteria are implemented. I am pleased that that was picked up by the Opposition spokesman, the hon. Member for Kingston upon Hull West and Hessle (Emma Hardy), and specifically the Minister, who mentioned the review that is being done. What he said in his concluding remarks about the “alternative geographical boundaries” and looking at the level of the threshold was helpful. I will not repeat the spat across the Chamber about who said what to whom, but the fact that it is being reviewed is very welcome. The staffing allowances being offered to local authorities that undertake the work will also be helpful.

I should mention the hon. Member for York Central (Rachael Maskell), who gave a compelling account of the problems that have been occurring in York. I particularly welcome her welcoming the defence measures that have made York a safer place to live.

Motion lapsed (Standing Order No. 10(6)).

Exclusive Economic Zone: Maritime Safety

Wednesday 17th April 2024 Westminster Hall

11:00

[Mr Alistair Carmichael (Orkney and Shetland) (LD)]

I beg to move,

That this House has considered maritime safety breaches within the Exclusive Economic Zone.

It is a pleasure, as ever, to serve with you in the Chair, Mr Efford, and I welcome the Minister to his place. He knows that I hold him in high regard as a very effective and diligent Minister, so I hope he will not take it amiss if I say that I was a little disappointed to hear that I was not getting a reply from the Attorney General or one of her staff. In fact, when I think about it, that change highlights one of the problems we are dealing with: this is an issue in which many Government Departments have an interest but for which nobody has overall responsibility. One thing that I hope we take away from this debate is a determination that somebody takes charge of the issue.

Essentially, I want to bring the House’s attention to a matter that arises from an ongoing conflict between fishing boats that operate static gear and those that operate mobile gear. There can only be better ways of resolving those conflicts and tensions than the ones that I am about to describe for the House.

There are two particular, well-documented incidents that I want to place on the record for the benefit of the House and for the Minister’s consideration. The first took place on 11 June 2020, and involved the Shetland-registered whitefish boat the Alison Kay. Skippered by James Anderson, it was fishing 30 nautical miles to the west of Shetland. Mr Anderson describes the roots of what was about to happen thus:

“The incident occurred on the 11th of June and when the vessel in question shot his gear”—

that is the Pesorsa Dos, which is a Spanish-owned but German-registered vessel—

“in the area he knew we were fishing. He chose to put his gear at risk. What he decided to do was to shoot nets”—

those are gillnets of quite industrial magnitude—

“in an area known to be used by trawlers and then subsequently tell the trawlers they can’t fish here now because his gear is now there! This is simply unacceptable terms for us and we have no intention of moving away when we have every right to continue fishing.”

This is an area of sea that has been fished for decades, if not centuries, by Shetland fishermen, so we can understand Mr Anderson’s strength of feeling. The skipper of the Pesorsa Dos then proceeded to tow a rope tied to a float across the bow, which was a clear attempt to foul the Alison Kay’s propeller or steering gear. It was an act of the most incredible recklessness for which there can be no excuse. It could have led to injury or death, or the loss of either or both of the boats. Of course, it was avoided because the skipper of the Alison Kay took evasive action.

The Pesorsa Dos is a Spanish-owned gillnetter that is flagged in Germany through SeaMar, a company based in Schleswig-Holstein. The Maritime and Coastguard Agency was made aware of the incident but declined to investigate because it said that it happened outside the 12-mile limit, and the 12-mile limit is the extent of its jurisdiction. That takes us into that area of sea between the 12-mile limit and the extent of the 200-mile exclusive economic zone. Notwithstanding the MCA’s describing the incident as extremely “concerning” and saying that the

“consequences could have been extremely serious”,

it was declared that the responsibility lay with the German investigating authorities, as that was where the Pesorsa Dos was registered—Germany was the flag state.

We pursued this matter in correspondence with the German authorities but, bluntly, they were not interested, even though Germany is the flag state. Why would it be? This incident involved a conflict between a Spanish vessel and a Scottish vessel in waters hundreds of miles away from the closest point of German waters. I do not believe this sort of behaviour was ever anticipated when the United Nations convention on the law of the sea—the governing statute—was entered into, but this is the reality with which fishermen in Shetland and other parts of the United Kingdom are now having to deal.

[Jim Shannon (Strangford) (DUP)]

As the Minister knows, I represent the constituency of Strangford, which has a large fishing fleet. The right hon. Gentleman has secured a vital debate and clearly outlined the two incidents. Does he agree that the sovereign rights that exist for our fishing fleet mean that the standards we set in that zone apply to every fishing vessel, not just British ones, and that we must enforce on any vessel the appropriate safety measures rigorously and authoritatively, with extended powers if warranted by the Maritime and Coastguard Agency? In other words, all vessels are subject to the same laws.

[Mr Carmichael]

The hon. Gentleman will not be surprised to hear that that is something with which I have no difficulty agreeing. The vessels are all subject to the same laws; the difficulty comes when we try to enforce them. In fact, the Irish Government have taken a rather more novel and, shall we say, direct approach from which we could probably learn some lessons.

The then Fisheries Minister, now the Attorney General, convened a Zoom call for me which had, while not exactly a cast of thousands, at least a dozen people on it. One by one, each of those people explained that although they understood the seriousness of the situation it was, in fact, always somebody else’s problem. At the end of the call, it was agreed that there would be further consideration and action would be taken, but I am afraid to say that, years later, we have heard effectively nothing since. It seems to just go from Department to Department, and is always too difficult for somebody to deal with.

For my constituents and for the fishermen working in Shetland’s waters, it continues to be a problem. On 16 October last year, the Defiant, a Lerwick-registered whitefish boat, skippered on that day by Magnus Polson, was working 18 miles east of Unst—again, within the area of water between 12 and 200 miles—when it experienced a similar incident, involving the Antonio Maria, a Spanish-owned but French-registered longliner. Mr Polson established where the long lines were and that he could operate safely without coming into conflict with the static gear, but 15 minutes later the skipper of the Antonio Maria altered his course on to a direct collision course with the Defiant. The longliner came dangerously close to the port side of the Defiant, whose crew saw two crewmen appear on the Antonio Maria and one throw a rope into water—designed, we presume, to foul the propeller. Mr Polson explained that

“due to close proximity and the endangered safety of our boat, I had no choice but to begin hauling back our gear to make room.”

A few weeks ago in Lerwick, I met the other skipper of the Defiant, Robbie Jamieson, who showed me the screen grab of the course that he had plotted in the wheelhouse of the Defiant. He also showed me where the long lines had been laid by the Antonio Maria. It was clear that the course along which the Defiant was going to tow its gear was not actually going to come into conflict with the long lines that had been set by the Antonio Maria, and would have moved somewhere to the south of them. When I raised this with the Fisheries Minister, the right hon. Member for Sherwood (Sir Mark Spencer), on 19 October, he described it as outrageous behaviour, and said he would certainly raise it with his ministerial colleagues. Again, we have heard precious little since. Everybody knows that it is mad, reckless and dangerous behaviour, but somehow nobody ever seems to have an answer for how to stop it.

The Maritime Coastguard Agency has forwarded its report to the French authorities for investigation. The incident happened in October, and we are now well into April and have had no response. The Shetland Fishermen’s Association has asked for the opportunity to have sight of what was sent by the MCA to the French authorities, but it has been told that it cannot have that. I wonder whether the Minister might raise that again with the MCA, because I do not see what the MCA would have to lose by publishing the report. Frankly, it would go a long way towards restoring some trust and confidence between the fishing fleet and the MCA.

Essentially, the difficulty lies in the terms of UNCLOS and the decision to vest authority for investigation and prosecution with the flag state. I do not believe this was something envisaged at the time UNCLOS was agreed, but it is now the reality with which my constituents have to live and deal. This will keep happening unless and until it is stopped. As I see it, it can stop only in one of two ways: there either has to be meaningful action to deal with it, or we wait until there is a fatality when a boat goes down and a life is lost. When that happens, all the people who come up with the good, worthy and complicated reasons as to why it is somebody else’s responsibility will be left looking pretty shame-faced and embarrassed. I do not want any one of them to turn around and say, “I wish somebody had told us about this.” They have been well warned by me today and on many previous occasions.

What can we do? There are a few quick and easy wins. The executive officer of the Shetland Fishermen’s Association said shortly after the Antonio Maria incident that there was a need for a streamlined process of reporting, with an individual designated within the MCA to receive reports. This sort of thing happens, nobody wants to know about it and fishermen get pushed from pillar to post. There needs to be a hotline—a dedicated number—that skippers can phone to report an incident. The sooner that some sort of action can be taken, the likelier it is that that action will then be effective.

I would like to see our Government pursuing the matter with a bit more vigour than they have done. We go through the motions—we tick the boxes, write the report and send it off to the German and French authorities—but then what happens? I call on the Minister to raise the issue at a diplomatic or ministerial level with his opposite numbers when such incidents happen, so that prosecuting authorities in the other flag states understand that it is something we see as being important.

We could also see much better co-operation between the MCA, which is an agency responsible to the Department for Transport here, and Scotland’s Marine Directorate, which is responsible for fisheries management issues and fishery protection in Scotland. They are the people who have boats in the water and who will be able to attend such incidents and gather the necessary evidence.

To come to the point made by the hon. Member for Strangford (Jim Shannon), fishing boats operate in the exclusive economic zone under licence, as all boats do. Surely it could be a condition of the licence that if a boat is going to fish in our waters, it does so in a way that is safe and responsible. We may not be able to prosecute for safety breaches, but we could take action to remove the boats’ licences. That is something that would concentrate the mind.

It is worth comparing the treatment of the Pesorsa Dos in 2020 in Scottish waters, or British waters, with the treatment that it received in Irish waters. The Skipper’s website from January 2023 describes what happened to the Pesorsa Dos after it was detained by the Irish Naval Service for breaches of EU fishing regulations in Irish waters. The skipper, Juan Pablo Docal Rubido, was brought before a special sitting of Bandon District Court following the detention of the vessel for alleged fishing offences.

Mr Rubido, whose vessel is Spanish owned and fishes out of La Coruña but was detained at Castletownbere, was charged with a total of 12 fishing offences on various dates between 5 January and 24 January, while fishing within the exclusive fishing limits of the state. He was charged with two logbook offences: of failing to record the proper depth that his vessel was fishing at, and failing to record the proper soak times or times that he allowed his nets to stay in the water while fishing within Irish exclusive fishing limits. He was also charged with a total of nine separate offences of allowing his nets to exceed the permitted soak times of 72 hours allowed for the gear while fishing within the exclusive fishing limits of the state, contrary to section 14 of the Sea-Fisheries and Maritime Jurisdiction Act 2006.

The best part, though, is still to come. The boat was detained. It was kept in the quayside as a consequence of action taken to seize it by the Irish authorities. The skipper himself was allowed bail on production of a bond of €5,000. The period for which the detention was to be permitted was actually extended on the application of the Irish Government. These trawlers—these massive gillnetters—are big businesses, and they only make money when they are out at sea. That old American saying, “If you get them by their reproductive organs, their hearts and minds will follow”, really characterises the way in which these people have to be tackled. The presiding judge, Colm Roberts, granted bail on Mr Rubido’s own bond of €5,000. He said:

“We have to make sure people realise how serious these matters are.”

Well, amen to that.

We are dealing with an industry that is probably the most dangerous way to make a living. Everybody knows that when fisherman go to sea, they very often put their lives at risk, and the fishermen themselves know that better than anybody else. They understand that this is a contest that sets man against nature and its elements. That risk is acceptable and understood, but setting man against man in such a way cannot be understood or excused. We have an exclusive economic zone. I suggest to the Minister and his colleagues that it is about time we understood what it means to be exclusive and to exclude those who will not use it responsibly.

11:18

[The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Transport (Guy Opperman)]

I congratulate the right hon. Member for Orkney and Shetland (Mr Carmichael) on securing this very important debate, which touches on key matters that this country should be conscious of and anxious to ensure are observed in the right way. He put forward his case and the case of his constituents in his customary, robust and very fair tone.

As the right hon. Gentleman knows, I know Shetland pretty well, having visited only last summer. I nearly knew it much better because Sumburgh airport was shut when I was attempting to leave. I am acutely conscious that the waters around Shetland are among the most dangerous in the world. As he rightly put it, this is about safety first and foremost. We can have an argument about sovereignty, consequences and the fiscal intentions of certain people fishing in a particular way, but the most important thing is safety. He is right to make the case that fishing is a dangerous profession.

I put on the record my thanks to our fishing fleet for its contribution to the UK economy. In 2022, for example, UK vessels landed 640,000 tonnes of sea fish into the UK and abroad, with a value over £1 billion. With National Fishing Remembrance Day coming up on 12 May, we remember those who have lost their lives while working in fishing in the UK. It is also an opportunity to raise awareness of the dangers and how we can tackle them. I am conscious that a number of incidents—certainly the MCA is aware of three—have been reported in the last five years.

The right hon. Gentleman outlined two in particular: one on 11 June 2020; and one on 16 October last year, when the actions of the French-registered Antonio Maria were clearly very serious in respect of what happened to the Defiant—a UK and Shetland-registered vessel—approximately 16 miles off the north-east coast of Shetland. I am aware of the footage and of the commentary since, and of the very serious potential consequences. Loss of power at sea so far from shore—given the weather and its ability to change so easily, particularly in October—should not be undermined in any way. I put on the record my utter condemnation of the actions of the crew of the Antonio Maria, and of other ships that have been involved in such activity; it is not conduct that they would wish upon themselves.

Without sounding too hackneyed, everybody is in the same boat in this respect, and it is of utmost important that we try to ensure a change of behaviour. As the right hon. Gentleman knows very well, the mechanics of that are very difficult, given the implications of UNCLOS. There is a difference, is there not, between the law that applies up to 12 miles out to sea—the draconian actions that can be taken when something is within UK waters in an area that we control and have legal jurisdiction over—and what can happen outside those 12 nautical miles. The right hon. Gentleman clearly knows that there was a report of the most recent incident by the MCA, which I thank for its efforts, but I think we need to do more. I do not have a lot of time today, but I want to address some of the right hon. Gentleman’s key asks.

The first key ask is that there should be sight of the letter that was written in October. Of course that can happen; I am surprised it has not. That will happen within a matter of weeks and will be shared with the Shetland Fishermen’s Association and the r hon. Gentleman. Secondly, he asked for a designated person within the MCA to receive reports. I think the devil is in the detail on this, but fundamentally I am going to make sure that there is a designated individual who is the nominated person for receipt. Active phone lines and things like that are more complicated to establish, but I take the point on board. I hope the right hon. Gentleman will bear with me, so I can allow the organisation to go away and think about how it will do that—not least because there needs to be link-up with actions and consequences if disasters do occur, and all organisations need to be kept informed. I totally endorse the idea of a designated person and will give instruction accordingly. If that has not happened thus far, it definitely will do going forward.

The third point that the right hon. Gentleman raised was in respect of the MCA working more closely with Marine Scotland. I have no specific comment on that in my papers. I am sure they work together already, but I am going to make very sure that they meet within the next month, and that there is an ongoing dialogue and discussion with all devolved nations and devolved organisations so that we are utterly joined up and as one.

I take on board the point about licences. We clearly need to go away and think about that. I respectfully suggest that, with an arm’s length body which is not effectively controlled by Government, there is a danger that the Government then say, “Well, we actually want to try to run it ourselves.” Every Minister has such arm’s length bodies; I had many at the Department for Work and Pensions and I have them at the Department for Transport. As my dad used to say, “You don’t buy a dog and bark yourself”: we have to be in a position to let them get on with it. I will, however, invite them to do two key things: first, to have a proper sit-down with the Fisheries Minister; and, then—in my humble opinion, this is what is needed—to have the Fisheries Minister correspond and sit down with individual Ministers to ensure that there is proper understanding, because it is in all our interests that such incidents do not happen. There should be no benefit whatever.

If this kind of activity is allowed to take place off the shores of Shetland, eventually there will be a serious accident. Lives could be lost. Loss of propulsion out in the ocean, far from land, in circumstances such as in October, is just not acceptable in any way whatever, however fired up everyone is. I believe that the Fisheries Minister needs to take that forward. I will also do my bit to raise this with the Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office, so that it too has an understanding of what is going forward.

The right hon. Member talked about the long-term reform, which will be to the United Nations’ law of the sea. That is clearly difficult, but not impossible. The key point that I want to finish on is that he is right: so many institutions that we set up as individual countries post war—whether the UN and its approach to various things, the G5, the G7, the various immigration rules and regulations that we all abide by, or whatever—struggle to deal with the modern world and the modern pressures on us all. The challenge for all Governments is to adapt and improve those institutions.

I take solace in one thing: without getting into the devil in the detail, the right hon. Gentleman will know that the law of the sea was only agreed by the UN in 1956, and it was upgraded and improved in 1960, 1973 and 1982—so that can be done. Having better penalties and more draconian action on consequences has to be the way forward, and those exist, with stuff clearly going on in the South China sea and the Philippines. My assurance to him is that we will take that on board. This will be a work in progress for successive Governments, but as a Government we take the view that that process should start now, and I give him and his constituents that assurance.

I thank the right hon. Member for Orkney and Shetland for raising this issue. I ask for the forbearance and understanding of his community, who are tough and hardy folk, doing an amazing job for the islands and our country. We should be extraordinarily thankful for their service, their contribution to the economy and the delicious fish they put on our tables. We will do what we can to ensure a better system going forward, because frankly that will be in all our interests.

Question put and agreed to.

11:27

Sitting suspended.

Spring Budget 2024: Welsh Economy

Wednesday 17th April 2024 Westminster Hall

[Peter Dowd in the Chair]

14:30

[Ruth Jones (Newport West) (Lab)]

I beg to move,

That this House has considered the impact of the Spring Budget 2024 on the Welsh economy.

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, I think for the first time, Mr Dowd. I am delighted to be able to bring this debate before the House today, but I want to start by acknowledging the seriousness of the situation in the middle east. My hopes and those of my constituents are for a more peaceful world and a meaningful de-escalation.

As we consider the impact of the spring Budget 2024 on Wales and the Welsh economy, I want to acknowledge the voices, views and concerns of the people of Newport West. My constituents have shared their worries and concerns with me in recent weeks since the Chancellor delivered his Budget. Of course, I am also thinking about people right across Wales who are dealing with the consequences of a Conservative Government that are out of touch and out of time.

The recent Budget could and should have been a unique opportunity to unlock Wales’s promise and all the potential we see in and around our communities, but instead it was more decline and decay. It is clear to everyone in the Chamber, and I suspect to the Minister too, that this Government have decided to continue papering over the cracks of almost 14 years of Conservative economic failure, rather than giving us the change we need.

As we consider the impact of Budget 2024, we need to think about where we are thanks to this Government. Every colleague in this Chamber will know that, after 14 years of Conservative Government, people in Newport West, Monmouth, Clwyd East and Bridgend, and indeed right across Wales, as well as in the rest of the United Kingdom, are worse off. Families continue to struggle with the cost of living crisis, higher taxes and eye-watering energy bills.

The list is depressing and long: debt and interest rates are much higher; Britain’s standing in the world is diminished; economic growth is stagnant; our much-needed and valued but seriously underfunded public services are on their knees; and taxes are higher than at any time since the second world war—indeed, never have a British Government asked their people in Wales and across the UK to pay so much for so little.

Let us take a moment to talk about the Tories’ unfunded plans to abolish national insurance contributions, and the Chancellor’s promise of £46 billion of unfunded tax cuts, which would leave a gaping black hole in the public finances. That reckless approach exposes the clear risk of five more years of the Conservatives. They will gamble with the public finances, and working people will be forced to pay the price yet again.

This Tory Government clearly have not learned anything since the former Prime Minister, the right hon. Member for South West Norfolk (Elizabeth Truss), crashed the economy and sent people’s mortgages spiralling, as we heard this morning during Prime Minister’s questions. I welcome the approach of the Leader of the Opposition and the shadow Chancellor, the right hon. Member for Leeds West (Rachel Reeves), who have been very clear that Labour will never play fast and loose with the nation’s finances.

On average, households in Wales will be £700 worse off under the Tory tax plan, which gives 5p for every 10p taken from people across the country. The Budget confirms that the UK has the highest tax burden in 70 years, rising every year of the forecast period. The Office for Budget Responsibility figures speak for themselves: for every 10p extra working people pay in tax under the Tories plan, they will get only 5p back as a result of the combined national insurance contribution cuts. That includes the OBR’s revised estimate for the impact of tax threshold freezes, which raise £41.1 billion over the forecast period and will create 3.7 million new taxpayers by 2028-29.

As we go back to the people in this general election year, we will be closing the door on the worst Parliament on record for living standards—the only Parliament on record where living standards have fallen. I welcome the Minister to her place, but it is important to remind her that real pay has gone up by just £17 a week over 13 years of Conservative Government; under the last Labour Government, wages rose by £183 a week over 13 years. The spring Budget reveals that growth in GDP per capita is negative this year, and has been downgraded in the four years of the forecast period.

The OBR confirmed what may be called “Rishi’s recession”, with GDP per capita smaller than when our unelected Prime Minister moved into No. 10, taking over from the former Prime Minister, who was beaten by a lettuce. The Conservatives have wrecked the public finances, debt has almost tripled under them, from £1 trillion to just under £2.6 trillion, and borrowing has been revised up for the next five years of the forecast period. That is the legacy handed down to the people of Wales after 13 years of Conservative Government.

Mr Dowd, you will not be surprised to hear me note that this is not just about the impact on Wales, as part of the United Kingdom; the Government have presided over the biggest drop in living standards in Wales since records began, but the same is true for England, Scotland and Northern Ireland too. That will obviously have a huge impact not only on the economy in our part of the United Kingdom, but right across the country.

In recent months, more than 7,000 homeowners across Wales have faced a Tory mortgage bombshell as their fixed-term mortgage rates have come to an end. The average estimated hike is approximately £240 per month; that is the real cost of the Conservative party. Under this Prime Minister, the Conservatives do not have a plan for our future. They crashed the economy and now they expect working people to pay the price.

Our country needs change, and that is why I am proud that the defining purpose of the next Labour Government, if we are fortunate enough to win the trust and support of people across Wales and our United Kingdom, will be to grow Britain’s economy so that we can invest in our future. Labour’s plan for growth is about making working people better off, boosting the Welsh economy and moving our country forward. We will put economic stability first by introducing a new fiscal lock to bring economic security back to family finances. We will back British business. Importantly for me, as a former president of the Wales TUC, Labour will make work pay.

The impact of Budget 2024 on the Welsh economy also shows how important it is that colleagues of mine standing for Labour across Wales are elected to this place. Many are strong Welsh women, such as Becky Gittins in Clwyd East, my neighbour Catherine Fookes in Monmouthshire—a constituency I know very well indeed—and Jackie Jones over in west Wales. They stand alongside colleagues such as the shadow Secretary of State, my hon. Friend the Member for Cardiff Central (Jo Stevens), and my hon. Friends the Members for Newport East (Jessica Morden), for Gower (Tonia Antoniazzi), for Pontypridd (Alex Davies-Jones), for Swansea East (Carolyn Harris) and for Llanelli (Dame Nia Griffith). Their re-election to this place will help ensure that better days lie ahead, and that any future Budgets under a Labour Government will have a significantly better impact on Wales and our economy than Budget 2024.

I have several questions for the Minister. Figures from Citizens Advice Cymru show that the number of people in Wales unable to top up their prepayment meters has increased by 36 times since the last general election. Will the Minister tell us how many households in Wales still have prepayment meters, and whether any have been forcibly installed since the ban in February 2023? I appreciate that she may not have the figures to hand, so perhaps she will write to me about that.

A recent Which? survey found that one in five working-age parents in Wales are skipping meals due to high food prices. Has the Minister had any recent conversations with supermarkets in Wales about keeping the cost of food down?

This year, 62,000 homeowners in Wales will face a Tory mortgage bombshell as their fixed-term rates expire. A Labour Government would require banks to protect homeowners, so what is the Minister doing to help owners with the bills caused by her party’s disastrous economic mismanagement?

The Conservatives have crippled working people with the highest tax burden since the second world war. The Prime Minister’s latest gimmick means that if a British person pays £10 in tax, they will get just £5 back. Does the Minister agree with Iceland boss Richard Walker that Labour is now the right choice for his customers?

You will be pleased to hear that I am drawing my remarks to a close, Mr Dowd. It will come as no surprise that, in my view, the best thing to do is to change course, deliver for our people and move forward with a Labour Government—and the sooner, the better.

14:38

[Dame Nia Griffith (Llanelli) (Lab)]

I am afraid the Conservative spring Budget was a real smoke-and-mirrors affair, and people in the Llanelli constituency are not taken in by it. The Prime Minister, and indeed the Minister, may boast that they have cut the rate of national insurance, but people in Llanelli know that we do not get something for nothing. They feel worse off, and that is because they are worse off. We have had the biggest fall in living standards in our history, with the UK economy remaining stagnant. The latest Office for National Statistics figures show that GDP per person has fallen in each of the last seven quarters—the longest period of stagnation since the 1950s.

People in Llanelli and across the UK are worse off under the Conservative Government, and they are now bearing the highest tax burden in 70 years. For every 5p the Conservative Government have given back in tax, they have in fact taken away 10p. People have pointed out to me that they have been hit by the freezing of the tax threshold. As their incomes have increased over the past few years—although never by enough, of course, to keep up with the rampant inflation that this Conservative Government have presided over—people have found that they are reaching the tax threshold for the first time or that more of their income is now subject to tax.

The freezing of the basic threshold has brought 3.7 million more people across the UK into paying tax, and more taxpayers are being squeezed by having to pay the higher rate of tax as more of their income is in that bracket, often because of a pay rise that has not even kept pace with inflation. So there is a double whammy of more tax and less purchasing power.

We have seen another sneaky trick: the devolution of the increasing cost of the burden of public services to the Welsh Government and local councils. As we know, a large proportion of what councils spend on local services comes from central Government—UK Government—taxation, to which we all of course contribute, whether it is allocated directly to councils in England or via the Welsh Government to councils in Wales. As the Conservative Government have squeezed and squeezed the Welsh budget, with the latest Welsh Government settlement some £3 billion less than if it had grown with GDP since 2010, the Welsh Government have had to pass on swingeing Conservative cuts to Welsh councils. Local councils in Wales are faced with the difficult balancing act of having to either cut services or raise council tax, at a time when councils, just like households, face huge inflation in their costs.

[Alex Davies-Jones (Pontypridd) (Lab)]

My hon. Friend is making a really powerful point about the cost burdens being imposed on local councils. My own local council of Rhondda Cynon Taf faces some of these burdens, and we have the extra burden of having to fund the remedial work to improve coal-tip safety in Wales—a legacy that predates devolution. We have had hundreds of years of mining in Wales, and that work should be the responsibility of the UK Government, but they are failing to take responsibility for the costs, which should not be borne by my constituents when it was the UK that benefited from the coalmining industry of south Wales.

[Dame Nia Griffith]

Indeed—my hon. Friend is absolutely right to bring up that point. It is something that we have been raising, and I hope the Minister, who has some former mines in her own constituency, will take that message back to her colleagues.

As I was saying, councils are having to make very difficult decisions; in fact, they have to both cut services and raise council tax. But make no mistake—these cuts in services and rises in council tax are a direct result of the way in which central Government have squeezed the Welsh budget. That leaves people in Wales paying more for poorer services.

Not only is the Welsh Government budget for 2024-25 £3 billion lower than if it had grown in line with GDP since 2010, but it is £700 million lower in real terms than was expected at the time of the 2021 spending review, which of course means that the Welsh Government have to manage even more cuts than had been expected. The Minister may point out that the Welsh Government will receive an additional £168 million in resource funding for 2024-25, but that is the result of spending decisions made in England and relates to funding for NHS pay and local government adult social care, which have already been factored into Welsh Government spending plans.

People in Wales are still seeing costs rise. Although inflation may have slowed, there is still inflation, which means that prices are still rising, and the price rises are for essential household costs such as food. That has left people really struggling.

Some 62,000 homeowners in Wales are also facing a mortgage bombshell as fixed-term agreements come to an end, because of the totally irresponsible mini-Budget the Tories pushed through—collectively—in the autumn of 2022, when the right hon. Member for South West Norfolk (Elizabeth Truss) was Prime Minister, which sent interest rates soaring. Homeowners will have to find hundreds of additional pounds year on year to cover their mortgage interest, which of course has a knock-on effect on rents as well, with increasing numbers of people finding that their rent is simply unaffordable.

People in Wales also face higher energy bills, and the UK Government’s failure to roll out renewables more quickly has made that situation all the worse, which has meant the loss of yet more precious time in the race to bring down bills and combat climate change. Last year, the fiasco of the UK Government’s handling of the bidding process meant that no proposals came forward for floating offshore wind projects.

There is no help for the least well-off. The Conservative Government have been squeezing household incomes for 14 years. Back in 2011, the Tories increased VAT to 20%, which increased household bills, hitting the poorest in particular. In an unprecedented move, they also broke the historic link between benefits and inflation. They have cut and cut the benefits paid to the least well-off in society, many of whom, of course, are in work, leaving many people with not enough to live on and not even enough to cover their essential costs. It is shocking that the Joseph Rowntree Foundation and the Trussell Trust have had to call for the implementation of an essentials guarantee to ensure that those in receipt of universal credit are able to meet their essential costs. Benefits should always cover essential costs.

On regeneration and the replacement of the European structural funds, it is disappointing that the UK Government have rowed back on devolution and cut the Welsh Government out of the consultation on the way that funds should be used and managed. The result is a tendency for the money to go to one-off projects in specific geographical areas, rather than us looking at the real levers that will drive up GDP and prosperity, such as apprenticeships and skills training.

What worries me in particular is that there is little in the Budget to suggest that the UK Government are serious about growth. Every Conservative Budget since 2014 has promised higher wages, higher skills or higher growth, but a year on from the so-called Budget for growth, the economy has actually shrunk, as have wages. We have some world-class manufacturing in Llanelli—Tata Steel, car component companies such as Gestamp, engineering firms that supply companies such as Aston Martin and so on—but the international competition for business and investment is fierce.

The lack of a UK Government industrial strategy makes it difficult to compete for investment with other geographical locations abroad, whether that is because of cheaper energy costs in neighbouring European countries or the Inflation Reduction Act in the US, where we now see growth forecast to be twice that of any other country in the G7. The Government are investing £500 million in an electric arc furnace in Port Talbot, but there has been no attempt by the Government to encourage investment in the technologies needed for green primary steel production.

We see Tata investing in such facilities at our competitor plant at IJmuiden in the Netherlands. I understand that one reason for not bringing that investment to Wales is our high energy costs—something we have been warning this Government about for years. Labour has pledged to invest £3 billion to secure green primary steelmaking in the UK, as well as a national wealth fund, bringing public and private funding together to invest in the green industries of the future, thus creating quality jobs as well as tackling climate change.

People in Llanelli and across Wale are desperate for change and for hope of a better life. That is why we need a Labour Government that will slash energy bills for households and industry, invest in the new green technologies of the future, and invest £3 billion to ensure that we develop primary green steelmaking in Wales—the sooner, the better.

14:47

[Liz Saville Roberts (Dwyfor Meirionnydd) (PC)]

Diolch yn fawr, Mr Dowd. I congratulate the hon. Member for Newport West (Ruth Jones) on securing this debate. The Government have tried to spin the Budget as the deliverer of long-term growth for Wales, but people’s response is at odds with the spin. The lack of faith in the Government’s rhetoric is rooted in what they experience day in, day out, and how little faith they now have in attention-seeking announcements.

The real story is one of stagnating living standards, higher taxes on poorer people, cuts to public services on top of years of austerity, and food banks providing meals to working families. The Budget’s headline announcement of a 2p cut in national insurance plays out in different ways in different places. London wage earners will benefit the most, at £621 on average, while those in Wales will get only slightly more than £1 a day —£380 on average.

This is not a matter of begrudging gains for some people in some communities, but what needs to be called out is the disregard for how the national insurance cuts, as a policy, will entrench inequality in different parts of the United Kingdom. There is nothing in the spring Budget to address the deep economic challenges facing Wales, such as flagging productivity. In Wales, gross value added per hour worked is 84% of that of the UK—the lowest productivity of any of the four UK nations, although it varies within Wales and in the English midlands. It plays out in different places in different ways.

Those indicators also reveal how little effect that worthy, familiar, perhaps misused 2019 election slogan of levelling up has actually had. I know the Tories will delight in telling us that Wales has had more than our per head of population share of levelling up since then.

[Alex Davies-Jones]

On that point about the Tories telling us we have never had it so good and Wales is benefiting, will the right hon. Member join me in being disappointed that, apart from the Minister, who is compelled to be here and for whom I have a lot of respect, there is not a single Welsh Conservative MP in this debate? That shows how much contempt and disregard they have for the people of Wales.

[Liz Saville Roberts]

They must be content with the crumbs that we get from the table with levelling up, frankly.

Is the per head of population distribution really a good measure of success? Under the European funding schemes, Wales also got the highest per head of population contribution for a reason, and the reason was recognised deprivation—proven need. How has the Tory levelling-up agenda grasped the challenge of replacing the European money previously distributed specifically to lift the poorest communities out of poverty? I will tell hon. Members how it has done that. It has done it by invoking the United Kingdom Internal Market Act 2020 to undermine the Senedd and any pretence at strategic working. It has done it by setting cash-strapped local authorities in direct competition with one another, like supplicants begging for pennies. It has done it by providing money without sufficient time even to use it to best effect. And it has done it by ensuring that there is scant effective evaluation of money used, so that we do not even know whether it is levelling anything up for anybody.

Of course, that is not the point. Levelling up was never about ensuring that Wales got not a penny less than it did under European funds. We know that we are getting £1.3 billion less. Levelling up has become a byword for cynical short-termism, lollipops for a Government to hand out with an eye to the next election—pork barrel politics. That is clear from the fact that the Budget included Canary Wharf in the £242 million of London levelling-up cash. Canary Wharf, of all places! That is hardly somewhere that needs further investment and levelling up when compared with other places in the UK.

The Chancellor announced departmental spending cuts of up to £20 billion in the spring Budget. Let us be clear that those cuts will make a wasteland of our public services, and they will do so in a country, our country—Wales—where we place a high value on how a community works for everyone. I fear for the future of Welsh public services. We have already seen the Welsh Government’s refusal to step in when they defended cuts to Wales’s National Museum. I am sad that, rather than demonstrating the political courage to protect our cultural institutions, First Minister Vaughan Gething tells us to wait patiently for a future Labour Chancellor to start properly funding Wales. I fear that he is referring to the same shadow Chancellor, the right hon. Member for Leeds West (Rachel Reeves), who drops heavy hints that Labour will go ahead with public spending cuts if it forms the next Government.

My party believes that the people of Wales should have the ability to grasp the means to build our own economic destiny. Why should we not take control of our natural resources through the devolution of the Crown Estate? Why should we not create a funding system that addresses our needs and makes best use of our fair share of money from HS2 and other projects?

After covid and in the face of a future of global unrest and accelerated climate change, the Chancellor should have prioritised long-term investment in our public services, infrastructure and communities, yet the Budget and its aftermath seem to have produced a consensus between the Tories and Labour on spending cuts, with the Institute for Fiscal Studies calling support for spending cuts a “conspiracy of silence” between the two main parties. The message should come loud and clear: as things stand, Wales gets crumbs from the table, and we can do so much better. Diolch yn fawr.

14:53

[Jessica Morden (Newport East) (Lab)]

I congratulate my neighbour, my hon. Friend the Member for Newport West (Ruth Jones), on securing this very important debate; in fact, I believe that this is the second year running that she has secured it. As always, she made her points well, as did all the speakers so far. I echo her comments on Gaza and the middle east. We share the city of Newport, and I know that that is a matter of great concern.

As my hon. Friend and neighbour set out, this is a Government clinging on to power, having presided over 14 years of managed decline. They lack the interest, vision and appetite to deliver the fundamental change that our country needs. We have had some excellent contributions from Members who will have had direct feedback from their constituents, be it on the doorsteps in places such as Monmouth, or in their surgeries. I certainly have: over the Easter recess we carried out a cost of living survey in Newport East, and people told us very strongly just how held back they feel by this failing Tory Government.

My hon. Friend put it well when she said that “never have a British Government asked their people…to pay so much for so little.” Having played fast and loose with the public finances, the Conservative party is passing on the cost of its incompetence to those who can least afford it just as public services, on which so many of them rely, are crumbling under the weight of its cuts. My hon. Friend the Member for Llanelli (Dame Nia Griffith) is quite right: the spring Budget is smoke and mirrors, and people are not taken in by it.

Let us take ourselves back to 2019, when those on the Government Benches stood on manifesto commitments not to raise taxes; to reduce debt; to reduce poverty; and to help people with cost of living pressures. Three Prime Ministers and five Chancellors later, and with the Tory chaos almost halving the Government’s parliamentary majority, those promises lie in tatters. As hon. Members have already said, it is the case, despite cuts to national insurance, which we support, that the income tax threshold freezes mean that taxes are rising at a record pace. They are now at a 70-year high, and rising in each year of the spring Budget’s forecast period. That will make households in Wales £700 worse off, as my hon. Friend the Member for Newport West said. I was very struck by what was said to me by a constituent I met in Magor on Saturday on the issue of the income tax threshold freezes, which was raised by my hon. Friend the Member for Llanelli. The constituent described to me how her small monthly pension was hit by the impact of that and how unfair that was.

[Dame Nia Griffith]

I am sure that my hon. Friend will mention what I forgot to mention, which is that pensioners do not pay national insurance, so they have had no benefit whatever from the NI cut.

[Jessica Morden]

I thank my hon. Friend for making that very pertinent point. There is a big impact on pensioners, as she has said.

The UK debt to GDP ratio is at its highest in 70 years, with no sign of falling. The number of people living in absolute poverty is expected to increase this year to 12 million, with 4.2 million children living in poverty. This year, 62,000 householders in Wales will face the Tory mortgage bombshell—which hon. Members have mentioned—as their fixed-term rates expire, with the average homeowner expected to face a £240 hike in their monthly bill. As hon. Members have said, this is the first Parliament on record for which living standards are set to be lower by the end than they were at the beginning. The Tory Government are breaking promises and breaking records—and all to the detriment of Welsh people struggling to make ends meet. The Prime Minister has joined his predecessor in backing the sort of enormous and entirely unfunded tax cuts that led to the swift demise of her premiership—this time in the form of the abolition of national insurance. Perhaps the Minister will explain to us in this debate, because the Prime Minister could not—he repeatedly failed to answer the question at Prime Minister’s questions today—what the Tory Government will cut to find the £46 billion needed every year for their new policy, or whether they plan to extend their tax-raising record by piling further costs on to Welsh working people.

Not only have the tired Tory Government lost any semblance of economic competence—driving down business confidence—but they have lost their moral compass. Over the last few days, my constituents Colin and Janet Smith have been sharing with the media the story of their decades-long fight for justice for their son, Colin, who tragically died aged seven, having contracted AIDS and hepatitis C from contaminated blood administered by the NHS. For years after his death they faced bullying, abuse and the loss of employment, due to the stigma surrounding his illnesses. I know the family very well, and the absolute tragedy of what he was put through. Members of the House will know that the Smith family’s story is not unique. They have campaigned tirelessly alongside so many others for the truth and for just compensation, so I would like the Minister to tell us why, despite the final recommendations on compensation having been delivered to Ministers by Sir Brian Langstaff, chair of the inquiry, more than a year ago, when he said the Government could get on with making the compensation payments, there is not a single word about it in the spring Budget. I think that is an absolute disgrace.

Welsh steelworkers are right to feel betrayed by a Government willing to countenance 3,000 redundancies across south Wales while our European steelmaking competitors make historic investments in green steel. The almost-overnight end to our virgin-steelmaking capability in Port Talbot is not an inevitability. Rather than relying on imports from across the world, exposing us to the same global risks that precipitated the energy crisis, Ministers must revisit the multi-union plan, described by Tata itself as credible, to work with our steelworkers towards a just transition to the greener future for steel that we all want.

As my hon. Friend the Member for Llanelli mentioned, a Labour Government in Westminster would invest £3 billion in green steel within the first term, protecting livelihoods and the future of our sovereign British steel manufacture, which is vital for our plan to make Britain a clean energy superpower by doubling onshore wind, tripling solar and quadrupling offshore wind.

It is not too late for the Government to change direction on this, and it would be particularly important for my hon. Friend the Member for Newport West, with the Llanwern steelworks in Newport. It would not be the first time a Conservative press release has sounded suspiciously familiar to Labour colleagues. Whether it is the narrowing of the non-dom tax loophole or the half-hearted levy on oil and gas giants, the Prime Minister appears to be slowly realising that the path to a fairer, brighter future for Wales and Britain is through the progressive policies of a Welsh Labour Government working with a Labour Government in Westminster.

The consequential funding that will flow from a UK Labour Government to Welsh public services will be critical. Importantly, my hon. Friend the Member for Pontypridd (Alex Davies-Jones) mentioned the cost burden on local government too. Our public services face intense challenges, particularly in the context of the value of the Welsh Government’s budget having dropped by £1.3 billion in real terms as a result of the Tories’ economic mismanagement.

Some progress was to be welcomed from the spring Budget. We have repeatedly called on the Government to get a move on with the new nuclear site at Wylfa. The purchase of the site is therefore good news, but we are still nowhere near seeing the prospect of clean energy and thousands of good jobs returning to Anglesey. Had they not dithered for five years, we could have seen the plant 50% complete, with up to 8,500 construction jobs under way, around 900 permanent jobs to follow and £400 million for the local economy in wages.

What we saw in the spring Budget was a Conservative Government without a proper plan to grow the economy, without an industrial strategy to match the ambition of our talented Welsh workforce and without the appetite for investment in a greener Wales. Those will only be achieved with a UK Labour Government working with a Welsh Labour Government and a Secretary of State for Wales who stands up for Welsh interests.

15:02

[The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Wales (Fay Jones)]

It is lovely to see you in the Chair, Mr Dowd. May I start by congratulating the hon. Member for Newport West (Ruth Jones) on securing this debate? I thank all right hon. and hon. Members for taking part. I hope the hon. Lady knows that I have great affection for her. We have been on opposite sides of many a Bill Committee over the last few years, and while we have often disagreed, we have always had fun doing so. It is a pleasure to respond to her debate. I very much enjoyed her speech and will refer to it throughout my contribution, but my favourite bit was the love letter to Labour women standing in marginal seats across Wales, which I thought was charming, if transparent. I congratulate all hon. Members who have taken part in this afternoon’s debate, who all happen to be women—

[Alex Davies-Jones]

Welsh women!

[Fay Jones]

Indeed. It shows what Welsh women can do when we get together.

Turning to the matter at hand, it is absolutely clear that the Conservative Government have a plan to deliver the long-term change that our country needs and that that plan is working. We have seen yet again today that inflation has fallen by over half its recent peak. The cost of living pressure is easing, and economic growth is more resilient than previously suggested. Debt is also forecast to fall. But the recovery is not over yet, and it is at risk from other political parties that do not have a plan for the economy and are instead making unfunded promises that will take us back to square one.

With the economy now turning a corner, the Chancellor has been able to make further tax cuts responsibly to boost growth across Wales and the UK by ensuring that working people keep more of their hard-earned money. Thanks to announcements made in both the autumn statement and the spring Budget, we have seen national insurance cuts benefit 1.2 million workers in Wales.

[Dame Nia Griffith]

Does the Minister accept that while national insurance cuts help all working people, they give a lot of money to the better off and are therefore a very blunt, not at all targeted way of helping people?

[Fay Jones]

The hon. Lady will not be surprised to know that I do not agree. I point her to the fact that at the end of 2010, a worker earning a wage of £15,000 was paying around £1,700 in taxation. Today—after 14 years of a Conservative Government—that amount is around £500. That shows that the Conservative party will deliver for working people.

Thanks to announcements made at the autumn statement and the spring Budget, we have seen national insurance cuts of about £701. Further tax cuts have been announced, included the freezing of fuel duty for yet another year, further easing cost of living pressures and saving the average car owner about £50 over a year. I believe that that is the 14th time since the Conservatives came to power in 2010 that we have frozen fuel duty. Alcohol duty has also been frozen once again to support Wales’s crucial hospitality industry. There was great news for Welsh SMEs, with the UK Government raising the VAT registration threshold to £90,000, building on last year’s autumn statement announcement that the UK Government are backing Welsh business through the British Business Bank’s £130 million investment fund for Wales.

I have listened to a lengthy list of complaints about the Conservative Government, but I remind Labour Members that while we are backing Welsh businesses, their own Government—their own colleagues in Cardiff Bay—have slashed business rates relief from 75% to 40%, meaning that hospitality businesses in Wales will pay thousands more in comparison to their colleagues in England.

The spring Budget also outlined the UK Government’s commitment to securing a diverse energy system with Wales at its heart, through the decision to purchase the Wylfa Newydd site on Ynys Môn. I welcome the shadow Minister’s rather muted celebration of that announcement. New nuclear developments have the potential to transform the north Wales economy, creating thousands of jobs while contributing to our net zero and energy security ambitions. Beyond nuclear, the renewable energy sector is also flourishing in Wales. The Government are supporting floating offshore wind by securing a long-term pipeline of projects in the Celtic sea and unlocking port infrastructure investment through the £160 million floating offshore wind manufacturing investment system. The Chancellor has also announced that the Crown Estate will bring forward an additional 12 GW of floating offshore wind in the Celtic sea in the 2030s.

The Budget was also a great moment for the creative industries—a sector that is hugely important to Wales’s economy. I am mindful of how many Members represent south Wales, so I am surprised this was not mentioned. Cardiff is now one of the UK’s largest media productions centres outside London. I was thrilled to see that the UK Government continue to back the creative sectors in Wales, with £500 million of new tax reliefs for the UK industry, as well as—a cause close to my own heart —a further £5 million for the agrifood industry in mid and north Wales, supporting research and development in our rural heartlands and helping to develop a more sustainable future for our vital agriculture sector. Again, this stands in stark contrast to the actions of the Welsh Labour Government, who have cut the rural affairs budget.

[Dame Nia Griffith]

Will the Minister give way?

[Fay Jones]

I will not.

Indeed, this Government are working hard to ensure that Wales’s sector strengths are empowered to move to the next level. That is why we confirmed at the autumn statement that there will be two investment zones in Wales: one located across Cardiff and Newport—again, a surprising omission from the speeches of the hon. Members for Newport West and for Newport East (Jessica Morden) ; and a second zone located across Wrexham and Flintshire. The Chancellor confirmed at spring Budget that the programme has been extended in Wales from five to 10 years, with each receiving £160 million in funding over this period. This will supercharge key sectors across both locations, creating jobs delivering growth and prosperity across Wales.

A determination to create new jobs has also been spearheaded by Wales’s freeports programme, and here —the hon. Member for Newport West will be surprised to hear me say this—I will praise the Welsh Government for working hand in hand with the UK Government. The freeports programme was further supported once again at this Budget by the Chancellor when he announced that there would be an extension in tax relief from five years to 10 years, providing greater certainty to businesses looking to invest, delivering growth and jobs, and levelling up the economy.

The Chancellor’s spring Budget has provided Wales with substantial additional funding, as I think was mentioned by a number of hon. Members this afternoon. Back in 2021, a record-breaking £18 billion block grant was secured at the spending review. This year’s Budget announced almost £170 million of additional funding through the Barnett formula for 2024-25. That is on top of the £820 million already provided to the Welsh Government since that record-breaking grant in 2021—blowing away Labour’s and Plaid Cymru’s argument that Wales has been underfunded. This is almost an extra £1 billion in additional funding for the Welsh Government. On top of this record funding, the Prime Minister recently announced £60 million for apprenticeships in England. That will result in yet more money for the Welsh Government.

Despite the negativity of Members opposite, there is no doubt that the Welsh Government are adequately funded to deliver on their responsibilities. It is a question of priorities. While the Conservative Government are pouring billions of pounds into Wales and turbocharging the Welsh economy, it is the decisions of the Welsh Labour Government, propped up by Plaid Cymru, that are undercutting Welsh public services.

I was disappointed by the negative and miserable tone taken by Opposition Members during the debate in relation to levelling-up funding in Wales and was surprised to see them criticise the record amounts of funding received in their own local authorities. An announcement at the Budget added to our commitment of long-term regeneration and growth in Wales. I am thrilled that Rhyl is the latest of five Welsh towns to benefit from £20 million as part of the long-term plan for towns.

[Liz Saville Roberts]

Who will be responsible if public money is not spent on levelling up because it was provided late to Welsh local authorities by the UK Government?

[Fay Jones]

I can assure the right hon. Member that her local council, Gwynedd County Council, will be responsible for the almost £19 million that was received from levelling-up round 2, so there is great accountability there. Local authority leaders across Wales are delighted by the extra support that the UK Government are giving them, which amounts to £440 million over the three levelling-up fund rounds. From the Muni Arts Centre in Pontypridd to Old College on Aberystwyth’s seafront, and from Porthcawl pavilion to the Pontcysyllte aqueduct—I have lived in Wales all my life and I can never say that. [Interruption.] I will work on that one. There are new developments, too, from a new leisure centre in Caerphilly to the development of Cardiff Crossrail, and walkways and cycle paths in the Vale of Neath. Our places across Wales are changing for the better. That work is all building on the foundation being laid across our regions by Wales’s city and growth deals, with £790 million invested in all four of our regional economies. The UK Government back the Welsh economy and deliver on the needs of the people, businesses and communities in Wales.

During this afternoon’s debate, the shadow Minister—the hon. Member for Newport East—and the hon. Member for Newport West, who led the debate, challenged me a number of times on an unfunded tax cut, which I heard mentioned many times at Prime Minister’s questions this morning. I understand that the Labour party’s new argument is that the UK Government have promised to abolish national insurance. I am curious as to where that has come from. No such promise has ever been made and no policy has ever been announced. I heard the right hon. and learned Member for Holborn and St Pancras (Keir Starmer) make that claim earlier and I would be worried that he could be accused of misleading the House—something I know he would never do. That is Labour’s smokescreen: covering up for that fact that Labour has no plan. The long and the short of it is that this Government have an excellent record to show for themselves in Wales and the spring Budget only boosts it further.

15:12

[Ruth Jones]

It is good to be able to wind up and to have a little time before Divisions. I thank hon. Members who are here today. It is interesting that this is a women’s debate—obviously women get things done, so that is fine.

I thank my hon. Friend the Member for Llanelli (Dame Nia Griffith), the right hon. Member for Dwyfor Meirionnydd (Liz Saville Roberts) and my neighbour, my hon. Friend the Member for Newport East (Jessica Morden), who is the shadow Minister. It is great that they are all here to support today. I also thank my hon. Friend the Member for Pontypridd (Alex Davies-Jones) for her interventions.

It was great to have the Minister in her place. I would just like to be able to live in her world, because it seems to be a parallel universe to the one we are living in in Wales. When we knock on doors every week and ask whether people feel better or worse off, the most emphatic answer is, “We are much worse off than we were even a year ago.” That is something she needs to take back to her Government because we are here again—as my hon. Friend the Member for Newport East reminded me, we did this a year ago—and not only have things not got better; they have got worse in Wales. We need to be clear on that.

On my questions about the prepayment meters, supermarkets and other things, it would be really helpful if the Minister could write to me.

[Fay Jones]

The hon. Member is absolutely right to point out that I was remiss in not responding to that point and I will certainly write to her. If I may, I also neglected to respond to the shadow Minister when she raised the matter of her courageous constituents Mr and Mrs Smith, who have been vocal in campaigning for their son. I reiterate that the Government will publish the findings of the inquiry later this month and I will work with the hon. Lady to make sure her constituents get the answers they need.

[Ruth Jones]

I am grateful to the Minister for that intervention and for clarifying.

[Jessica Morden]

The Minister does not have to wait.

[Ruth Jones]

As my hon. Friend the Member for Newport East says, the Minister does not have to wait; she can get on with it now.

The smoke and mirrors in the Budget were quite clear. The Welsh people are paying more and getting less. All I would say in conclusion is: bring on a general election and let us show what a difference we can make.

Question put and agreed to.

Resolved,

That this House has considered the impact of the Spring Budget 2024 on the Welsh economy.

15:15

Sitting suspended.

Antimicrobial Resistance

Wednesday 17th April 2024 Westminster Hall

16:25

[Peter Dowd (in the Chair)]

I call Will Quince to move the motion and then I will call the Minister to respond. There will not be an opportunity for the Member in charge to wind up, as is the convention for 30-minute debates.

[Will Quince (Colchester) (Con)]

I beg to move,

That this House has considered antimicrobial resistance.

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mr Dowd. Until November last year, I had the privilege of serving as Minister of State at the Department of Health and Social Care, alongside the Under-Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, my hon. Friend the Member for Lewes (Maria Caulfield), who I am pleased to see here in Westminster Hall today. If I may say so, Mr Dowd, it was a pleasure to work alongside her.

My hon. Friend will know that the DHSC is a Department where, despite one’s best efforts, one spends a considerable amount of time firefighting and dealing reactively with issues. During my time in the DHSC, many pressing issues concerned me, some of which remain today, but one in particular scared me.

If I told the House that there was an issue that was so serious that it is a top World Health Organisation global health threat, that it sits on the UK’s national risk register and that it costs the NHS around £180 million a year, would we be surprised if I also said that most people were not aware of it? What about if I said that globally there were 4.95 million deaths associated with this issue and that 1.27 million of those deaths were directly attributed to it? What if I said that one in five of all those deaths were of children under the age of five? Or how about if I said that deaths in the UK related to this issue are estimated to stand at 12,000 per year, which is the equivalent of deaths from breast cancer? What if I told the House that 10 million people—I repeat that figure; 10 million—are predicted to die globally each year by 2050 because of this issue if urgent measures are not taken?

This debate is about antimicrobial resistance, or AMR. If we walked out into Parliament Square now and asked 100 people at random what “AMR” is, I wonder how many of them would know. For the reasons that I have just set out, we should be aware of AMR and concerned about it. We should be pushing our Government, Governments globally and the World Health Organisation to do more to highlight this top global health threat and to take steps to address it.

AMR occurs when bacteria, viruses, fungi and parasites no longer respond to antimicrobial medicines. As a result of drug resistance, antibiotics and other antimicrobial medicines become ineffective and infections become difficult or indeed impossible to treat, therefore increasing the risk of disease spread, severe illness, disability and—sadly—death. Although resistance is a natural phenomenon and not just a health issue, from a human healthcare perspective it is accelerated by inappropriate use of antimicrobial drugs, poor infection prevention and control practices, a lack of development of new antimicrobial drugs and insufficient global surveillance of infection rates.

As I have said, the World Health Organisation has declared AMR to be one of the top 10 global health threats, and it is also listed on the UK Government’s national risk register. In 2019, there were 4.95 million deaths associated with bacterial AMR across 204 countries, and 1.27 million of those were directly attributable, leading the WHO to declare it a top public health threat.

The OECD has found that one in five infections—I repeat: one in five infections—is now resistant to antibiotics, with the potential for that rate to double by 2035. In 2021, there were 53,985 serious antibiotic-resistant infections in England, which represented a rise of 2.2% from 2020. If left unchecked, resistance to third-line antimicrobials—the last-resort drugs for difficult-to-treat infections—could be 2.1 times higher by 2035. That means that health systems will be closer to running out of options to treat patients suffering from a range of illnesses such as pneumonia and bloodstream infections. Despite that—this is the really concerning part—no new class of antibiotics has been developed since the 1980s. Preserving and optimising our current antimicrobial arsenal is therefore not just urgent but paramount.

The consequences of AMR are huge. For urinary tract infections caused by E. coli, one in five cases exhibited reduced susceptibility to standard antibiotics. That is making it harder to effectively treat common infections. AMR also presents a threat to malaria control. Antimicrobial resistance is putting the gains of modern medicine at risk, because it makes surgical and medical procedures that are a normalised part of everyday life—such as caesarean sections, cancer chemotherapy and hip replacements—far more risky.

In addition to causing death and disability, AMR has significant economic costs. AMR creates the need for more expensive and intensive care, affects the productivity of patients or their caregivers through prolonged hospital stays and—I appreciate that this is a side issue—harms agricultural productivity. The World Bank estimates that AMR could result in $1 trillion of additional healthcare costs by 2050 and $1 trillion to $3.4 trillion of GDP losses per year by 2030.

Considering the huge risk that AMR poses to health security across the world, I do not believe that enough is being done globally to combat the current inevitability. Let me start by praising the UK Government for their action in this space, in particular the AMR five-year national action plan, or NAP, to contain and control AMR by 2040, which the NHS long-term plan details commitments to implement. I look forward to the update beyond 2024, which this period goes up to.

I could focus the rest of this speech on what more the UK could and arguably should be doing. We do need to see more on robust monitoring and surveillance. We need a significant public awareness campaign, greater investment in diagnostics, monitoring and screening—particularly in relation to rapid point-of-care testing—at local system level and, vitally, greater focus on infection prevention and management. However, I want to spend the rest of the time available to me focusing on international efforts and the role that the UK can play.

[Greg Clark (Tunbridge Wells) (Con)]

I am very grateful to my hon. Friend for bringing this very important matter to the Chamber. Before he moves to the international lens, will he reflect on the contribution that bacteriophages can make? Those are the subject of a report from the Select Committee on Science, Innovation and Technology. In effect, they are viruses that eat bacteria. In the UK at the moment, there is no approved manufacturing plant and therefore it is impossible to license phages for clinical use. A facility in Leamington Spa that was used as a Lighthouse lab could be repurposed for that. Does my hon. Friend agree with me that the Government might find that a useful way to address the very significant problem that he describes?

[Will Quince]

I thank my right hon. Friend for bringing that to my attention; it was not something that I was aware of. Given the gravity and seriousness of the situation that we face not just here in the United Kingdom but globally, I think that we need to look at all potential tools in the arsenal to tackle this issue, so I hope that the Minister has heard the case that my right hon. Friend has made very powerfully, and I would be happy to meet with him afterwards to find out more about it, because it sounds incredibly interesting.

My right hon. Friend is right—although I want to focus for some time on the international effort—the battle is not won here in the UK, we have far more to do, and the Department of Health and Social Care and NHS England have important roles to play. I know from first-hand experience, including when representing His Majesty’s Government at the World Health Assembly and the United Nations General Assembly when I was Minister of State, the global leadership that the UK shows through the World Health Organisation, especially in partnership with Sweden. During my time, I was proud to be able to announce an investment of £39 million into research through the global AMR innovation fund to help to tackle what is a silent pandemic. I understand that £24 million of that has been awarded to bolster the UK’s partnership with CARB-X, which is a global AMR research initiative that supports the continued early development of invaluable new antibiotics, vaccines, rapid diagnostics and new products that combat life-threatening, drug-resistant infections, as well as prevent death and disease across the world.

[Jim Shannon (Strangford) (DUP)]

I commend the hon. Gentleman for bringing the debate forward. The issue has been in my mind for some time, and I have a number of questions about antibiotic use, which, as I understand from the stats and from questions to the Department and Ministers, has been increasing greatly. Does the hon. Member agree that during covid a standard was set whereby many GPs and out-of-hours practices had to prescribe antibiotics without seeing patients? We need to return to the prescription of antibiotics after an examination that determines whether they are absolutely necessary. We cannot keep on giving them out willy-nilly; we have to do it under strict control.

[Will Quince]

The hon. Gentleman makes a valuable point; he is absolutely right that we need to readdress our approach to antibiotics. Yes, there is a role for clinicians in that. A 10-minute slot is not a lot of time to diagnose. Lots of people will go to see their doctor and the first thing they will say is, “I have an infection; I need antibiotics.” That may not be the case, and we have to trust clinicians. The Government’s new Pharmacy First initiative, which pharmacists take seriously, has strict controls and surveillance around the use of antibiotics; the UK Government and the Department of Health and Social Care take that incredibly seriously.

The hon. Gentleman is absolutely right to allude to the fact—and this is what worries me—that, in many countries around the world, antibiotics are available off the shelf, in the same way that paracetamol or ibuprofen are. I will not name the country, but I spoke to the Health Secretary of a particular country in Africa, who said that people routinely keep antibiotics in their medicine cupboard at home; if they feel unwell, they will take a few. That causes huge problems. We need an enormous awareness campaign and education piece around antibiotics, because their use may be harming us all in the medium to long term.

I also want to touch on the Government’s Newton fund, which has supported more than 70 research teams to conduct crucial research on strategic areas, including AMR. Through the brilliant Fleming Fund, the Government have invested £265 million to support countries around the globe to generate, share and use data on AMR. I am proud that that is the world’s single largest aid investment in AMR surveillance. I also must not fail to mention the role played by Dame Sally Davies, who is the UK’s special envoy on antimicrobial resistance. At the WHA and the UN General Assembly, I saw at first hand Dame Sally’s global leadership and how widely respected she is on the world stage on this issue. We are very lucky to have her.

Internationally, there is movement. I welcome the landmark 2015 WHO global action plan on AMR, which was followed in 2016 by the historic UN declaration on AMR and, more recently, the one health global leaders group on AMR, founded just a handful of years ago to provide leadership and maintain political momentum on the issue. But I believe the issue is so serious that more urgent and immediate action needs to be taken. As I said to the hon. Member for Strangford (Jim Shannon), we know there are countries where antibiotics are routinely kept in cupboards and medicine drawers at home and taken when people feel unwell. We know there are countries where antibiotics can be purchased over the counter or online without seeing a doctor or physician. My question to the Minister is what action could and should we be taking?

I think we need a significant domestic and international awareness and understanding campaign on AMR. We need the Governments in our respective nations to understand the risks of failure. We need the public to understand the impact on them and their families, and the urgency of the situation: we want them to be the ones calling for action. We need to do more to promote appropriate and adequate global surveillance for AMR to detect and strengthen our knowledge and evidential base. Incidentally, doing that will also help with identifying potential future pandemics, so there is a dual benefit.

We need to work towards an international agreement on common evidence-based goals, and support other countries to deliver against them. We have to use our official development assistance—our overseas aid budget —to help reduce the incidence of infection through effective sanitation, hygiene and infection prevention measures. To the best of our ability, we need to use the UK’s political positions on international platforms and our soft power, including our ODA spend, and of course the formidable Dame Sally Davies and our UK expertise, to continue to provide global leadership on AMR. I hope the Minister will commit to supporting and continuing to fund the work of the World Health Organisation on AMR.

I hope that in the short time available to me—I appreciate that it was shorter because I was racing to get here in time following the votes—I have been able to set out why antimicrobial resistance is the issue that concerned me most when I was Minister of State at the Department of Health and Social Care and why it continues to concern me on my glide path out of politics. I genuinely think it should greatly concern us all. I hope the Minister and future Ministers will continue to keep the issue front of mind and treat tackling it with the urgency and seriousness it deserves.

16:42

[The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Health and Social Care (Maria Caulfield)]

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mr Dowd. I thank my hon. Friend the Member for Colchester (Will Quince) for securing today’s debate, for his contribution to the Department of Health and Social Care during his tenure as a Minister and, in particular, for his work on this issue.

This is a pivotal year for confronting antimicrobial resistance, because the emergence of resistant infections is relentless and, as my hon. Friend eloquently described, the pipeline for new antibiotics is running dry. The evidence is stark, not just domestically but globally: more than 1 million people die every year from infections that have become resistant to treatment. To put that number in context, that exceeds the number of people who die from HIV or malaria.

AMR is sometimes described as an ignored pandemic, but if we do not act, the cost of treating resistant infections could compare to having a pandemic such as covid-19 every five years. My hon. Friend is absolutely correct to say that, if we were to walk outside this place, many of the people we talked to would not understand what AMR is or appreciate the consequences of not dealing with it domestically or internationally. That is why we are committed to addressing antimicrobial resistance.

My hon. Friend is also right that in 2019 we published our vision for antimicrobial resistance to be contained and controlled by 2040, and that date looms ever closer. That vision recognises that it is a complex problem. There are three tiers to the way we are tackling it. First, we must lower the burden of infection in humans and—my hon. Friend touched on this slightly—in animals: if you do not get the bug, you will not need the drug.

Secondly, we must use antimicrobials only when they are absolutely needed, and we should use them correctly. That is also true for both people and animals, as I will touch on in a moment. Thirdly, we must develop new antibiotics or new technologies to treat these infections so that we have more tools in our armoury as resistance emerges.

We can all play our part. I make a public health plea to everyone: we all have a responsibility to finish courses of antibiotics prescribed to us—often, we do not finish our course, because we feel better and think there is no need to take the rest of it, but that is a key way of developing resistance—and not to self-medicate after keeping the strip, which is equally harmful. There are bad practices in other countries, but we all have a responsibility to take our antibiotics as prescribed, and not to self-medicate, should we have some antibiotics looming in our cupboards.

[Richard Foord (Tiverton and Honiton) (LD)]

I am grateful to the Minister for giving way and I pay tribute to the hon. Member for Colchester (Will Quince) for securing the debate. On a brilliant Radio 4 documentary called “Swimming in Superbugs”, Dr Anne Leonard of the University of Exeter Medical School talked about her Beach Bums project and said that people who use the sea are three times more likely to have antibiotic bacteria in their gut. Does the Minister agree that we should not import human sewage sludge to spread on farmland, given that we think traces of antibiotic resistance material might have ended up in the sea?

[Maria Caulfield]

That goes back to my first pillar of reducing and preventing infections in the first place. We need to do that domestically, but internationally we are also doing huge amounts of work in that space to improve water sanitation. With animal health, too, we have done a huge amount of work, in particular on antibiotic use in food. Among animals used in food production, the UK has reduced by 59% the amount of antibiotics going into the food chain, which has a knock-on effect.

We are also investing in innovation and capitalising on our world-leading science, including phage therapy, as my right hon. Friend the Member for Tunbridge Wells (Greg Clark) pointed out. I had not heard about the Leamington Spa facility, and I am interested to catch up with him after the debate to see what more can be done. The National Institute for Health and Care Research is investing almost £90 million in that type of research, so if there is potential to develop that further, we are always keen to hear it. Our plan is cross-sectional, a one health approach, recognising the links between the health of humans, animals and the environment, and the spread of resistance between them.

We have a national action plan, which is not limited to activity in the UK. We all know that infections do not respect borders. As my hon. Friend the Member for Colchester said, we are therefore working internationally and taking a lead in many elements of that across the global community, with our UK special envoy on antimicrobial resistance, Dame Sally Davies, spearheading some of the effort. On updating my hon. Friend on the action plan post 2024, we are working it up as we speak and hope to make an announcement soon. There is an ongoing piece of work to drive forward some of the changes across the three sectors.

We are doing our bit here and are leading internationally, but my hon. Friend also touched on what is happening in other countries. Low and middle-income countries have to be part of the change so that we can safeguard ourselves against antimicrobial resistance.

[Jim Shannon]

One of the groups that I speak to reminded me to mention—I quote—

“the need for Group B Strep screening in pregnant women during labour instead of using antibiotics for all routinely.”

The Minister is interested in that subject and has an opinion on it. Does she agree that this is a chance to raise awareness of that particular issue?

[Maria Caulfield]

The hon. Gentleman is absolutely right. I will touch on how much more we can do with screening to prevent some infections. This cannot just be about developing new antibiotics; it is about preventing infections and screening for them in a range of scenarios.

To touch on some of the high prevalence internationally, 89% of all antimicrobial resistance deaths occur in Africa and Asia, so we have responsibility to ensure that we help out in those countries that struggle most with the issue. We must continue to ensure that people around the world have access to the antibiotics they need, which is why the £40 million in innovative research through the global AMR innovation fund that my hon. Friend the Member for Colchester mentioned is so crucial. It enabled the development of a new antibiotic for drug-resistant gonorrhoea, the first in 30 years.

The hon. Member for Tiverton and Honiton (Richard Foord) touched on the role of water, which requires an international effort. Sanitation is often a leading cause of infection in other countries. That is why we are working hard with other countries and the WHO to improve water sanitation and hygiene to reduce infections occurring in the first place.

In 2022, we made a further £210 million commitment for the second phase of the Fleming Fund to strengthen our surveillance systems. As the hon. Member for Strangford (Jim Shannon) said, it is not just about treatment, but about picking up infections and trends and trying to prevent them in the first place. The Fleming Fund is having an impact. Since 2015, over 240 laboratories have been upgraded with state-of-the-art equipment, training and new systems, and over 75 national action plans on AMR have been developed in Africa and Asia to try to get the death toll from antibiotic resistance down. The Fleming Fund leverages UK expertise, with over 3,000 healthcare workers being trained in antimicrobial surveillance principles through a partnership with the NHS.

Looking ahead, we recognise the risks. We are not being complacent either domestically or internationally. Through the hard work of my hon. Friend the Member for Colchester, we have put some good building blocks in place, but we need to look to the future. Our next five-year antimicrobial resistance national action plan will be published later this year.

[Greg Clark]

I am grateful to the Minister for what she said about phages. She knows that UK science is world-leading, especially in this area. In Imperial College alone, there are 180 researchers working on AMR. One such researcher, Professor Jonathan Cook, has noted the real benefits of point-of-care testing and the fact that other countries, including the Netherlands, have managed to make a big impact. Can the Minister say whether we have plans to accelerate the availability of such testing in this country?

[Maria Caulfield]

My right hon. Friend makes a good point, which I will take away and follow up on. There are some really good examples in primary care where some testing is done. Primary care nurses particularly will do point-of-care testing to see whether someone’s infection will be sensitive to antibiotics or not. I believe there is more we can do in that space, both in primary and secondary care, so I am happy to write to him about how we can roll that out nationally. Importantly, that testing helps to maintain patients’ expectations. I cannot remember who, but someone said that people go along to GPs and expect to be given antibiotics. Point-of-care testing will be able to reassure them that they either do or do not need antibiotics and tell them which type is best suited to their type of infection. That is crucial.

Our plan will set out an ambitious programme of work, learning from covid-19 in testing, surveillance and treatment to prepare for infections of the future. I can reassure my hon. Friend the Member for Colchester that we will continue to collaborate internationally with organisations such as the WHO and use our soft power to help to support in particular African and Asian nations, which are suffering greatly from the mortality of antimicrobial resistance. This is a hidden pandemic that will have consequences for us all if we do not deal with it.

Question put and agreed to.

Dentistry: Access for Cancer Patients

Wednesday 17th April 2024 Westminster Hall

16:54

[Andrew Western (Stretford and Urmston) (Lab)]

I beg to move,

That this House has considered access to dentistry for cancer patients.

As always, it is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mr Dowd. I want to start this debate, which I am delighted to have secured, by paying tribute to my constituent Michele Solak-Edwards, who is here to listen to the proceedings. Her phenomenal campaigning on these issues is the reason that we are all here.

Back in 2016, after a routine health assessment, Michele found out that she had triple negative breast cancer—a devastating diagnosis, followed by nine months of gruelling chemotherapy. Among the many, many challenges that Michele faced in that time was a deterioration in her dental health. That is a common yet rarely discussed side effect of chemotherapy and radiotherapy.

Unlike other physical side effects of cancer treatment, which may be medicated with the free prescriptions that cancer patients are entitled to, any side effects requiring dental treatment must be paid for. As we all know, the costs of dental treatment, even if someone is lucky enough to be registered with an NHS dentist, can be overwhelming. For Michele, the significant costs of her dental treatment had to be paid for at a time when, like many other cancer patients, she was unable to work because of her condition.

When Michele was going through one of the most difficult experiences a person can face, she found that accessing affordable dentistry was yet another obstacle for her and others in her position to overcome. So like all great campaigners, she took action to make a difference. She set up an online petition calling for better access to dentistry for cancer patients and for dental care to be free for cancer patients for five years from diagnosis, or until the end of life, if the diagnosis is terminal. This is crucial, given that dental issues do not always become apparent straight away at the outset of cancer treatment, and the issues caused can take a number of years, in some cases, to present themselves.

Within weeks, Michele had more than 130,000 signatures on the petition, with support from dentists, surgeons and oncologists. The petition now has the backing of almost 200,000 people, many of whom are cancer survivors. It is a privilege to be able to highlight its importance to the Minister today. Why is it important? Primarily, because there is an indisputable link between cancer and dental health issues. As the National Cancer Institute said, chemotherapy and radiotherapy can cause dental side effects, with both therapies altering the balance of bacteria in the mouth, leading to ulcers, tooth decay and potentially serious infection.

The link between cancer and dental health does not end there, because existing dental problems can worsen during cancer treatment, which can then impact the effectiveness of treatment or lead to it being delayed. That is why it is widely recommended, including by the British Dental Association, that a dental health assessment should take place after a cancer diagnosis and before the start of treatment.

While the link between cancer and dental health is clear, the pathway from a cancer diagnosis to dental health treatment is often blocked. The biggest issue is the crisis in accessing affordable dentistry. This challenge is not unique to cancer patients, with one in four of Britain’s adult population unable to see an NHS dentist in 2022. In my and Michele’s local authority area of Trafford, only 4% of dental practices are accepting new adult patients on the NHS, and that is by no means a low number, based on current availability. What this means for most people is the choice of going private or going without. When the costs of private dentistry are so high, that is not really a choice at all for many, especially for those on lower incomes.

Even if someone is lucky enough to access NHS treatment, costs can still be sky high, with the price of dental charges increasing by 45% over the past decade. I am not attempting to be party political, but I am suggesting that there is a link between being a cancer patient and being on a lower income because, as I mentioned, many do need to give up work. Macmillan Cancer Support estimates that a cancer diagnosis leads to a person being around £570 a month worse off, with 33% of patients having to give up work because of their condition. Cancer patients are more likely to be priced out of the dental treatment they need, and in cases where dental treatment is required before cancer treatment can begin or continue, that can have potentially life-changing consequences. Every day lost risks lives.

Let us look at some specific examples, such as the case of one of Michele’s campaign supporters, Kelly. Kelly is waiting to start bisphosphonate treatment, which is needed to strengthen bones that are at risk of breaking due to cancer. To start that vital treatment, she must undergo important dental work, which is proving impossible as she cannot see a dentist. The fact that a person’s cancer treatment can be delayed, impacting their life quality or even survival chances because they cannot access dental care is clearly unacceptable.

I know that the Minister understands the crisis in accessing dentistry and I am aware of the Government’s recently published dental recovery plan, which aims to address that. However, the British Dental Association has said that the plan fails to embrace the fundamental reform that patients and dentists so desperately need, with no new money provided and inadequate measures to tackle the workforce retention crisis. If we are ever to achieve the goals of Michele’s campaign, we must get that right, because the speedy provision of dental care for cancer patients would be significantly undermined if, in practice, many cancer patients were still unable to see an NHS dentist due to an unaddressed workforce crisis.

While addressing the crisis in NHS dentistry and the affordability of dental care is not something that can be achieved overnight, there are more immediate things that could be done to improve the pathway from cancer diagnosis to dental treatment. Currently, there is no guarantee that cancer patients will be informed by their doctor that they should seek a dental check-up before undergoing cancer treatment. That is despite guidance from the NHS Specialist Pharmacy Service, the Royal College of Surgeons, the BDA and the British Society of Special Care Dentistry stating the importance of patients being dentally fit before starting cancer treatment.

Michele’s campaign therefore calls on the NHS to provide information to all newly diagnosed cancer patients, telling them of the need to seek dental assistance prior to their cancer treatments commencing. That does happen in many places, but we want to see it enshrined in law. That information could be provided by GPs and would include a list of dental practices in each area that could treat the cancer patient on the NHS.

I would also like to share the experience of Hayley from Reading. Hayley is another supporter of Michele’s campaign, and her stories sum up the issues that I have tried to raise today. When she was 21, Hayley had chemotherapy and radiotherapy for non-Hodgkin lymphoma. The radiotherapy caused severe dental issues. Now aged 44, Hayley has breast cancer and has had to remortgage her house to spend £11,000 on removing the remaining six teeth in her lower jaw and replacing them with implants. At no stage has Hayley been able to access NHS dentistry. Experiences such as that are why this campaign is so important. No one wants a situation where cancer patients are losing out on the healthcare they need because they cannot afford or access it.

We must act on this underappreciated crisis. I therefore encourage the Minister to address in her response the asks of Michele’s campaign, including not only the long-term aim of free dental care for cancer patients, but, in the short to medium term, the possibility of prioritising cancer patients for NHS dentistry and ensuring that there is clear guidance on the need for cancer patients to receive dental care provided at the first point of contact with their GP or cancer team. I am particularly interested to know what consideration the Minister could give to joining cancer and dentistry services together for cancer patients, offering out-patient appointments for sufferers in hospital alongside their other treatment. That would seem a practical way of ensuring that people can access the care that they need.

I also invite the Minister to meet Michele and myself—as the shadow Minister, my hon. Friend the Member for Birmingham, Edgbaston (Preet Kaur Gill), kindly did earlier today, and I know Michele was appreciative of that—so that we could discuss these issues in greater detail. She will appreciate that I have not been able to cover all aspects of this important issue. Likewise, I accept that there is an escalator of asks here, some with financial implications. Michele has a mine of further information on the subject, and I know that she would be keen to talk the Minister through some of her ideas for funding these changes.

Ultimately, we must all work together on improving access to dentistry for cancer patients. As I said, I do not consider this to be party political, but it is something that we must get right. It is the least we can do for people who are already facing one of life’s toughest challenges.

17:05

[Richard Foord (Tiverton and Honiton) (LD)]

It is an honour to serve under your chairship, Mr Dowd. Since being elected to represent Tiverton and Honiton almost two years ago, one of the issues that has appeared most regularly in my inbox and mailbag is access to NHS dentistry. It is common across the country for someone to have difficulty accessing new NHS dentists if they are not already registered, but that is particularly difficult in some parts of the country, including in Devon, which is often regarded by many as a so-called “dental desert”.

In recent months, we have heard the Government suggest that a way to address the difficult shortages of dentists is to try to attract qualified dentists into an area regarded as a dental desert. For example, we have seen the proposal to pay one-off incentives to qualified dentists to move into a dental desert such as Devon, but the truth is that this is still very difficult. I appreciate that the new proposal has not come in yet, but given that it is a one-off incentive, there is still no long-term incentive for dentists to move into dental deserts. That is difficult for many of my constituents, but it is more deeply worrying for those who are living with cancer. This is not a hypothetical scenario; it is the experience for people in rural communities such as Devon where finding a new dentist is impossible.

I will recount a real-life story from one of my constituents who was caught in just that scenario. Robin Whatling lives in Tiverton and is aged just 55. He is struggling with advanced cancer. Because of the treatment and medication that he is on, his bones and teeth are weaker than they would otherwise be, which means that regular check-ups are more important for him.

Robin’s wife, Sharon, contacted me last December and told me how, after booking a check-up, he received an abrupt phone call just a few days before it was due to happen. He was informed that the practice was no longer treating NHS patients and that if he wanted to go ahead with his appointment, he would need to go private. That is clearly a massive issue for a couple like Robin and Sharon. Due to Robin’s vulnerable state, Sharon has had to go part-time to become his carer. That means that she is not able to work the hours that she used to, which would have possibly afforded her more money to pay for private healthcare treatment.

Instead, the couple pursued the idea of finding an NHS dentist. They were held on the phone for three hours before being cut off. In the end it all became too much, and Rob ended up removing one of the teeth that was causing him pain by himself at home. I do not need to tell the House that that is a shocking, appalling situation to have to contend with while suffering advanced cancer.

Despite years of working hard and paying into the system, this couple are now left adrift with no support or access to dental care. In some of the correspondence that Members receive, we have constituents who rage at us with anger, but this couple approached me with great modesty and humility. They absolutely were not seeking to score any sort of political point. They just wanted to let me know, in a very factual way, the experience of a rural couple contending with cancer and trying to find NHS dentistry on the state.

The British Dental Association has laid bare the facts. Oral cancer is one of the fastest-growing types of cancer and it is killing more people than car accidents every day. Dentists can play a key role in diagnosis and referral, and if oral cancer is diagnosed early, survival rates can be as high as 90% compared with just 50% if diagnosis takes place at a later date.

Let us say it as it is: NHS dentistry is in crisis. It is another example of the Government continuing to let people down and stand by as our vital services crumble. The NHS dental budget has been cut in real terms by £1 billion while the Conservatives have been in power. That is a shocking legacy of neglect. My constituents were not party political about this, but I am going to be: this Government have presided over the crumbling and decay of NHS dentistry, and have paid lip service to proposals to do bits and pieces that do not amount to contract reform. So I urge the Minister, for the sake of Rob, Sharon and everyone who is trapped in a situation like this, to take on board the urgency of the issue of NHS dental care for cancer patients and those who might become cancer patients.

17:10

[Mrs Paulette Hamilton (Birmingham, Erdington) (Lab)]

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mr Dowd. I thank my hon. Friend the Member for Stretford and Urmston (Andrew Western) for securing this important debate.

As someone who has lost family members and friends to cancer, I frequently come to this place to try to shine a light on the huge problems in our health service, which disproportionately impact people with cancer and their families. Dentistry is no exception. Like many colleagues, I have been contacted by constituents, in Erdington, Kingstanding and Castle Vale, because they are unable to find an NHS dentist. There are more than 100,000 people living in my constituency, but only seven dental surgeries, and at least three of those are not accepting any new adult patients. A constituent without a dentist contacted me and said: “I am desperate for an NHS dental repair. I now have an abscess in my jaw. Please help me”. That case is one of many. The response I received from NHS England advised my constituents to call 111 for any urgent care services and said that it is

“working to address the challenges facing the service right now”.

The challenges in our dental system are exacerbated for people in our communities living with cancer. The Less Survivable Cancers Taskforce states that 90,000 people in the UK are diagnosed with one of the less survivable cancers every year, which is an average of nearly 250 every day. People with less survivable cancers are twice as likely as people with a more survivable cancer not to be diagnosed until symptoms are severe enough for them to go to hospital. I personally know that that is far too long. Some 80% of people with pancreatic cancer are diagnosed at stages 3 and 4.

People with cancer need fast and effective dental services in a system that recognises the difficulties they will face during their treatment. Dentists also play a huge part in detecting, diagnosing and managing oral cancers, which kill more than 3,000 people a year in the UK. Unlike the less survivable cancers, oral cancers have a survival rate of 90% when diagnosed early, as the hon. Member for Tiverton and Honiton (Richard Foord) said, so it is crucial that dentistry can be accessed quickly and treatment is free for those people.

Both those issues come down to one main problem: money. Over the past decade, dental charges have increased by 45%, and last year YouGov found that nearly a quarter of respondents to its survey in England about dentistry delayed or went without dental treatment because they just could not afford it.

There are hidden costs in cancer care, such as increasing energy bills and the cost of frequent travel to and from hospital, and the burden of rising dental costs is too great for people with cancer. Although I think that it is a great idea to introduce free dental treatment for all cancer patients, we need to think bigger. We must reform the NHS and make it fit for the future.

There are two huge problems facing our health service—a crisis in both cancer care and NHS dentistry—with waiting lists for both at record highs. As a nurse, it breaks my heart to say that the NHS has never been in a worse state. The last Labour Government delivered the shortest waiting times and the highest level of patient satisfaction in history, because we invested properly in our NHS. It is high time that we did so again.

17:15

[Yasmin Qureshi (Bolton South East) (Lab)]

It is a pleasure, Mr Dowd, to serve under your chairmanship.

First, I thank my hon. Friend the Member for Stretford and Urmston (Andrew Western) for securing this very timely debate, and I also thank Michele for the wonderful campaign that she has been running on this issue. I declare an interest, as I am the chair of the all-party parliamentary group on dentistry and oral health. Hopefully, that will remind the Minister that is a cross-party issue and that many of her party colleagues are concerned about it.

Dentistry is in crisis across the country, whether in Devon, Somerset or in constituencies such as mine—Bolton South East. My hon. Friend the Member for Stretford and Urmston has detailed the importance of free dental treatment for all cancer patients. I listened to my hon. Friend the Member for Birmingham, Erdington (Mrs Hamilton), who has just spoken, about the details of the effects of this crisis on cancer patients, which she knows because of her experience of being a nurse. I also listened to what the hon. Member for Tiverton and Honiton (Richard Foord) said about his dealings with a constituent who had a cancer issue and who then had to take out his own teeth, which really is not acceptable in 21st-century Britain. I strongly support an exemption for people who are suffering from cancer and who therefore should be able to receive all the treatment that they need.

In fact, I was contacted by a constituent who had breast cancer. She told me how confused—indeed, how overwhelmed—she had felt. The last thing on her mind was dental health. However, a dental check-up should be essential for cancer patients; indeed, it should happen before anyone starts chemotherapy. Imagine the complications in treatment for someone with a suppressed immune system who is recovering from an infection. There are countless horror stories out there about the expensive dental work required by many cancer patients and they simply cannot afford it, especially given the cost of living crisis and the rising cost of bills.

I urge the Minister to get things done so that free dentistry is made available. The reality, however, is that even if the Minister made such a commitment today, as I am urging her to do, many people will not be able to access the service due to the ongoing crisis in NHS dentistry. For example, pregnant women and new mothers theoretically enjoy free NHS dentistry, but official data shows that over the last three years 1.2 million of them missed out on this entitlement because they were not able to access an NHS dentist.

It is crucial for all patients that this crisis is addressed urgently. The Minister will be aware that in 2021 about 2,000 dentists quit the NHS. In 2022, a BBC survey found that nine out of 10 of the dental practices still offering NHS services were not accepting any new adult patients, and eight in 10 were not taking on any more children, even though children are supposed to be a special category. Many of them have been left without access to basic healthcare, resulting in “dental deserts” across England. The problem is getting worse because many dentists are leaving the profession. For those who have stayed, morale has reached rock bottom.

What are the Government doing about this? They have been in power for 14 years. Recently, they introduced a so-called dental recovery plan, which many dentists have said is not even worthy of the title, because it will not stop the exodus from the workforce or offer hope to the millions who are struggling to access care. If the whole point of this plan was to stop dentistry becoming an issue, I am afraid the Government have failed. This is a crisis that will remain a burning issue in our communities across the country until we get real change. Constituents like mine in Bolton South East can see that NHS dentistry has been abandoned and left to rot by this Government. The system is not working. Many constituents write to me about trying to access NHS dentistry, and I have personally made phone calls trying to get them an appointment. It has been impossible to get an appointment until my office writes and persuades them to accept someone.

When the NHS dental recovery plan was introduced, the Health and Social Care Secretary assured the House of Commons that the plan was backed by £200 million in new funding. She very clearly said:

“There is £200 million on top of the £3 billion that we already spend on NHS dentistry in England.”—[Official Report, 7 February 2024; Vol. 745, c. 264.]

She reiterated that the £200 million was additional money. I was therefore very surprised to hear the Minister who is here today explain to the Health and Social Care Committee that the plan to deal with crises in NHS dentistry was not in fact backed by any additional investment. She stated that it was

“all coming out of the £3 billion that is currently”

being “underspent”.

I hope the Minister understands that these two statements contradict each other. On 20 March, I made a point of order in the Commons Chamber in which I raised this matter with the Deputy Speaker. I asked the Minister to return to the House to correct the record. So far, she has not done so; I hope she will do it today.

Saving dentistry is not rocket science. We need an NHS contract that is actually fit for purpose, with funding that means practices can be sustainable. We need real reform now.

17:23

[Kirsty Blackman (Aberdeen North) (SNP)]

Thank you for chairing this debate today, Mr Dowd. I thank the hon. Member for Stretford and Urmston (Andrew Western) for bringing the debate to the Chamber, and I thank all Members who have spoken. It is really good to have their constituents’ input and thoughts on the issues they face. I especially thank Michele for the campaign she has been running, which is the reason why this debate is taking place today. It is incredibly important that these issues are aired, and I look forward to hearing from the Minister what the Government are planning to do to improve the situation. It clearly cannot continue.

I want to talk a little about some of the things that we are doing in Scotland. Honestly, this sounds like the conversation I remember having 20 years ago in Scotland about being unable to get an NHS dentist. When I moved house in 2016 in Aberdeen, I had the choice of two different NHS dentists to go to. Everybody was like, “There’s no problem getting an NHS dentist now,” because of everything that has been put in place in Scotland to ensure that we can have those NHS dentists. More than 95% of the population in Scotland is registered with an NHS dentist and therefore able to get free dental check-ups.

Part of the increase in the amount of NHS dentists was the result of the creation of a new dental school in Aberdeen, specifically because we recognised the fact that Aberdeen was struggling with dentists. We created a new dental school there, which has had a significant impact on the numbers of dentists in Scotland. We also have various measures to ensure that dentists move to areas that are struggling to get any, as the hon. Member for Tiverton and Honiton (Richard Foord) mentioned. A £37,000 golden hello package is available for trainee dentists who are willing to move to areas that desperately need dentists. That is over the course of a three-year period of practice, so it is not like they get it all on one day—they have to be there for the three years to get the £37,000. There has also been a change in the amount of money that dentists get for the treatments they provide, to ensure that they are properly compensated, that they are able to do the treatments and that it is affordable for them to continue as an NHS dentist, rather than feeling obliged to go private.

Lastly, Brexit has had a significant impact on the NHS dental workforce and how it works. We are struggling with the loss of dentists because of Brexit. My husband was talking about his most recent dentists being Greek, Polish and Romanian, but the change in the relationship with the EU means that the situation is more difficult. People are less likely to want to stay in the UK as a dentist when they could stay in the country of their birth, closer to their homes, with people they feel might actually want them, rather than people who have voted for Brexit. The negative change there is causing a problem.

Specifically on cancer patients and the cancer strategy, in Scotland we have a 10-year strategy for cancer and it is a national priority for the Scottish Government. Everything done for cancer support is about having a person-centred outcome. A person-centred approach to support ensures personalisation, so that everyone gets a variety of the supports that they need, rather than a variety of the supports that exist or that happen to be—“You have this type of cancer so we will give you this.” Instead, it is very much a person-centred approach.

People undergoing cancer treatment could be eligible for free dental treatment and check-ups in a variety of ways. Some people on universal credit who meet income thresholds can get free treatment. For anyone who is an in-patient and treated by dentists in hospitals—which we have—that treatment is, again, free. A low-income health scheme is in place as well. Given the much wider availability of NHS dentists in Scotland, people are able to access such services and are much more likely to get free treatment, because of the increase in the numbers.

I did not want to talk for too long. This is not a concern that affects a significant number of my constituents, because they have access to dental services at this incredibly worrying time. They are able to get appointments, so it is one less thing for them to worry about when their lives are a complete and total rollercoaster. The Minister must ensure that we do everything we can for people who have had a cancer diagnosis and are going through treatment. Their lives have potentially changed dramatically overnight, and a lack of accessible and affordable dentistry services is one more thing that they do not need to be worrying about right now. They need to concentrate on getting through their treatment, on the support they are receiving, on ensuring that they can get well as quickly as possible, and on following doctors’ instructions and guidance. People do not need to be worrying about dentistry.

The Minister must do everything possible to ensure that personalised treatment is provided and that an increase in access to NHS dentists is in place. If there is not to be a widespread increase in access to NHS dentists across England in the near future, is there anything the Minister can do in the meantime to prioritise the treatment of cancer patients? They need to be able to access appropriate dental treatments that they can afford as soon as possible, until the NHS in England is in a position to offer dentistry services at a reasonable level and people can actually access treatments.

17:29

[Preet Kaur Gill (Birmingham, Edgbaston) (Lab/Co-op)]

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairship, Mr Dowd.

I thank my hon. Friend the Member for Stretford and Urmston (Andrew Western) for securing the debate and for speaking so powerfully about how the dentistry access crisis affects cancer patients and survivors such as his constituent, Michele. I had the pleasure of meeting Michele with my hon. Friend earlier today, and it was eye-opening to hear the stories about what cancer patients and survivors face. I am delighted that Michele is here today. I thank her for all her campaigning and the support that she provides for those suffering pretty much what she had to go through.

I am afraid the state of NHS dentistry under this Government is Dickensian. Most of us might think that our teeth would be the least of our worries if we were diagnosed with cancer, and as we have heard, oral health is incredibly important. Many cancer patients, who previously had few or no dental issues, can experience the loss or crumbling of teeth, together with a host of other dental problems during or after treatment. Poor dental hygiene can lead to infections, which can interfere with a patient’s chemotherapy. Radiotherapy can cause acute complications for teeth and gums through tissue damage. In rare cases, extractions afterwards can result in bone necrosis, whereby the jawbone essentially dies.

It is therefore crucial that timely access to dentistry, including any required treatment and preventive advice, is provided before, during and after cancer therapy to maximise positive outcomes. The last thing that any cancer patient needs is to find that they cannot access a dentist when they need one. However, as the Minister knows, the current crisis in access to dentistry is shocking. After more than a decade of neglect, patients are desperately queueing round the block to see a dentist. Eight in 10 practices are not taking on new adult NHS patients and, as we have heard, one in 10 people have tried DIY dentistry. Some of the most vulnerable people in society, who need to get seen, are missing out.

I want to share with the Minister some of the stories that were shared with me before the debate. Michaela from Alresford said:

“I lost all my root canals and my teeth just started falling to bits on chemotherapy. I wasn’t able to see an NHS dentist and I couldn’t afford private. I’m awaiting treatment again for cancer (for the second time) and urgently need my teeth sorted before I have chemotherapy again, but I can’t get in to see a dentist.”

Carole from Shropshire said:

“I was with an NHS dentist but missed a check-up while going through chemo—was very ill. So got knocked off. I had problems when taking ibandronic tablets for bones, had to go for emergency treatment. NHS dentist in Shrewsbury 17 miles from home. This was two years ago—still not been able to register. Tried surrounding towns. I know I am not on my own. There are hundreds in the same situation as me.”

What does the Minister have to say to Carole and Michaela? Has the Department made any estimate of the impact of the access crisis on cancer patients and survivors?

As we heard today, according to research by Macmillan Cancer Support, four in five cancer patients are hit with an average cost of £570 a month as a result of their illness. If patients face oral health complications because of their treatment and they cannot be seen on the NHS, most will simply go without. A two-tier system, whereby those who can afford to go private and the rest go without, is obscene. How are the Government working to minimise the financial cost of cancer for patients and survivors? Those costs can knock back their health.

It was disappointing to hear from Michele that when she was diagnosed with breast cancer her doctor did not tell her about the impact her treatment could have on her oral health. I know the Minister accepts that such advice should be routine. The Department of Health and Social Care guidance for delivering better oral health states that cancer patients should receive appropriate care to manage and stabilise their oral health before treatment, but it appears that not all cancer patients are getting that support. I urge the Minister to address the matter and raise it when possible.

In my team, a parent of one of my staffers was diagnosed with throat cancer in 2020, but did not get his orthodontist appointment to have four teeth removed until a year after his treatment. Will the Minister comment on the fact that the latest estimates show that in February 2024 more than 325,000 patients were waiting for oral surgery in England? That is up by nearly 200,000 since 2015, almost a decade ago, which was the last time the NHS target was met. How many cancer patients’ treatments are delayed as a result?

There is also the dire issue of cancer diagnoses themselves. Oral cancer is now one of the fastest-growing types of cancer in the United Kingdom, with mortality rates up by 46% on a decade ago. It now kills more than 3,000 a year in the United Kingdom. But if diagnosed early, oral cancers have a survival rate of roughly 90%, compared with 50% if diagnosis is delayed. Given that dentists are often the first to spot the early signs of the disease, will the Minister say whether she has made any assessment of the contribution of the dentistry crisis to the appalling mortality figures?

As my hon. Friend the Member for Bolton South East (Yasmin Qureshi) said, the Health Secretary claimed in the Commons in February:

“There is £200 million on top of the £3 billion that we already spend on NHS dentistry in England.”—[Official Report, 7 February 2024; Vol. 745, c. 264.]

But that is not true. Notwithstanding the fact that £1 billion of that is covered by patient charges, not central Government, the Health Secretary also subsequently admitted that the money will come from existing budgets. So really it is only £200 million as part of the money that she might spend on NHS dentistry if the £400 million yearly underspend persists.

The Health Secretary also claimed:

“The Opposition’s ambitions reach only as far as 700,000 more appointments. Our plan will provide more than three times that number of appointments across the country—that is 2.5 million”.—[Official Report, 7 February 2024; Vol. 745, c. 255.]

But that is not true either, is it? It is not true because the Government’s scheme will run for only one year, while Labour’s plan would deliver both in the here and now and into the future. Perhaps the Health Secretary might correct the record on that, too.

My hon. Friend the Member for Stretford and Urmston shared his thoughts on how joining up services in hospital for cancer patients could address access to dentistry for very high-risk patients. NHS dentistry is dying a slow death under this Government, and the people who rely on NHS care cannot wait another five years for a Tory Government to decide that, this time, they really mean it and they will reform NHS dentistry for good. Labour’s fully funded plans would provide 700,000 more urgent appointments a year, supervised tooth-brushing schemes in areas of deprivation, and a targeted recruitment scheme in left-behind areas, all paid for by cracking down on tax dodgers. We would get on with the reform to the NHS dental contract that this Government have put off for 14 years. Cancer patients, new mothers, those in rural communities and millions of others are being failed every year that we let the decay in NHS dentistry continue.

17:37

[The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Health and Social Care (Dame Andrea Leadsom)]

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mr Dowd. I congratulate the hon. Member for Stretford and Urmston (Andrew Western) on securing this really important debate on behalf of Michele and all the other petitioners. I would of course be delighted to meet Michele to hear her views, and I particularly take note of her call for all cancer patients to be advised of the potential impact of cancer treatment on their oral health. That is a really solid and actionable thing that I undertake to take away today. I look forward to meeting Michele and the hon. Gentleman in due course.

I wish to take this chance to pay tribute to the Mouth Cancer Foundation, the Oral Health Foundation and Dentaid, to name just a few of the excellent charities that provide support and advice to so many.

I thank all Members who have spoken in what has been an excellent debate. I say to the hon. Member for Tiverton and Honiton (Richard Foord) that I fully appreciate the challenges in Devon. He will no doubt welcome the fact that a mobile dental van, which will be quite a boost for very underserved and geographically distant areas, will be forthcoming for Devon in the near future. In addition, one of the real problems in Devon—this is not the hon. Gentleman’s fault at all—is that in his area on average only around 57% of commissioned units of dental activity are actually undertaken by dentists. I am sure he might like to talk to his local integrated care board about that, if I can help in any way, I would be delighted to.

As I will come on to talk about, our dental recovery plan attempts to incentivise further NHS dentists to really ramp up delivery. In fact, we have already seen hundreds of thousands of new dental treatments just since 1 March, when the plan went live. Unfortunately, the data is not publishable as yet, but I feel really optimistic. I totally understand what Members say about it being not good enough—I totally get that—but we are seeing rapid improvements and I encourage the hon. Gentleman to talk to his local ICB.

[Richard Foord]

On the Minister’s point about only 57% of the units of dental activity being taken up in Devon, is that not a workforce issue?

[Dame Andrea Leadsom]

No. How it works is that the ICB commissions dentists to provide NHS dentistry, and the NHS contractor undertakes to fulfil a number of units of dental activity. If they do not do that, for whatever reason, at the end of the financial year the ICB claws back the money they gave the NHS dentist to fulfil that contract. I am not judging anything; I am merely giving the hon. Gentleman information that I hope is helpful to him.

[Yasmin Qureshi]

Will the Minister give way?

[Dame Andrea Leadsom]

Yes, but I do not want to run out of time.

[Yasmin Qureshi]

On that point, it is very much an issue of being able to survive: many dentists say they return the units because if they took on all the NHS appointments, they would not be able to survive financially.

[Dame Andrea Leadsom]

I hear what the hon. Lady says. My own assessment is slightly different, but I obviously respect her view.

The hon. Member for Birmingham, Erdington (Mrs Hamilton) and I have worked together for many years on all matters to do with early years intervention. She made a really good point about less survivable cancers, but I would highlight to her the 160 diagnostic centres that are being opened, which will help with early detection. She also made some good points about the importance of good oral health assessments, and she is right to raise that. One thing I would point out to all hon. Members, which was astonishing to me when I came into this role in November, is that since 1948, when the NHS started, only between 40% and 50% of adults in England have ever received NHS dentistry. It is not like Scotland, where the hon. Member for Aberdeen North (Kirsty Blackman) said the number is 90%—is that the right number?

[Kirsty Blackman]

95%.

[Dame Andrea Leadsom]

Yes, 95% of people in Scotland receive NHS dentistry. In England, it is extremely different, and it always has been under Governments of all parties. I would just put that to hon. Members as a piece of information that it is really important to know.

To the hon. Member for Bolton South East (Yasmin Qureshi), I would highlight SMILE4LIFE, which is a big part of the dental recovery plan. The shadow spokesman, the hon. Member for Birmingham, Edgbaston (Preet Kaur Gill), also raised the SMILE4LIFE. It focuses on the earliest years, including getting pregnant mums to have their teeth checked, and on good oral health in babies and toddlers, so that by the time they go to school they are used to brushing their teeth twice a day. Good oral health is absolutely critical. In answer to the point raised by both the hon. Member for Bolton South East and the shadow spokesperson, I should say that the Secretary of State and I both made very clear and full responses to the Health and Social Care Committee on the issue of where funding for the dental recovery plan has come from.

Moving on to the things that I actually intended to say, I am absolutely aware that almost everyone in our country has been personally affected by cancer, whether themselves or through a friend or relative, and that includes members of my own family, so I really do understand the issue. Last year, just over 340,000 new cancer patients were diagnosed in England—almost 1,000 every single day or one every 90 seconds. We know that receiving a diagnosis can be terrifying, and we should never lose sight of what those patients and their families are going through. I am really glad that the petition has been brought forward to highlight the terrible disease of oral cancer and the impact on the oral health of those with other cancers.

Before I turn to cancer, I want to quickly outline the steps we have taken to improve access to dentistry across the country since publishing our recovery plan on 7 February. As colleagues will know, access has simply not recovered fast enough since the covid lockdowns, and the issue was my top priority on appointment to this role in November. I am really proud that the plan is creating around 2.5 million additional NHS appointments. We are supporting dentists through a new patient premium to take on patients who have not seen a dentist for two years. We are increasing the minimum value of a unit of dental activity to £28. We are helping patients to find a dentist through a new marketing campaign. We are bringing dental care to our more isolated communities through mobile dental plans and by encouraging dentists to work in underserved areas through golden hellos for 240 dentists. As I have mentioned, the SMILE4LIFE initiative is designed to get in early and help families to understand the importance of good oral hygiene.

Not only that, but we are also making progress to increase the workforce and, in fact, there were 1,352 more dentists doing NHS work in 2022-23 than in 2010-11. It is not the case that dentists are disappearing from the NHS; there are 1,350 more. As announced in the long-term workforce plan, we are going to increase dentistry training places by 40%, so that there are over 1,100 places by 2031-32. We are also increasing training places for dental therapists and hygienists to more than 500 a year by 2031-32. Importantly, we are exploring whether the prospects for a tie-in could ensure that dentists spend a greater proportion of their time delivering NHS dental care, rather than receiving that very expensive training and then perhaps going off to do private dentistry, which means fewer people have access to NHS dentists. It is great to see that, since we published the plan on 7 February, and it went live on 1 March, hundreds more dental practices are already opening their doors to new patients. I look forward to giving the House a full update on the recovery plan shortly, when I will be able to talk to colleagues about the significant increase in the number of patients able to access an NHS dentist.

In the hon. Member for Stretford and Urmston’s own integrated care board in Greater Manchester, there is the second highest number of dentists doing NHS work in England. That is almost 71 dentists per 100,000, against a national average of 53.5. I understand that the ICB there is supporting a local initiative called the dental quality access scheme to improve access to NHS dentistry, which requires practices to commit to seeing new NHS patients and, importantly, to providing urgent care access. The practices have been asked to prioritise vulnerable patients and patients with serious conditions, including cancer. That is a fantastic scheme by the ICB, and I encourage other ICBs listening to this debate to follow suit. The scheme brought over 200,000 extra appointments for patients in the last financial year, which I am sure the hon. Member is delighted about.

Turning to the hon. Member’s specific points on charges, the Government responded to a petition on 9 November that requested

“Free Dental Treatment for All Cancer Patients”.

Our reply pointed out that, in 2022-23, 47% of all courses of treatment for NHS dental patients were delivered free of charge, and those who do pay for dentistry are providing an important contribution to NHS budgets. I am sure the hon. Member will know that dentistry charges have been in place almost since the foundation of the NHS 75 years ago. Also, as I have already pointed out, under Governments of every party only about 40% to 50% of adults have ever received NHS dental care.

Despite inflation and other spending pressures, we froze charges between December 2020 and April 2023 to help all our constituents with cost of living pressures, and since then we have raised the charges only proportionately. The hon. Member is right to say that cancer patients face additional financial burdens, and that is why the Government are committed to supporting every patient who faces financial hardship with full or partial exemptions from dental patient charges, which are available through the NHS low income scheme. As the hon. Member for Aberdeen North pointed out in the case of Scotland, those also apply to people being treated in hospitals, and that will not change.

I am sure that the hon. Member for Stretford and Urmston will appreciate that, at a time when NHS budgets are under extreme pressure, it is not feasible to offer free dental care to every patient regardless of their means. We are instead focusing our efforts on continuing to ensure that the most vulnerable are supported to access NHS dentistry, including patients with cancer. In 2021, there were just over 9,100 oral cancers, which was equal to around 3% of all cancers. It is clear that cancer must be caught at the earliest opportunity to give people the best possible chance for recovery. Dentistry plays a crucial role because dentists check for signs of oral cancer in every routine check-up, and it is a contractual requirement for dentists to prioritise patients at a higher risk of oral cancer for more frequent recalls.

Turning to the hon. Gentleman’s specific point about prioritising dental appointments for cancer patients, I am aware of instances where patients have faced unacceptable delays to the start of their treatment because of a lack of dentistry appointments. I agree with all hon. Members that such delays are just unacceptable, and we are committed to making sure that everyone who needs a dentist should get one. That is why, along with the raft of measures we are introducing to improve access to NHS dentistry across the country, we are also publishing new guidance to make it crystal clear to every integrated care board that they have a responsibility to commission additional specific services in their local area when they identify problems such as cancer patients being unable to access timely treatment.

As soon as we published our dentistry recovery plan on 7 February, I turned my attention to seeking out the expertise and knowledge of dentists and their representative bodies to understand their perspectives on the need for dental contract reform. I am specifically looking now at what reforms would improve access to dentistry and encourage greater capacity, as well as how at we can consult the dental profession and prepare for further announcements later this year. I can assure hon. Members that, in every decision, I will keep pushing for every patient in our country to have access to the dental care they need, while protecting our cast-iron guarantee to support those most in need with full or partial exemptions from dental patient charges for those on low incomes.

17:51

[Andrew Western]

I thank everybody who has contributed to the debate. We have a considerable amount of expertise in the room—in particular, my hon. Friend the Member for Bolton South East (Yasmin Qureshi) is the chair of the all-party parliamentary group and my hon. Friend the Member for Birmingham, Erdington (Mrs Hamilton) is a former nurse and national lead for the Local Government Association on all things relating to health.

I am grateful to colleagues who have contributed to the debate in various ways and focused more generally on the considerable issues facing those seeking to access dentistry. I want to drill down more specifically on the issue of access for cancer patients, and I appreciate the Minister’s offer of a meeting, which will hopefully move us forward. I also welcome her commitment to looking at how we can deal with the information side of this. However, with respect—she would expect me to say this—that is perhaps the easiest of the issues to tackle. I gently say to her that at no point did I ask for all patients to have free dental treatment, but just for cancer patients to have dental treatment because their experience has not come about as a result of not looking after their teeth, but as a direct result of other treatments. [Interruption.]

I am cognisant of the Chair’s clearing of his throat, and I will raise some of the other issues that I was hoping to discuss today in the meeting with the Minister. As I say, I am grateful to her and the shadow Minister for meeting me and Michele earlier, and to everyone who has contributed.

Question put and agreed to.

Resolved,

That this House has considered access to dentistry for cancer patients.

17:53

Sitting adjourned.