Westminster Hall

Thursday 27th February 2025 Westminster Hall

Thursday 27 February 2025

[Esther McVey in the Chair]

Backbench Business

Rural Crime

Thursday 27th February 2025 Westminster Hall

13:30

[Ben Maguire (North Cornwall) (LD)]

I beg to move,

That this House has considered rural crime.

It is a pleasure to serve with you in the Chair, Ms McVey, and a privilege to open this important debate on rural crime. It is fantastic to see many hon. Members, from both sides of the House, joining the debate, and I thank them all for their attendance.

I grew up in the rural constituency of North Cornwall—which I now proudly serve as its Member of Parliament—and my family and friends, like many others, are acutely aware of the dangers that rural crime can bring and the drastic effects it can have on our small, tight-knit communities. For too long, rural crime has been overlooked and not made a priority by successive Governments, but for those living and working in our rural communities, its impact can be absolutely devastating. Let me be crystal clear: rural crime is rarely random or opportunistic, and successive Governments have not given it the attention it deserves.

The evidence overwhelmingly shows that rural crime is now dominated by organised criminal gangs that operate with sophistication across police forces and systematically target farmers, tradesmen and rural businesses. I am not talking just about the occasional theft of a piece of farm equipment; this is large-scale, co-ordinated and organised criminal activity, with criminal networks exploiting gaps in policing resources.

[Ian Roome (North Devon) (LD)]

Sadly, in the last week my constituency has suffered a spate of rural break-ins on the edge of Exmoor, and a quad bike and a chainsaw were also stolen from sheds in West Anstey earlier this month, in a pattern that we are very familiar with. Just this past week, South Molton and Umberleigh joined a string of other Devon villages where thieves believed to be targeting cigarettes struck local shops and service stations overnight. Does my hon. Friend agree that, when we talk about rural crime, we are really talking about the perception among criminals that rural areas are soft targets for obtaining goods that can be easily fenced elsewhere?

[Esther McVey (in the Chair)]

Order. Interventions should be brief.

[Ben Maguire]

I completely agree with my hon. Friend, and I will come on to that type of rural crime. We have become far too much of a soft touch for these organised criminal gangs.

If we want to tackle crime in this country, we must finally start taking rural crime seriously. The latest figures from NFU Mutual put the total cost of rural crime in 2023 at £52.8 million—an increase of 4.3% on the year before. But those figures only reflect insured losses, and the true cost is likely far higher, as many people do not have trust or confidence that crimes will be properly investigated when reported.

The explosion in thefts of high-value equipment is particularly worrying. GPS theft surged by 137% last year, costing £4.2 million, and farmers cannot simply replace the equipment overnight. Thefts of quad bikes and all-terrain vehicles, which are critical equipment for farmers and rural workers, rose by 9% to £3.2 million. Livestock theft remained at an alarming £2.7 million, with evidence of animals being butchered in the fields and then stolen, causing immense distress to farmers.

Farmers—who faced botched Brexit trade deals thanks to the Conservatives, and who now face a family farm tax because of this Labour Government’s changes to agricultural property relief—are suffering from the scourge of rural organised crime, which is often theft to order. The toll on farmers’ mental health and wellbeing is enormous, and my inbox has been inundated with cases from North Cornwall. One farmer saw his £17,000 all- terrain vehicle stolen in the dead of night, and that was not the first time thieves had targeted his property. Another farmer, in the village of St Kew, lost more than £3,000 in the blink of an eye when thieves broke in and stole vehicles, tools and equipment that he relied on for his livelihood. Finally, one farming couple in Blisland had two quad bikes taken from their locked garage, costing £15,000 to replace. With this particular theft, police travelled all the way from Totnes—a three-hour round trip—showing up three days after the event. They put a few signs around the property, and the farmers have not heard from them since. Those stories make it unsurprising that 86% of countryside residents have said rural crime is negatively impacting their mental wellbeing, as highlighted by various surveys conducted by the NFU.

Yet, one of the most under-reported aspects of rural crime is the mass theft of power tools and machinery from tradesmen and small businesses—a crime that exceeds farm machinery theft in total volume. The figures are staggering. Of the over 3,600 stolen tools recovered by the national rural crime unit, only 77 were successfully returned to their owners. That is just 2%, which is an abysmal rate of return, with a huge impact on the livelihoods of these tradesmen. These thefts can devastate builders, carpenters, plumbers and others who rely on expensive, specialised equipment to earn a living. When tools are stolen, jobs are lost, deadlines are missed and insurance costs soar. Yet, some manufacturers outright refuse to co-operate with crime prevention efforts, as there is currently no legal requirement for forensic markings or GPS tracking on these high-value power tools to help with their recovery.

[Greg Smith (Mid Buckinghamshire) (Con)]

The hon. Gentleman may be aware that a private Member’s Bill I brought forward in the last Parliament—it is now the Equipment Theft (Prevention) Act 2023—would enable us to place that requirement on power tool manufacturers to fit forensic marking; it just requires secondary legislation. The Bill was discussed at all stages of debate during its passage through the House of Commons and the House of Lords, so will the hon. Gentleman support my calls from back then, and on the new Government now, to look at bringing in that secondary legislation to make the Act apply equally to power tools?

[Ben Maguire]

Along with my Liberal Democrat colleagues, I certainly do support that change, and I will discuss it slightly later in my speech.

The trust that our rural communities have in police forces to solve these crimes is shockingly low, with two thirds of respondents to one survey saying that reporting rural crime is a total “waste of time” as they know it will go unsolved. The Government could reopen some of the smaller police stations in rural areas, such as that in Launceston in my constituency, so that these crimes can be reported and dealt with by the front desks, which would certainly be a start in regaining the public’s trust and confidence,

As the hon. Member for Mid Buckinghamshire (Greg Smith) just mentioned, Parliament passed the Equipment Theft (Prevention) Act in July 2023, with the aim of deterring thefts of farm vehicles by requiring immobilisers and registration databases. The Act was a clear step forward, but unfortunately it did not do quite enough to tackle the true scale of the problem, as it does not cover GPS units, power tools or smaller, high-value pieces of equipment, which are among the most frequently stolen items. Will the Government consider the merits of extending that legislation to ensure that all GPS systems, power tools, and pieces of high-value rural equipment are required to have forensic markings and registration databases?

[Greg Smith]

Will the hon. Gentleman give way on that point?

[Ben Maguire]

I am going to carry on for a moment.

Without proper enforcement and action, we are leaving the van door wide open for thieves. While rural crime grows, police forces remain underfunded, overstretched and lacking the specialist knowledge needed to combat these offences. In many cases, local police do not have the resources, staff or capability to track and recover farm equipment and power tools at the rate at which they are stolen. These crimes are committed across wide areas and are often too small to warrant the attention of large-scale organisations such as the National Crime Agency but too big for individual forces to deal with on their own.

That is where the national rural crime unit comes in. The unit is a vital national co-ordination centre, and does excellent work in the recovery of stolen property, sharing intelligence across forces and disrupting these organised criminal gangs. Shockingly, the national rural crime unit is set to lose its single national crime co-ordinator this year due to a lack of funding. That role has been essential in tackling cross-border rural crime, linking intelligence between forces and co-ordinating national efforts to combat criminal gangs. However, without continued funding, that vital work will collapse.

Furthermore, the NRCU is entirely industry-funded, yet as it stands the Government take 50% of all cash assets seized from criminal gangs, which cannot be returned to the victims. That 50% could instead go directly back into fighting the criminal gangs, and supporting the work of organisations such as the NRCU. I ask the Minister to commit to providing long-term funding for the NRCU to allow it to continue its critical work and deliver greater co-ordination between local forces to tackle rural crime. As it stands, the Government are relying on the insurance industry to fund rural crime policing, and my constituents and I view that as unacceptable.

County line drug gangs have increasingly infiltrated Cornwall and other rural areas across the country, exploiting vulnerable individuals, including children, to traffic and sell drugs across the region. In Bodmin, for instance, gangs took over the homes of vulnerable residents—a practice known commonly as cuckooing—to establish bases for their illicit operations. These gangs operate across vast rural areas and often in sparsely populated towns and villages, and proper resourcing is required to ensure that they are properly policed.

The costs of rural crime extend beyond humans, often harming our natural environment and the animals that live in it. Illegal snaring, hare coursing, poaching and other criminal activity have decimated and traumatised wildlife populations in North Cornwall and across the country. That is not to mention the huge problem of fly-tipping, which comes up time and again from my constituents, with rubbish being illegally dumped in our towns and across our countryside. To combat that issue specifically, the Government could consider a single reporting mechanism for fly-tipping, so that landowners and farmers need report an incident only once and will have the confidence that it will be followed up on.

Despite facing unique challenges, rural police forces such as Devon and Cornwall police continue to receive some of the lowest funding per head in England. In Cornwall alone, the population swells by over 3 million during the summer months, placing enormous strain on an already overstretched police force. Meanwhile, the police and crime commissioner for the region costs around £1.5 million a year, factoring in expenses and office costs. That money could instead go directly into funding into rural crime teams—officers on the beat, instead of office administrators.

Furthermore, more than a third of officers in Devon and Cornwall have less than three years of service, due to difficulties in retention and recruitment caused by chronic underfunding over many years. Despite those clear pressures, the Government have failed to reform the funding model to reflect real-world policing demand in our rural communities. Policing should not be a postcode lottery, where the most in need are often the least supported.

On all these issues, we still seem to have no clear Government strategy to tackle rural crime. We do not appear to have national co-ordination, proper funding structures or a commitment to equipping rural police teams with the resources they so crucially need. The Government could look to organisations such as the Scottish Partnership Against Rural Crime, which has had an official rural crime strategy in place since 2019. That strategy focuses on gathering intelligence and raising people’s confidence in reporting crimes to the local authorities. As a result, the cost of rural crime in Scotland reduced by £2 million, from £5.6 million to £3.6 million in just one year.

The rural crime team established within the Lancashire police force is also proving to be an excellent example of a specialised rural crime unit. One resident served by their work said that the police

“just showing their faces around here has had a massive impact on rural crime for us”

and that it had even led to a “massive decrease” in fly-tipping. That is why, on 14 January, I introduced the Rural Crime (Strategy) Bill, which would require the Home Secretary to establish an independent taskforce to develop and implement a comprehensive rural crime strategy. The taskforce must bring together stakeholders from across industry, police and rural communities to advise the Government, ultimately leading to a strategy that could take vital steps such as ensuring that properly funded dedicated rural crime teams or specialists are embedded in police forces—currently, less than 1% of police officers are assigned to rural crime—providing training for police and 999 control room staff on how to tackle rural crime, and improving intelligence sharing among the different forces.

Rural crime is a serious, organised and devastating issue for our countryside communities. It is time for a cohesive national strategy that puts an end to the chaos of underfunded police forces and unco-ordinated responses and that gives teeth to legislation to tackle these problems. Organised crime is thriving, and the Government need to act now, starting with bringing forward a comprehensive rural crime strategy, because our rural communities deserve so much better.

[Several hon. Members rose—]

[Esther McVey (in the Chair)]

Order. I remind Members that they should not mention any live legal cases during the debate. Members should bob if they wish to be called, and interventions must be brief. We will come to the Front-Bench spokespeople at 2.30 pm.

13:46

[Kevin McKenna (Sittingbourne and Sheppey) (Lab)]

It is an honour to serve under your chairmanship, Ms McVey. I thank the hon. Member for North Cornwall (Ben Maguire) for securing this debate and for comprehensively outlining many of the problems. It was good to hear his insights and the work that he has already done, particularly around rural thefts and thefts of farm equipment, which are a big issue in my constituency. I will focus on fly-tipping, which is a huge blight in Sittingbourne and Sheppey and across the whole of Kent, where it costs about £1.8 million annually.

One of my problems with fly-tipping is the name; it is too cutesy. It makes it seem so unimportant—“Fly-tipping? Well, fine.”—but it is a massive environmental scourge and a massive scourge on the people who live near it. In an urban setting, it is often small scale, with lots of people doing it on housing estates and in back alleys— I have that in bucketloads in my constituency—but there are also huge, illegal dumping tips. I have one in my constituency on Raspberry Hill Lane near Iwade. Yesterday morning, a BBC documentary showed drone footage of the site, with a real investigation from BBC journalists into the problems.

Fly-tipping has been going on there for a long time. Residents have raised the issue repeatedly, and they have struggled to understand what has been going on to challenge it. Some of what has been looked at very much involves cross-agency working that has frequently failed. One of my biggest concerns about fly-tipping is whether we have the structures in place to investigate it: are the right organisations doing the investigations, and do we have the right level of punitive punishments for the people who are destroying vast swathes of countryside?

The site that I am discussing is right next to a site of special scientific interest. It is an extremely vulnerable area. It is also right on the edge of a village. The smell, the noise and the disruption is obvious to everybody as they go past it.

At root, this is an organised crime issue. Whether the sites are big or small, it is not just a man in a van dumping stuff in someone’s bins or back alley or on the street. At multiple sites, such as the one that I am talking about in Kent, truck after truck brings along its loads of unprocessed waste, which is dug into the ground and left for the birds to eat and spread around nearby farmland.

I do not think people understand the significant impact that it has on local people, or how frustrated many of them are at not getting a response from the authorities about what is going on. When they have reported fly-tipping, it is hard to understand where investigations have got to or whether anyone is looking into them at all. Because organised crime is involved, many of my residents are afraid to raise the issue publicly.

[Patrick Spencer (Central Suffolk and North Ipswich) (Con)]

The hon. Gentleman is making an interesting point about fly-tipping as an issue of organised crime. I suppose that Opposition Members would also include casual littering in the same bracket. We see that every day in towns and villages, but also on the side of motorways. Does he want to say something about that also being a real scourge of society?

[Kevin McKenna]

I am very happy to say that. We have a lot of casual littering, with things thrown out of cars as going up the A249 between Sheppey and Sittingbourne, so it is an issue. We also see articles from time to time about middle-class fly-tipping, with people—apparently benignly—leaving furniture out on the street in front of their house for people to pick up. Honestly, I can see that that is well-meaning—or thoughtless. That level of littering needs dealing with in one way, but it is the organised criminal side of it that we really need to look at in a much more systematic way.

Does the Minister think that the Environment Agency is the right organisation to be doing the investigating? It is not really set up as an investigative organisation, but that is where the bulk of the digging and detective work is now falling. That is similar to some of the other issues regarding the Environment Agency, such as with land drainage, where it is pulled into operational matters when that is not really what it is set up for. I would like to hear the Minister’s thoughts about whether we need to look at how the Environment Agency operates, what its real function is, and whether it should be the investigating agency.

I would also like to look at what the actual penalty for the crime is, where it is provable that those people are organised criminals. Frankly, where landowners have been using land to create organised illegal dumps, I would question whether they should retain the assets—not just the land, but the vast fleets of trucks and lorries that they are using for that. It is being done on an industrial scale and it needs to be addressed, not with fines of a few tens of thousands of pounds, but by looking at actually seizing the assets of those organised criminals.

Finally, the most important thing that I want to talk about is that, at its root, organised crime is a market issue. Those people are criminals, but they are serving a market need, and a lot of that is down to regulation. Are the regulations around the licensing of waste removal and waste processing incentivising criminal gangs to get involved in this “business”—obviously in scare quotes—rather than other areas of crime? Honestly, as with many areas of organised crime, we have to look at the market forces behind that crime and see how we could use regulation to disincentivise criminals and then hopefully get them as they move into other areas.

13:52

[Greg Smith (Mid Buckinghamshire) (Con)]

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Ms McVey. I congratulate the hon. Member for North Cornwall (Ben Maguire) on securing this debate. While I will talk about the Equipment Theft (Prevention) Act 2023 in more detail later in my remarks, I assure him, because of the comments that he made, that GPS units were very much intended to be included within the scope of that Act; they were spoken about extensively at all stages of debate before the Act achieved Royal Assent. I urge the Minister to have that in mind as she prepares the necessary statutory instruments to fully bring the Act into force. I believe that has now been promised to come by this summer.

Fundamentally, rural crime is devastating to all rural areas, not least those such as mine in Mid Buckinghamshire, where the economy is mostly agricultural and entire communities are centred around farming and the local economy that farming supports. Whether it is theft, hare coursing, fly-tipping or antisocial behaviour—to name just a few such crimes—the countryside is too often an easy target for criminal gangs looking to make a quick buck. It is imperative that the Government recognise that and take steps to build on the work that we did in government, particularly over the last few years, to tackle and prevent rural crime.

According to the Countryside Alliance’s 2023 rural crime survey, fly-tipping accounted for the most commonly reported crime—to the point made by the hon. Member for Sittingbourne and Sheppey (Kevin McKenna)—at 37% of cases, followed closely by agricultural machinery theft at 32% and trespassing at 31%. It goes without saying that farm machinery is essential to the smooth running of farms. Those items are not just tools; they are the backbone of the entire agricultural machine. Whether it is a combine harvester, a tractor, or a high-tech bit of equipment, the cost of replacing them can run into tens of thousands of pounds.

In 2022 alone, rural crime cost UK farmers over £50 million, with farm machinery theft accounting for a substantial portion of that. NFU Mutual—which, let’s face it, insures the vast majority of agricultural machinery in this country—estimates that the cost of rural crime increased by 4.3% year on year in 2023 to £52.8 million, and the cost of GPS theft alone reached an estimated £4.2 million in 2023, which was a 137% increase. Quad bike and all-terrain vehicle theft cost an estimated £3.2 million in 2023—up 9% on 2022. It is not just heavy machinery and equipment that is targeted. Often it is fuel, which is all too easy for organised gangs to simply siphon off and load into a van, then off they go, leaving victims with huge losses and hefty bills to restock.

Last year I visited a farm in my constituency that is directly opposite Chequers. It seems like an unlikely place for opportunist thefts to happen—opposite one of the most heavily armed and secure premises in my constituency—but the farmers fell victim to the loss of some 2,000 litres of red diesel that was siphoned off and taken away in the night. That particular farm operates a very good farm shop, and the thieves also got away with two chest freezers full of meat destined for it. That has not just a huge financial impact on those farmers and that business; there is an equally huge toll on business owners’ and farmers’ mental health, as the hon. Member for North Cornwall referenced.

These criminal gangs are incredibly difficult to apprehend when operating across county lines, and the raids can often take several hours and go on through the night, with criminals targeting several farms and heading off great distances with the stolen items. Some are even shipped overseas and sold without any traceability. The ever-evolving nature and sophistication of criminal gangs makes this a severe uphill battle, but it is a battle that, I would put to this House and to the Minister, this country can win. We can defeat these gangs.

The Equipment Theft (Prevention) Act, which was my private Member’s Bill, requires retailers to register ATV sales and to ensure that vehicles are fitted with unique identifiers in the form of forensic marking. That will help police forces to track those that fall into the wrong hands. The use of GPS trackers and forensic marking on machinery is already helping farmers who voluntarily fit them to their equipment to ensure that stolen items can be recovered; where voluntarily applied, law enforcement agencies have followed leads and caught criminals before they could profit from their crimes.

Given that my Bill achieved Royal Assent in 2023, I was hopeful that the secondary legislation would have been passed before the general election was called last year, or quickly after it. That was not to be, but I am assured from commitments made in the main Chamber that those pieces of secondary legislation are coming. I would be grateful if the Minister could reconfirm in her speech that the summer is still the intended point of arrival for them, so that we can debate the regulations in a Delegated Legislation Committee.

Another common-sense piece of legislation passed under the last Government was the Police, Crime, Sentencing and Courts Act 2022, which increased the maximum sentence for hare coursing from a fine to six months in prison. It is not just the legislation that is making a difference; it is the commitment of local law enforcement. In Buckinghamshire, Thames Valley police has been working tirelessly to track down and apprehend those responsible for thefts and other rural crime.

Increased patrols, better surveillance systems, and collaboration with local farmers and rural communities have contributed to a drop in farm machinery theft in areas where such initiatives have been rolled out. I argue that, with the support of the Thames Valley police and crime commissioner, Matthew Barber, Thames Valley police is leading the way, with a commitment in the 2024-25 policing budget for an uplift in officers to tackle rural crime—in fact, a doubling of Thames Valley’s rural crime taskforce.

The national rural crime unit has been mentioned in this debate. Thames Valley’s rural crime taskforce, led by Stuart Hutchings, has been a trailblazer feeding into that. Launched in March 2022, the taskforce has made a huge impact. It has already seized more than £5 million-worth of property including vehicles, drugs, plant machinery and tools, as well as completing hundreds of investigations and supporting hundreds of people with crime prevention advice. I pay particular tribute to the national rural crime unit, led by Superintendent Andy Huddleston, who was instrumental in helping to put my Bill together and who I very much value as a friend and someone I look to for sage advice. The unit has recovered stolen property, including agricultural machinery and vehicles, worth £10 million since 2023. It has co-ordinated operational responses across the UK that have resulted in multiple arrests, as well as disrupting organised crime groups. The national construction and agriculture theft team, which sits under the NRCU, seized £3.1 million-worth of stolen vehicles and machinery in 2023 alone.

Even in the last few weeks, this co-ordinated approach, started by the last Government and hopefully continued by this one, has produced significant results. Following a series of hare coursing and associated antisocial behaviour incidents across the south-east and east of England, key arrests were made by Cambridgeshire police with support from Thames Valley police. This reinforces the effectiveness of intelligence sharing and co-ordination between forces that makes entire regions and the whole country safer by stopping these gangs operating.

To conclude, rural communities in Buckinghamshire and the whole country deserve the same level of protection as urban areas. We must ensure that our hard-working farmers are able to focus on what they do best— feeding the nation—without the looming threat of theft, intimidation or criminal damage hanging over their heads. I urge the Minister to ensure that the good words that have been said about fighting rural crime under this Government so far are turned into a solid reality that will protect rural communities—my own and all others across the country—in the coming months and years.

14:02

[Alex Brewer (North East Hampshire) (LD)]

It is a pleasure to serve under you in the Chair, Ms McVey. Last week, one of my local farmers told me that in the last two years there have been fewer thefts on his farm. I was thrilled and asked him what had led to that—and he told me that everything worth taking had already been stolen.

My constituency of North East Hampshire is a beautiful part of the country. Rolling countryside is peppered with picturesque villages, farm shops and even a vineyard. Despite being officially classed as semi-rural, it has all the hallmarks of idyllic country life. But beneath that is a troubling picture. Day in, day out, farmers face theft, fly-tipping and hare coursing on their land, and this is often accompanied by threats, violence and intimidation. These are not small, isolated incidents in rural pockets; every farmer I speak to has plenty of experiences to share.

As we have heard, these crimes are linked to and a major source of funding for organised crime such as drug trafficking and gambling. This in turn affects our towns and returns to our communities in the form of shoplifting, car theft and county lines drug dealing. Last year, an estimated 6,600 active county lines were in operation, generating an annual criminal profit of £800,000—a figure likely to be a significant underestimate. The profitability of rural criminal activity and competing county turf wars in turn increases violence and rural knife crime. There are 22 active organised crime gangs across the country that are specifically involved in rural crime. The organisation of these groups enables them to take stolen goods across international borders, and farming equipment is frequently traced to eastern Europe and Africa.

The more valuable the crime is to the criminal, the more aggressively they will protect it, and farmers are experiencing the impact. Isolated farms are exposed, and farmers tell me that they receive direct threats of retribution for reporting crimes. We know that these rural crimes are often under-reported and difficult to prosecute, especially given the ways in which police weaknesses are exploited across county boundaries. Despite the precautions of CCTV, extra locking on gates and digging ditches, the police are usually just too far away to be able to reach the farms quickly enough. The impact of Conservative cuts to policing is still being felt despite recent recruitment of new officers. We are not back to former police officer numbers and many are not experienced enough to manage the complex and violent nature of rural crime.

Hare coursing is particularly lucrative, with betting proceeds running into tens of thousands of pounds on each race. The money goes to criminal gangs and the farmers are left with damaged fields and dead hares. Criminals know the land so well that they can simply duck for cover when they see the blue lights of a police vehicle. If they do end up in a police chase, they drive so dangerously that the police are often forced to give up pursuit. The knowledge that they can avoid police action and prosecution has made criminals in rural areas, including mine in North East Hampshire, increasingly brazen. They will drive over fields of crops three or four times a season, damaging fields that support our food security, pushing farmers’ insurance bills through the roof and making farmers feel so threatened that some physically cover their heads when they move around their own land at night because they expect to be attacked.

This is a complex problem that requires a co-ordinated, deliberate and targeted solution. Hampshire was promised a rural crime taskforce, but where is it? There has been a lot of talk and very little action. All the while, farmers continue to experience an escalation of crime that is costing Hampshire at least £1.4 million a year. We know what needs to be done, so I call on the Minister and the Government to work with local communities to build up dedicated rural crime units, increase specialist training for new police officers and forge collaboration across county boundaries. Many of the solutions lie in planning policy partnerships, partnerships with industry, and prevention, as much as with policing. We have the knowledge; now we need the strategy, the leadership and the action.

Farmers have had a hard deal recently and our food security is at risk. It is time for the Government to step up to ensure the safety and dignity of our farmers and to put an end to the distress that rural communities are facing. Our farmers are the backbone of this country—it is time we gave them the fair deal they deserve.

14:07

[Patrick Spencer (Central Suffolk and North Ipswich) (Con)]

It is wonderful to see you in your place, Ms McVey. I credit the hon. Member for North Cornwall (Ben Maguire) for securing this debate.

I represent a predominantly rural constituency with low crime rates. Those low crime rates have been achieved by focusing on three things: increasing police numbers, effective police strategies and a strong local economy that has minimised the age-old problem of poverty driving crime rates. I pay tribute to my police and crime commissioner, Tim Passmore, and the hard-working people serving Suffolk constabulary. But this positive headline negates two fundamental realities.

First, it does not portray the changing nature of crime across Suffolk and other rural areas, specifically the proliferation of crime in our agricultural sector and on farms; fly-tipping, which was raised by the hon. Member for North Cornwall; poaching; damaging heritage and historical sites; crime at logistics hubs and warehouses; and, awfully, hidden crime such as sexual exploitation and domestic violence, which have tragically become all too prevalent in rural communities.

Secondly, the positive headlines ignore the fact that Suffolk constabulary has to police both a very rural countryside with a low population density over a large geographic area as well as urban crime in Ipswich. Covering very different environments and very different types of crime presents huge challenges to many rural police forces, be they in North Cornwall, Suffolk, Essex, Hampshire or anywhere else. We have already heard that the Countryside Alliance rural survey estimates that more than a third of people living in rural communities experience rural crime every year. As the hon. Member for North Cornwall said, the NFU estimates that the cost of rural crime increased by nearly 5% last year to £52.8 million.

The situation facing rural police forces is indeed tough, so in the short time I have, I ask the Minister to comment or give a steer on this Government’s intent on the following. First, earlier this week I had the opportunity to take part in Home Office oral questions, and I raised the long-term problem of looking at the funding formula for rural constabularies. I accept that the problem is long term and that the previous Government did not do nearly enough to tackle the confusing nature of our funding formula. Rural constabularies, as I said on Monday, consistently receive less money than urban ones. Will the Minister agree to publish the formula and methodology, and launch a consultation on reforming it, so that we can move on—and away from this iniquity?

Secondly, the national rural crime unit was set up by the last Government and it has made great strides, along with the Equipment Theft (Prevention) Act 2023 that my hon. Friend the Member for Mid Buckinghamshire (Greg Smith) was epic in the pursuit of. However, the NRCU has a very limited mandate. Could it not expand to tackle other forms of crime that we know proliferate in rural areas, such as fly-tipping, organised crime and rural domestic violence? At the moment, I am afraid to say that it is somewhat limited to the pursuit of crime around equipment and GPS theft, and other things that are specific to agriculture and farming. By expanding its remit, and giving it extra funding, it could support rural police forces with intelligence on tackling problem areas.

Finally, I ask the Minister what steps this Government are taking to invest in technology that will help deter and tackle rural crime? Yes, police forces do need cars and coppers. The hon. Member for North Cornwall mentioned earlier issues around the public faith in our police to turn up and tackle crime. Just over the recess, my next-door neighbour was broken into. Did the police turn up? No, they did not—it was deeply disappointing.

We need cars and coppers, but we also need drones that can react 10 times as quickly to theft on a farm. We need AI tools and monitoring CCTV that are able to pick up potential targets and suspects. Technology may be expensive up front, but the savings in the long term will be substantial. Rural crime is not just about farms and tractors. It has a real impact on people, lives and livelihoods, and it is too often underestimated here in Westminster.

14:13

[Chris Bloore (Redditch) (Lab)]

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Ms McVey. I congratulate the hon. Member for North Cornwall (Ben Maguire) on securing this vital debate. He gave such a comprehensive overview of the many challenges facing our rural communities that I will perhaps make my speech slightly shorter than planned.

Although my constituency is named simply Redditch, some Members will have noticed that I often refer to it as Redditch and the villages. That is because although the Boundary Commission for England has found it fit to change the layout of my constituency on many occasions, it has yet to update its title. In addition to the town of Redditch, my constituency is vast and contains many beautiful rural communities and villages. Tomorrow I will be walking with local councillors in Dodderhill parish, and I know the issue of rural crime will feature heavily in those important conversations when we speak face to face with constituents.

Fly-tipping remains one of the biggest concerns of my residents, local businesses and farmers, with many selflessly cleaning up after the thoughtless actions of others and the organised dumping of waste by nefarious actors. As the hon. Member for Mid Buckinghamshire (Greg Smith) mentioned, the 2023 Countryside Alliance rural crime survey showed that fly-tipping was the most reported rural crime in our communities, and 73% of respondents said it was on the increase.

A 2024 National Farmers Union survey found that more than half of respondents had experienced small-scale fly-tipping on their farm, and more than a quarter had experienced large-scale fly-tipping. Fly-tipping on private land is often under-reported because the responsibility for dealing with it rests with the private landowner and is not subject to mandatory data reporting. Will the Government reconsider that situation, so that we can understand the true scale of fly-tipping on private land across the country?

I welcome the Government’s decision to introduce in 2026 mandatory digital waste tracking to prevent bad actors from getting away with fly-tipping in our communities. Currently, there is no comprehensive method for tracking the waste produced in the United Kingdom. Existing systems are fragmented across the country and utilise a mix of digital and paper storage. The Government’s initiative will enhance the regulation of waste management by transforming how environmental regulators monitor compliance and prioritise their regulatory activities. It aims to help to prevent waste-related crimes such as fly-tipping. Hopefully, if we know where waste is coming from, we will be able to take punitive actions against the organised crime networks that are exploiting our rural communities and costing my local businesses millions of pounds.

Of course, many other rural crime issues will come up on the doorstep tomorrow, from car theft and tool theft, which has already been mentioned, to burglaries, farm machinery being stolen—often made easier by our proximity to the motorway network—and the continued incidents of antisocial crime that continue to worry my residents. That is why I welcome the Home Secretary’s commitment to ensure that rural communities will see the benefits of the Government’s promise to enhance our neighbourhood policing teams.

I finish by thanking our existing policing teams and Harvington, Norton and Dodderhill parish councils for their hard work in combating rural crime and ensuring that our beautiful villages remain great places to live.

14:16

[John Lamont (Berwickshire, Roxburgh and Selkirk) (Con)]

As ever, it is an absolute pleasure to serve with you in the Chair, Ms McVey. I congratulate the hon. Member for North Cornwall (Ben Maguire) on securing this important debate.

The Scottish Borders is home to many people who rely on agriculture, forestry and tourism for their livelihoods. These communities are tight-knit, with deep-rooted traditions, but they are also isolated. This geographical isolation often makes them more vulnerable to crime. Livestock theft, vandalism and break-ins at farmhouses and outbuildings are just a few examples of the challenges faced by farmers and rural residents.

As we have heard, rural crime is going up, and going up fast, rising by 34.9% in 2023 compared with the previous year. It cost the UK £52.8 million in 2023, according to NFU Mutual. Livestock theft remains a particularly disturbing issue, with cattle, sheep and even horses being stolen from fields or transported to markets without detection, with NFU Mutual claiming that that cost around £2.7 million in 2022.

Another crime that has been on the rise is the theft of agricultural equipment. Tractors, trailers, quad bikes and tools—vital assets for those who work the land—are all being stolen, sometimes in broad daylight. According to NFU Mutual, of the £1.8 million estimated total cost of rural crime in Scotland in 2023, £1.1 million related to machinery theft.

These are not just petty thieves but sophisticated and organised criminal gangs, often travelling up from England. [Interruption.] I apologise to colleagues—I will explain later what I mean by that. I am not coming out with an anti-English rant here. The impact of the crimes goes far beyond the immediate financial loss: it disrupts the day-to-day operations of those affected, causing distress to families, and results in significant delays that can affect the wider rural economy.

What can we do to address this issue? Much of this policy area is devolved to the Scottish Government and the Scottish Parliament. My MSP colleague Rachael Hamilton recently presented a Bill to the Scottish Parliament that would replicate UK legislation enacted in the last Parliament by my hon. Friend the Member for Mid Buckinghamshire (Greg Smith), who highlighted the importance of his legislation and what it will achieve when it is finally fully enacted. The Scottish Bill introduced by my colleague in the Scottish Parliament will help to tackle rural crime in Scotland head-on.

It is clear that rural crime cannot be tackled through traditional policing methods alone. A more comprehensive, multifaceted approach is required. First and foremost, we must ensure that police forces in rural areas are properly resourced. I pay tribute to the local police officers in the Scottish Borders who do a tremendous job in engaging with the rural community and farmers in my constituency. They do everything they can to protect those people and prevent this type of crime from happening, but their hands are tied behind their back because the SNP Government have not done enough to resource local policing. The SNP focus too much on the central belt of Scotland and do not allocate enough resource to rural areas such as the Scottish Borders. It is unfortunate that no SNP Members are here today to explain why they do not fund my local police in the way we would expect.

We must provide additional funding for policing services in rural communities, and ensure that officers have the training and equipment they need to address the unique challenges of rural crime, and we must improve communication between local farmers and the police. We also need to recognise the role of preventive measures —as rural communities become more connected through technology, we must harness that power to reduce crime. Surveillance technologies such as CCTV cameras, automatic number-plate recognition systems and livestock tagging can be used to monitor activity and deter potential criminals. Rural watch schemes, whereby communities come together to report suspicious activity and share information, are another effective means of prevention. By encouraging the use of such technologies, we can create a more proactive approach to tackling rural crime.

Although technology and policing are vital, local residents and communities have an important role to play too, so we must empower them to be part of the solution. Community-led initiatives such as neighbourhood watch schemes and local crime prevention workshops can provide valuable support to law enforcement. This effort resulted in some good news in my constituency just last week, when Scottish Borders police reported that a quad bike stolen from Jedburgh was recovered after a member of the public saw it being loaded into the rear of a van. They contacted the police, which allowed officers to trace the van, resulting in the thief being arrested.

Finally, we must work collaboratively with farmers and landowners to develop strategies for crime prevention and resilience. Farming is at the core of the Scottish Borders economy and it is essential that we protect those who sustain it. Engaging farmers in conversations about crime, sharing best practice on security and offering training on how to protect a property will help to build a more secure and resilient agricultural sector.

In the light of much of this policy space being devolved, as I mentioned earlier, will the Minister commit to ensure proper cross-border engagement? Many of the challenges that we face in the Scottish Borders come from the urban conurbations further south. Some come from Edinburgh, but the police reports suggest that Newcastle and the surrounding urban areas present us with particular challenges, so I ask that there be more engagement between the police forces on both sides of the border. That happens already, but more needs to be done to ensure that we are ahead of the game.

Rural crime in the Scottish Borders is a growing issue that demands our attention. Although the challenges are unique to rural areas, there are solutions that apply across the board. By working together, giving the police adequate resources, leveraging technology and supporting local communities, we can ensure that people in rural communities such as the Scottish Borders feel safe, secure and supported. Our rural communities are the lifeblood of this country and we must do all we can to support them.

14:23

[Lisa Smart (Hazel Grove) (LD)]

As a fellow north-western MP, let me say that it really is a pleasure to serve with you in the Chair, Ms McVey.

For too long, our rural communities have been subjected to too much rural crime, but time and again previous Governments have failed to take those crimes seriously enough, and have left police forces understaffed, under-resourced and thus ill prepared. The new Government have the opportunity to take real action to address rural crime, and the Liberal Democrats will continue to fight to ensure that it is tackled properly, starting with a real strategy and real resources for our police. We look forward to scrutinising the Government’s plans for crime and policing as the current legislation makes progress.

In 2023, the NFU reported that the cost of rural crime rose to £52.8 million—up nearly 22% since 2020. Farmers and rural business owners are left to pick up the pieces and face huge financial losses. Rural crime does not just hit wallets but takes a toll on people’s wellbeing. The NFU survey also found that 86% of farmers say that rural crime is negatively affecting their mental health, so we need more from the Government.

I am lucky enough to represent the wonderful constituency of Hazel Grove, where we have urban, suburban and some semi-rural communities. Although there are trends and similar issues that affect the whole community—off-road bikes are just as annoying in Marple as they are in Woodley—certain crimes disproportionately affect the more rural areas of my patch. In High Lane, constituents have raised with me concerns about the impact that low-population density can have on criminals’ ability to commit crime. It makes sense if we think about it. It is easier to steal a quad bike or livestock if the barn they are kept in is several miles from the nearest neighbour.

The Minister and I have spoken before about the importance of neighbourhood policing—I think she and I agree on that—but I have spoken with local police officers from my patch who tell me they just do not have the resources or the tools to catch offenders, so too many of our communities are left to deal with the consequences. That is why we are pushing for a dedicated rural crime strategy, which is sorely needed.

As the hon. Member for Berwickshire, Roxburgh and Selkirk (John Lamont) mentioned, we are not just talking about petty theft. Much of rural crime is driven by organised criminal gangs. According to the National Rural Crime Network, there are at least 22 active gangs stealing farm machinery, vehicles and GPS equipment and selling them on the black market, which contributed to a loss of over £4 million in 2023 alone. The gangs exploit the fact that police forces are stretched thinly, and often work across county and police force borders to evade capture. Criminals know that rural policing is underfunded and overstretched, so they take full advantage.

Freedom of information requests show that less than 1% of police officers in England and Wales are dedicated to specialist rural crime teams. Many police forces lack the basic tools they need, such as mobile ANPR cameras and rural drone kits, as others have mentioned. How can we expect our dedicated police to fight rural crime without the right resources?

The Countryside Alliance reports that nearly half of rural residents—49%—feel that the police do not take rural crime seriously enough, and two thirds think that reporting it is a waste of time. That is something I hear from my own constituents. Ian from Mellor reported repeated instances of people riding those irritating, illegal off-road bikes, terrorising his street. When his wife calls the police, she waits 20-plus minutes on hold each time, month after month, and nothing is seen to be done.

The Lib Dems will fight to keep rural communities safe and continue to give rural crime the attention that it deserves. I commend my hon. Friend the Member for North Cornwall (Ben Maguire) on securing this important debate. He spoke with eloquence and clarity about the issues and some of the things that we Lib Dems would like to see happen to tackle these issues. I am particularly keen to hear the Minister’s thoughts on my hon. Friend’s Rural Crime (Strategy) Bill.

There have been other strong contributions from Members today. The hon. Member for Sittingbourne and Sheppey (Kevin McKenna) made a really interesting point about the language we use when we talk about fly-tipping. I agree with him that the language we use can diminish the issue—there is a similar issue around shoplifting. It can almost sound like a little bit of fun rather than a really serious problem. Some really good work has been done on calling it “shop theft” rather than shoplifting. The hon. Gentleman also made interesting points about investigation and enforcement.

The hon. Member for Mid Buckinghamshire (Greg Smith) commented on Chequers being a low-crime area. If I were a mischievous person, Ms McVey, I might make a comment about some of the people who have stayed over at Chequers in the past, but I am not a mischievous person so that point can be left to somebody else.

My hon. Friend the Member for North East Hampshire (Alex Brewer) made important points about police numbers and the importance of a co-ordinated and targeted approach. I thoroughly endorse her comments.

I was glad that the hon. Member for Central Suffolk and North Ipswich (Patrick Spencer) mentioned some of the hidden crimes, such as the sexual exploitation and domestic violence that occurs in rural communities. That was a really important point to make at that point in the debate.

The hon. Member for Redditch (Chris Bloore)—and the villages, of course—talked about our brilliant rural communities taking matters into their own hands when they have to clean up after inconsiderate illegal fly-tipping.

The Lib Dems’ comprehensive plan to tackle rural crime includes establishing a permanent national rural crime co-ordinator to work across police forces and share best practice. We would embed a properly funded, dedicated rural crime team in every police force, which would include a single point of contact for local communities. At the very least, I urge the Government to provide specific rural crime training for police and 999 control room staff—including in metropolitan forces like my local Greater Manchester police—to increase access to the technology needed to detect and deter rural crime, and to streamline communications between rural crime offices and the communities they serve, including via WhatsApp for a quick intelligence-sharing reporting tool. That is what a real rural crime strategy would look like: real action, real funding and real support for our rural communities.

14:30

[Robbie Moore (Keighley and Ilkley) (Con)]

It is a pleasure to serve with you in the Chair, Ms McVey. I thank the hon. Member for North Cornwall (Ben Maguire) for securing this important debate, and I thank all Members for their contributions. Crime is often perceived to be an issue confined to cities and metropolitan areas. While it is true that crime rates are often higher in these areas, it is easy to overlook the unique challenges of policing rural communities.

As many Members have eloquently said in today’s debate, the reality is that rural crime is often a complex picture for the police, ranging from minor incidents of antisocial behaviour to organised criminal gangs exploiting our rural communities through machinery theft, livestock theft, fly-tipping and county lines operations—indeed, many of the issues that have been outlined today.

As my hon. Friend the Member for Central Suffolk and North Ipswich (Patrick Spencer) rightly outlined, many of the hidden challenges associated with rural crime are very complex and need the full weight of police attention. As NFU Mutual’s rural crime report indicated, the cost of rural crime has risen again this year to £52.8 million. We know that the cost is likely to be substantially higher, given how insurance policies work for those thefts.

Research from the National Rural Crime Network concludes that there is an unprecedented level of organised rural crime, with its datasets illustrating the point. This has led to the network’s focus on making sure it is working collectively with all stakeholders that are willing to interact, and on making sure that all police forces are working as collaboratively as possible.

It is therefore vital that the police have a full range of powers and resources to tackle rural crimes. It is also imperative that the Government work effectively with the National Police Chiefs’ Council to ensure that the next rural and wildlife crime strategy reflects the priorities of our rural communities.

Every Member has mentioned fly-tipping, which is an attack on our communities, nature and environment. It endangers wildlife and people alike, and the harm caused by these criminals must not go unpunished. For this reason, under the previous Conservative Administration, DEFRA grants were allocated to 58 local authorities specifically to enable them to provide additional enforcement powers.

I welcome the Government’s intention to act on fly-tipping through the Crime and Policing Bill. However, it appears that all they are offering is limited statutory guidance for local authorities. I am therefore interested to hear from the Minister about the extent to which the guidance will help local authorities by further increasing the powers available to them. What will the guidance seek to achieve? Will it be accompanied by additional financial support, like that previously made available to local authorities by the previous Conservative Administration, and will it enable further enforcement action?

Fly-tipping is probably one of the most prolific categories of rural crime, as the hon. Member for Sittingbourne and Sheppey (Kevin McKenna and my hon. Friends the Members for Mid Buckinghamshire (Greg Smith) and for Berwickshire, Roxburgh and Selkirk (John Lamont) mentioned. A survey of NFU members found that 54% of respondents had experienced small-scale fly-tipping on farmland, while over a quarter—30%—said they had been hit by large-scale industrial fly-tipping. DEFRA statistics from January 2023 show that fly-tipping is estimated to cost the economy £924 million in England alone. Worryingly, instances of large commercial fly-tipping are ever-increasing, costing local authorities in the region of £13.2 million.

[John Lamont]

Does my hon. Friend agree that, with many councils closing tips and other community services, there is almost no other option for some residents to dispose of materials? Obviously, fly-tipping is illegal, but when councils cut back services such as tips, there is often no other alternative but for residents to do that. That is not a defence, as the action is totally unacceptable, but if there is no other option, some people are forced to do it.

[Robbie Moore]

As my hon. Friend makes clear, fly-tipping hits every part of our community. In Keighley and Ilkley, Bradford council recently made the decision to close two household waste and recycling centres, which has resulted in more fly-tipping not only in those parts of the rural environment that sit on the urban fringe, but sometimes in the most isolated of rural places. That is incredibly detrimental to many of our constituents. I would very much like to see, as we have previously advocated, a single reporting mechanism for fly-tipping, which would make it easier for police forces to manage the levels of reporting. This must continue to be a priority for all Governments.

Hare coursing has also been mentioned, and intervention is crucial to preventing wildlife crime. I thank all those involved with the passage of the Police, Crime, Sentencing and Courts Act under the previous Conservative Administration, under which hare coursing now carries the appropriate punishments that recognise the damage it causes, with powers in place to impose custodial sentences, as mentioned by my hon. Friend the Member for Mid Buckinghamshire. As the Sentencing Council stated in its January 2025 consultation,

“The courts now have a fuller suite of sentencing powers, including new ancillary orders, to deal with hare coursing offences.”

Hare coursing may seem to many like an abstract issue, but for the many Members who represent rural constituencies, the offence unfortunately continues to take place. As a result of that Act, however, incidents are being reported. It is encouraging to see that, as of this Tuesday, 16 people have been arrested for the crime, but that underscores the need for the police to ensure that offenders are properly punished. It is highly encouraging that in areas where police forces are taking part in Operation Galileo, hare coursing has decreased by 40%. As I mentioned, the Sentencing Council is consulting on updating its guidance to reflect instances of this crime. I would be grateful if the Minister could keep the House updated.

Without doubt, the other big issue that has been mentioned is machinery and diesel theft. Based on data from the NFU and the Countryside Alliance, one of the most impactful crimes affecting rural communities is theft of agricultural machinery, including vehicles. Data from the NFU indicates that the theft of agricultural goods costs more than £10 million in just the last year, which is a shocking amount.

I give huge credit to my hon. Friend the Member for Mid Buckinghamshire, whose private Member’s Bill, now the Equipment Theft (Prevention) Act, received Royal Assent back in 2023. The Act provided the Government and the police with wider powers to tackle the increasing incidence of vehicle and equipment theft from farms, including of quad bikes and ATVs, focusing on prevention. As my hon. Friend has consistently indicated, there is still a need for secondary legislation. It is comforting to hear that it will potentially be laid before the House by the summer, but the Government need to pass that secondary legislation to ensure the Act includes other agricultural equipment such as power tools.

Members have also mentioned livestock worrying, which involves livestock being attacked or chased by dogs that are not kept under proper control. NFU Mutual found that an estimated £2.4 million-worth of farm animals were killed by livestock worrying in 2023 alone, a rise of 30% on the previous year. Those deaths were not always because of physical attacks or injury. With the lambing season now under way, I worry that the issue will fill all our inboxes in the spring months ahead.

The Dogs (Protection of Livestock) (Amendment) Bill, which is a critical piece of animal welfare legislation, was first introduced under the last Government, and it is now slowly moving back through the legislative process. It received an unopposed Second Reading in the House of Commons on 29 November 2024, having been reintroduced by my hon. Friend the Member for Chester South and Eddisbury (Aphra Brandreth). I ask the Government to ensure that time is allowed for the Bill to progress as quickly as possible. This much-needed legislation would provide much comfort to many of our livestock farmers, because it aims to address the growing issue of livestock worrying by enhancing protections for farmers, introducing tougher penalties for offenders and expanding police powers. It would also expand the definition of livestock, introduce unlimited fines for offenders and grant the police powers to seize suspected attacking animals and to collect the DNA evidence needed for prosecution.

I reiterate the need for all our police forces to work collectively and collaboratively to deal with rural crime. Rural crime is often isolated, but as my hon. Friend the Member for Berwickshire, Roxburgh and Selkirk indicated, we must enable cross-border interaction and ensure that police forces like mine in West Yorkshire, which predominantly have an urban base but also remote rural fringes, focus on rural crime just as much as more rural police forces.

It seems that rural crime is often a bottom priority for our local leaders and police forces. It is difficult to measure, it is often difficult to observe and it generally impacts fewer people. Rural crime can be reduced, but it requires not just investment but an understanding and prioritisation by decision-makers across all branches of local and national Government. The Opposition are determined to put the prioritisation of rural crime in focus, and I hope that the Minister will be able to match our commitment.

[Esther McVey (in the Chair)]

I ask the Minister to leave a few moments at the end for the Member in charge to wind up.

14:42

[The Minister for Policing, Fire and Crime Prevention (Dame Diana Johnson)]

It is a pleasure to serve under you this afternoon, Ms McVey. I congratulate the hon. Member for North Cornwall (Ben Maguire) on securing this debate, as well as on his private Member’s Bill, which is before the House. I am grateful for how clearly he set out the serious nature of rural crime, particularly the involvement of organised criminal gangs. I am also grateful for the contributions of all Members to this debate, which has shown great insight; Members’ passion for this issue has been very clear.

The hon. Member for North Devon (Ian Roome) mentioned the theft of a quad bike and chainsaw, and almost every Member who spoke in the debate mentioned such thefts. My hon. Friends the Members for Sittingbourne and Sheppey (Kevin McKenna) and for Redditch (Chris Bloore) spoke with a lot of knowledge of fly-tipping. They and a number of Members asked what more we can do to tackle fly-tipping.

I will take away some of the challenges that have been raised in this debate on fly-tipping, but I want to refer to the provisions in the Crime and Policing Bill, which had its First Reading this week. Through that Bill, there will be a power to issue statutory guidance to ensure consistency and robust enforcement of fly-tipping, but I very much hear the concerns about organised criminals who are involved and whether the Environment Agency is the most appropriate enforcement body. I will certainly write to respond to hon. Members’ concerns about fly-tipping.

We all thank the hon. Member for Mid Buckinghamshire (Greg Smith) for his work on the Equipment Theft (Prevention) Act. We are working hard on the statutory instrument that is needed, and I will say something about that in a moment. As the Policing Minister, I am also concerned to hear his comments on the thefts around Chequers. We also heard from the hon. Member for North East Hampshire (Alex Brewer) about the particular effect in her constituency. She spoke about hare coursing, which other hon. Members also raised.

The hon. Member for Central Suffolk and North Ipswich (Patrick Spencer) raised the funding issue. I fully accept that many are concerned about it, and I will say something about it in a moment. He also talked about the use of technology such as AI and drones, which is important in not just urban areas but rural areas.

Other issues, which we did not really touch on today, include domestic abuse and sexual exploitation, which are a problem in both rural and urban areas. The hon. Member for Berwickshire, Roxburgh and Selkirk (John Lamont) gave us the Scottish perspective, and talked about the need for cross-border work between Police Scotland and English police forces.

It is clear that this issue is important to many hon. Members and their constituents, and I take it very seriously as well. I visited North Yorkshire two weeks ago and had the privilege of meeting farmers who had been subject to farm thefts and lost quad bikes, and we talked about how that made them feel. There is the issue of safety and security, but these thefts are also a loss to their businesses. I also talked to farmers who are seeing hare coursing in their fields, crops destroyed and gates damaged about how they felt about that. I fully recognise that these are important issues.

I also met the officers who were policing that area in rural North Yorkshire, and one thing that struck me was that they talked about how the community—although it was dispersed—wanted to work with the police. Because of the nature of the geographical area they have to cover, WhatsApp groups have been set up to provide information and intelligence that they can use. That assistance from the community is quite important.

This has been a wide-ranging debate, and I want to deal with a few issues. First, it is clear that the offending we have been discussing affects the lives and livelihoods of decent, law-abiding people. Those who have been victims of crime in rural communities often indicate that they have been left feeling isolated and undervalued, and we need to change that. No victim of crime and antisocial behaviour should feel unsafe. Their concerns should be taken seriously, and if they report, action should be taken.

In the National Rural Crime Network’s “Rural Crime” report in 2024, 49% of rural residents surveyed said they did not feel that the police take rural crime seriously, and they reported a sense of dissatisfaction with and lack of faith in rural policing. That may be because of the lack of visibility of policing in rural areas or negative experiences when a crime is reported. We will not stand for that any more, which is why we have made safer streets one of the core missions of our plan for change. It is why we are committed to restoring neighbourhood policing to communities across the country, including in rural areas. It is why we are taking action to crack down on criminals and protect the public. We will be implementing the new neighbourhood policing guarantee to deliver an additional 13,000 police officers, police community support officers and special constables in neighbourhood policing roles, ensuring that every community has a named officer to turn to. Those policing commitments will not just be about towns and cities; they will also be for rural communities, speeding up response times and building public confidence in all those areas.

As we all know, neighbourhood policing sits at the heart of the British policing model. It is a critical building block in helping communities to feel safe, and the public rightly expect their neighbourhood police to be visible, proactive and accessible to their community. The national policing guarantee will help us deliver our commitment to ensuring that greater visibility and presence in all of our communities and restoring confidence in policing.

Beyond that commitment, in the 2025-26 police settlement we have committed to provide funding of up to £19.5 billion for the policing system in England and Wales, which is an overall increase of up to £1 billion compared to this financial year. In January 2025, the Government announced in the final police funding settlement that they would double the funding available to a total of £200 million in 2025-26 to support the first steps of delivering on the 13,000 more neighbourhood personnel.

I take the point about the funding formula. I said in the main Chamber that the previous Government made two—but I now understand it is three—attempts at changing the formula. We have been in government for seven months, and we have made it very clear that we have an agenda around reforming policing to make it fit for the future and to give it the structures and capabilities it needs. That will, of course, involve a conversation about funding, and that will happen as part of our reform agenda.

The major investment that I have just talked about supports the commitment to making our country’s streets, and our village streets, safer. It also reflects the scale of the challenges, which I fully accept that forces are facing and which this Government are determined to address.

I acknowledge the vital role of the national rural crime unit and the national wildlife crime unit. Those specialist policing units play a really important part in tackling crime, as well as in helping police across the UK to tackle organised theft and disrupt serious and organised crime groups. Both units have delivered a range of incredible successes. The national rural crime unit co-ordinated the operational response by several forces to the theft of GPS units across the UK, which resulted in multiple arrests and the disruption of two organised crime groups, as well as recovering over £10 million in stolen property, including agricultural machinery and vehicles, in the last 18 months alone. The national wildlife crime unit helped to disrupt nine organised crime groups, with a further nine archived as no longer active, as well as assisting in the recovery of £4.2 million in financial penalties. It also oversees the police national response to hare coursing, which has resulted, as we heard, in a 40% reduction in offending.

I am very clear about the excellent work of both units, and although we obviously have to wait for the outcome of the spending review, the Government are committed to supporting their ongoing specialist policing activities. I understand the urgency to confirm funding, but I hope we will not have to wait too much longer before we are able to update the House on this issue.

On the issue of taking a national focus on rural crime, we will continue to support the National Police Chiefs’ Council on the next iteration of its rural and wildlife strategy for 2025 and beyond. I recently met Deputy Chief Constable Nigel Harrison and Superintendent Andrew Huddleston, who the hon. Member for Mid Buckinghamshire praised in his speech, to ensure that the commitments made under our safer streets mission, such as the neighbourhood policing guarantee, will apply in rural areas.

I want to address a few issues on rural crime more specifically. The Government are committed to ensuring that countryside communities that are blighted by organised crime, rural theft and antisocial behaviour are protected. We understand the devastating consequences of these crimes and the fundamental impact they can have on perceptions of safety. Rural crime and the associated costs have a considerable impact on rural residents and business owners.

Significantly, the threat appears to be increasing. For example, we know the significant impact that thefts of agricultural machinery—in particular, all-terrain vehicles—have on individuals and businesses in rural areas, and the disruption that such thefts cause to essential farming work. That is why we are committed to implementing the Equipment Theft (Prevention) Act 2023 to fend off these thefts and the resale of high-value equipment, and we intend to introduce the necessary secondary legislation later this year. We will shortly publish the Government’s response to the call for evidence, which will determine the scope of that secondary legislation.

We understand the impact of cruel hare coursing, which many hon. Members mentioned; livestock worrying, which was also mentioned; and the serious issue of fly-tipping, all of which blight communities. In 2022-23, local authorities reported 1.08 million fly-tipping incidents. That figure, of course, excludes the majority of private land incidents, as my hon. Friend the Member for Redditch noted.

The same crimes that affect urban communities can also, of course, affect rural communities. I talked earlier about domestic abuse and exploitation, and the hon. Member for North Cornwall raised another issue we need to talk about: drugs, drug dealing and drug supply. We know that county lines is the most violent model of drug supply and a harmful form of child criminal exploitation. Gangs exploit children and vulnerable adults to move and store drugs and money, often using coercion, intimidation, violence and weapons. I reassure hon. Members that, through the Home Office county lines programme, we are targeting, and will continue to target, the exploitative gangs working in both rural and urban areas. It is absolutely the case that when someone reports a crime, no matter where they live, it should be properly investigated, with victims having faith that justice will be delivered and criminals will be punished.

In conclusion, I thank the hon. Member for North Cornwall again for securing the debate, and I thank all those who have spoken. Rural crime is, without doubt, a serious threat and must be dealt with as such. That is why we are taking the actions I have talked about and why we have the wide-ranging safer streets mission. There is clearly much more to do, but we are determined to deliver the safety and security of all our communities, rural and urban.

14:57

[Ben Maguire]

It has been a pleasure to serve with you in the Chair, Ms McVey. I thank all Members who have contributed to the debate; it is great to see such cross-party support and that all Members take rural crime especially seriously.

It was excellent to hear from the hon. Member for Sittingbourne and Sheppey (Kevin McKenna), who made an eloquent case regarding the severity of fly-tipping and how it blights so many rural communities. I again congratulate the hon. Member for Mid Buckinghamshire (Greg Smith) on his Equipment Theft (Prevention) Act, and I was delighted to hear the Minister confirm that the Government will take it forward, which is an important step.

It was excellent to hear from my hon. Friend the Member for North East Hampshire (Alex Brewer), who highlighted the violent crime that happens in our rural communities. Just because some of these crimes happen in quaint and beautiful rural settings, that does not make them any less serious. The hon. Member for Central Suffolk and North Ipswich (Patrick Spencer) made a series of excellent points, including about the need for increased technology, such as drones and AI.

I am pleased that the Minister is taking all those matters extremely seriously. I look forward to working on a cross-party basis with her and, given some of his excellent points, with the shadow Minister, the hon. Member for Keighley and Ilkley (Robbie Moore). This is such an important issue that it takes Members from across the House to tackle it.

Question put and agreed to.

Resolved,

That this House has considered rural crime.

Women’s Health

Thursday 27th February 2025 Westminster Hall

[Dr Rupa Huq in the Chair]

15:00

[Helena Dollimore (Hastings and Rye) (Lab/Co-op)]

I beg to move,

That this House has considered women’s health.

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairship, Dr Huq.

“Women’s pain is too often dismissed, recorded as emotional, misunderstood and misdiagnosed. It’s got to change.”

Those are the words of my friend, Professor Geeta Nargund—an expert in women’s health, who joins us today. They sum up well the issues that we are here to talk about.

Ahead of today’s debate, the House of Commons put out a public call for evidence. We have been overwhelmed by more than 800 responses in just a few days, which shows the strength of feeling on this matter and how much women in this country want to see more focus on and prioritisation for women’s health.

Although I will focus my comments today on the state of women’s health in this country, it is worth putting on the record our concern for the awful situation that many women around the world find themselves in. I will never forget seeing the maternity theatre run by Save the Children in Yemen, where women gave birth between airstrikes. In many parts of the world, women struggle to access the most basic care and the most basic of reproductive rights and healthcare. The struggle for better women’s health does not stop at our borders.

We have heard stories from women up and down this country of not being believed, not getting diagnosed and then having difficulties obtaining treatment when they do finally get that diagnosis. Before coming on to some of the specific areas of women’s health that need to be addressed, I want to highlight the underlying themes that are too common in so many of these cases. For too long, women have had to fight to be believed and to be taken seriously, which can result in them losing their jobs. Their relationships, mental health and wellbeing can be affected. So many women have got in touch to share their stories of going through endless appointments and referrals in search of a diagnosis. During the long waits, women wait needlessly in pain and in huge suffering. For some, sadly, the long wait has proved fatal.

As this Labour Government take welcome action to tackle long gynaecological waiting lists, we are committed to improving inequalities in many areas of women’s health. It is worth pointing out that if we lined up the number of women currently stuck on the hugely long gynaecological waiting lists in this country, that line would stretch from London all the way to Exeter. What a shocking indictment of 14 years of Conservative failure!

In their submissions, several women shared their stories of having their symptoms dismissed by doctors or clinicians as being simply due to hormones, or even as having been imagined, only for the real diagnosis of a very serious rare cancer to come later on. I share one story of my friend—the late, great, Baroness Margaret McDonagh. Margaret attended her GP on several occasions complaining of painful headaches, but they were dismissed by her GP time and again as being related to her hormones. Tragically, Margaret was later diagnosed with a brain tumour, a glioblastoma. We all wish that it had been caught earlier; Margaret could still be with us today.

Anyone who knew Margaret will be aware of what a force of nature she was. It shows the scale of the issues facing women in accessing healthcare that even she was dismissed. We have heard similar stories from women eventually diagnosed with ovarian cancer and blood cancer, with the delayed diagnosis damaging their chance of successful curative treatment.

Many women eventually diagnosed with endometriosis shared similar stories. In its 2024 report of over 4,000 women who had received a diagnosis, the charity Endometriosis UK found that almost half of the women had visited their GP 10 or more times before receiving a diagnosis. Some 70% had visited over five times and 20% reported seeing a gynaecologist 10 or more times before getting a diagnosis.

Another common barrier for women is the lack of research and data about women’s health. We have all been made familiar with the gender data gap and the consequences for policymaking by Caroline Criado Perez’s excellent book “Invisible Women”. The gender health gap is stark. The Women and Equalities Committee report published in December said:

“past research has shown that five times more research is conducted into erectile dysfunction than premenstrual syndrome. This is staggering considering that 19% of men are affected by erectile dysfunction, while 90% of women have premenstrual syndrome.”

Over-the-counter Viagra was available a full six years before chemists in this country were able to provide medicine over the counter for urinary tract infections.

It is clear that far more attention and focus needs to be given to women’s menstrual cycles and treatment for conditions related to them, including the menopause. Why is it that in over a decade of being at school in this country, I learned all about many obscure topics like oxbow lakes, but never about the menopause, which affects 51% of our population? Everyone will be affected by it, whether they experience it as a woman or their mother, daughter or wife does.

We are rightly seeing more focus given to the menopause thanks to the work of many campaigners. I want to give particular mention to my hon. Friend the Member for Neath and Swansea East (Carolyn Harris) for her championing of the cause. She and many others have rightly highlighted the shocking delays for women in accessing hormone replacement therapy treatment— a medicine that plays a critical role in alleviating the symptoms of the menopause, helping millions of women in the UK manage what is a natural life transition.

One of my constituents, Kate, wrote to me to describe her struggle to access adequate treatment for the pain that she has been suffering and how she was not taken seriously by medical professionals. She says:

“At one point, I was experiencing such a high level of pain…that I was sent by the GP to A&E with suspected appendicitis. After tests confirmed what I’d said all along”—

that it was endometriosis—

“I was ‘confronted’ by a doctor…who demanded to know why I was there, and what I thought they should do to help me. When I said that I’d been clear that I thought it was related to endometriosis the whole time, she dismissed me and said ‘we don’t deal with menstrual issues in A&E’. I left in tears and pain and have since avoided A&E despite experiencing acute pain”.

Another area of great importance in this debate is maternity services. I recently had the chance to visit my local maternity unit at the Conquest hospital in Hastings and see the fantastic care that local midwives are giving women. Midwives are working really hard and have our full support. We need to ensure that we are doing everything we can to tackle the retention crisis in midwifery and encourage more young people to enter the profession. We have heard harrowing evidence in the numerous reviews commissioned into maternity services at a number of hospital trusts of the same mistakes being made over and over again and lessons not being learned, with tragic consequences of women and babies losing their lives or experiencing traumatic births. That has to change.

The landmark report of the all-party parliamentary group on birth trauma in the previous Parliament set out for the first time the shocking impact that traumatic births have had on women and their families and what needs to change to prevent that. Often, those tragic cases were a result of an unhealthy obsession in maternity units with not intervening. I must point out to the House how damaging that obsession has been for many women. The report made many important recommendations and I hope that the Government will look closely at them.

I pay tribute to those in that all-party group in the previous Parliament for the work that went into that report and to the women who shared their stories, and to all the women that have shared their stories as part of the House of Commons call for evidence. We have looked through all of them, and I know that many Members will be sharing stories about their own constituents’ experiences.

It is also worth pointing out that some examples of brilliant women’s healthcare have been shared as well. I want to particularly mention Dr Warner from the Rye medical centre in my constituency. She was mentioned by a number of women who got in touch with me who said she was a champion of women’s healthcare; as a result, a huge waiting list of women were waiting for appointments with her because word of mouth had spread about how she prioritised this issue.

Maternity services, of course, are not the only area in which shocking scandals have been exposed regarding women’s health. We will hear today from Members who have been campaigning for justice for the women who were victims of the mesh and sodium valproate scandals. We have also heard a number of shocking stories from women, as part of their submissions, about an inability to access basic contraception, about long waits to access the healthcare that they have the right to access and about challenges in women’s mental health services.

Many Members wish to speak, so I will sum up by saying that it is clear that far more attention needs to be given to women’s health. I am looking forward to hearing the stories from other Members’ constituencies and how this Labour Government will be working to ensure that women get the support and treatment that they have the right to.

[Several hon. Members rose—]

[Dr Rupa Huq (in the Chair)]

Everyone who wants to speak should be bobbing, because we will be calculating the time limit depending on how many there are.

15:11

[Alice Macdonald (Norwich North) (Lab/Co-op)]

It is a pleasure to serve under your leadership, Dr Huq. I thank my hon. Friend the Member for Hastings and Rye (Helena Dollimore) for securing this important debate. As we have heard for far too long, women have been paying the price of an NHS that simply is not working. Women know that; in a survey that I saw, half of women said that they believed that their health was treated as second class.

Our economy is also paying the price. There are many areas that we could mention, but I want to focus on one in particular: the often very challenging journey that people experience when trying to have a baby. More than 3.5 million people in the UK go through some kind of fertility challenge, and that obviously has a huge impact on women. It can happen for a variety of reasons and is often heartbreaking. There is no one-size-fits-all approach to addressing fertility, but the National Institute for Health and Care Excellence guidelines are clear that, for women under 40 with a clinical diagnosis requiring in vitro fertilisation, or with unexplained infertility for two years, three NHS-funded cycles of IVF should be offered. The guidelines also recommend that women aged between 40 and 42 should be offered one cycle of IVF on the NHS, subject to some conditions.

Yet the reality is a postcode lottery. It is down to local integrated care boards to decide their approach, and only around a quarter of ICBs in England offer a full three cycles. The east of England, where my constituency is, has the lowest proportion of NHS-funded cycles, and my own ICB of Norfolk and Waveney offers two cycles. In other areas—north-east London, for example—the full three cycles are funded, whereas in areas such as Hampshire only one is.

Recent data tells us that fewer than 27% of IVF patients receive NHS funding nationally. When we think about our NHS, that is a huge anomaly. It means that most patients are paying for their treatment. Other factors also come into play: inequalities are stark when it comes to access and outcomes for black and ethnic minority patients, as well as for those in female same-sex relationships.

The postcode lottery needs to end. We must address those inequalities in access to NHS funding. There also needs to be greater education for healthcare professionals around fertility, regarding diagnosis and treatment, and for people themselves, so that patients have the choice and know what to do when it comes to their own fertility.

Beyond medical treatment, there is also not enough support in the workplace. We really need a whole-of-Government approach to this issue. It is not just about the Department of Health and Social Care; there are so many other areas, including, importantly, the Department for Work and Pensions. There is no legal right to time off for fertility treatment and currently, under the Equality and Human Rights Commission’s code of practice, fertility treatment is compared with cosmetic dental surgery. That means that many employers regard fertility treatment as a “nice to have”—an elective choice. Instead, it should be treated as a medical procedure that is needed.

I have heard stories of women losing their jobs simply because they have attended an IVF appointment. That needs to change. That is why I am campaigning, with Fertility Matters at Work and others, for a change in the law, so that people—women, in particular—have a right to paid time off for fertility treatment. I have met the Minister for Employment, my hon. Friend the Member for Birkenhead (Alison McGovern), to discuss the issue, and I welcome the continued engagement with the Government. I hope the Minister will meet us to discuss those demands. Many companies, including Centrica, E.ON and Cadent, already give women time off because they know it makes sense for productivity and happiness at work. Almost one in five people undergoing fertility treatment end up leaving their jobs because of the impact.

I also want to touch on miscarriage, another aspect of the journey; I know that my hon. Friend the Member for Walthamstow (Ms Creasy) will mention it as well. We need a right to time off for miscarriage before 24 weeks. It causes huge trauma, and women do not recover from it straight away. They need to be given time.

In the 30 seconds that I have left, I want to touch on gynaecology in my area of Norfolk. The situation is dire: we have the worst wait for gynaecology treatment in England. We are nowhere near the 92% target of 18 weeks: the figure is 44% in Norfolk and Waveney. Research from the House of Commons Library shows that more than 1,000 patients have been waiting for more than a year in Norfolk and Waveney, and that has a massive impact on women’s health.

I have to stop there. I wanted to talk about women’s health hubs, but I am sure that others will. There are so many issues to discuss, but when it comes to fertility and gynaecology, we simply cannot wait. Our manifesto promised that we will not neglect women’s health again, and I am sure that we will live up to that promise.

[Dr Rupa Huq (in the Chair)]

With a time limit of four minutes—the clock is counting backwards—I call Jim Shannon.

15:16

[Jim Shannon (Strangford) (DUP)]

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairship, Dr Huq. I thank the hon. Member for Hastings and Rye (Helena Dollimore) for leading the debate and setting the scene incredibly well. I welcome the Minister to her place. I think this might be her first official engagement as Minister. If it is, I wish her well in her new role. I welcome the Conservative and Liberal Democrat spokespeople. The hon. Member for Hinckley and Bosworth (Dr Evans) and I seem to spend every Thursday afternoon at about this time in these debates. It is a pleasure to be here.

I am my party’s health spokesperson, so finding solutions and discussing these issues are of major importance to me. It is important to get the full perspective, so I will give some facts and figures about Northern Ireland, which will echo what the hon. Member for Hastings and Rye said.

Many will be aware that health is a devolved issue. That does not mean, of course, that our central Government allow the devolved Administrations to be left behind. The Department of Health back home launched a women’s health survey in late 2024. The hon. Lady referred to a similar survey. The Northern Ireland survey, which closed on 31 January 2025, focused on women’s healthcare needs and experiences to help shape planning for women’s health services. Almost 80% of respondents to a separate women’s health survey undertaken by the Community Foundation Northern Ireland said that they felt unheard by healthcare professionals, and more than 30% reported that necessary services were inaccessible or very inaccessible, so we have real problems back home.

I have worked closely alongside many charities raising awareness of endometriosis and polycystic ovary syndrome care, and the challenges that women in Northern Ireland face in relation to gaining access to treatment. Endometriosis UK revealed in 2023 that there was an average diagnostic delay of nine years and five months—an increase on the eight-year delay reported in 2010—so we really have significant issues in the Province.

As of 2021, Northern Ireland had only one endometriosis specialist surgeon, and some 324 women were waiting a long time, in pain, for surgery. I ask the Minister whether it would be possible for her to have some discussions with the relevant Minister in the Northern Ireland Assembly to see how we can address these things together.

I want to speak very quickly about the menopause. The hon. Member for Neath and Swansea East (Carolyn Harris), who is not here—she is in the main Chamber speaking on St David’s day—is a real champion on this issue. If she were here today, she would be adding to this debate. In my office, I employ six women of different ages, and I have always tried to make an effort to be understanding to ensure they are comfortable in the workplace. For menopause, there are adjustments that can be made in the workplace to support women, and I encourage employers to be mindful of that, especially in more male-dominated fields, where women can feel more isolated. Women are playing their part in places where men used to have all the jobs, such as engineering. It is time that employers grasped that and came up with something to help those ladies.

I have mentioned some of the issues, but there are many, many more. As the hon. Member for Hastings and Rye said, we in this place can do more as legislators to support more research into and funding for women’s healthcare. We need to do more to ensure women can access what they need. I look forward to working closely with the responsible agencies and our respective Governments to see what more can be done. I thank the hon. Lady again for bringing forward this debate, and I look forward to contributions from many others who will add to it. I am here to help us do the best we can, and to bring a Northern Ireland perspective, because we are badly lagging behind. We need to step up and do more.

15:19

[Mrs Sharon Hodgson (Washington and Gateshead South) (Lab)]

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship today, Dr Huq. I thank my hon. Friend the Member for Hastings and Rye (Helena Dollimore) for securing this important debate, and for her excellent opening speech. There are so many things that I want to talk about, but for time’s sake, I will focus my remarks around the importance of women being believed by healthcare professionals, and the detrimental effect on women when that is not the case.

The UK has the largest female health gap in the G20, and that is attributed in part to the misdiagnosis of conditions in women. It is absolutely shocking that eight in 10 women in this country report not being listened to by healthcare professionals. Those discrepancies extend beyond the confinement of the consulting room; they actively reinforce beliefs among wider society that women’s symptoms, no matter how debilitating, are normal. That is likely to prevent so many women from seeking medical advice, ultimately putting them at risk. Therefore, that widespread problem does not just perpetuate systemic misogyny but directly impacts women’s health outcomes and endangers their lives.

Published in August 2022, the 10-year women’s health strategy for England included a six-point plan on how to improve health outcomes and the way that the healthcare system listens to women. No. 1 on the list was to ensure that women’s voices are heard. In the month of the first anniversary of the publication of the excellent Hughes report, there is no better time to speak on an apt example of what happens when women’s voices are not heard. As the chair of the all-party parliamentary group on first do no harm, mesh, Primodos, valproate, I campaigned for justice and compensation on behalf of the thousands of women who live with the consequences every day of what happens when women’s voices are not listened to. The mesh scandal in particular exemplifies that perfectly.

To set the scene, it is believed that 40,000 women in this country could be affected by mesh damage and complications, and 10,000 of those women have been left with disabilities, as the mesh has cut into their organs and nerves. I hear from mesh-impacted constituents who describe desperate situations of poverty, depression and isolation as a result. Many have lost their jobs, their marriages and their trust in a service that is supposed to be there for us when we are sick, not make us sick.

Perhaps even worse was the treatment of those women when they realised that it was the mesh that was causing their health complications. The women then report being gaslit, undermined and ridiculed when trying to sort out a mess they had no part in making, or even consenting to in most cases. Among the thousands of mesh-injured women is my own mam. I personally sat next to her at our local hospital and watched her be gaslit and undermined by her original surgeon when she first sought help with her pain and symptoms. Despite now having had her mesh removed by the wonderful Dr Suzy Elneil in London, the complications sadly do not stop there.

The way mesh attaches to our organs has been likened to the way that chewing gum gets caught in our hair, so it is almost impossible to fully remove it. As such, regardless of the removal, my mam, now 80, is still struggling and in her own words, will never be the same again. The important point is that had my mam and the thousands of others affected been men suffering horrendous pain as a result of a medical procedure, I do not believe that dismissal on such a scale would have occurred. Nor do I believe that compensation and recognition of the scandal would be such a painfully slow process.

Before I finish, I put on record my gratitude to my friend who recently retired from the other place, Baroness Cumberlege, for all her work on this issue. I will leave it there, as I am out of time.

15:24

[Rosie Duffield (Canterbury) (Ind)]

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairship, Dr Huq. I congratulate the hon. Member for Hastings and Rye (Helena Dollimore) on securing this debate, which is one of only a handful to tackle women’s health in general. Since I came to this place, a big focus for me has been women’s health, whether it is the devastating and shocking findings of the Kirkup review of East Kent Hospitals maternity care; the setting up of the APPG for birth trauma; the plight of women who now have no recourse to any healthcare or medical treatment in Afghanistan; the women whose health and wellbeing means precisely nothing to the warring factions in places such as Tigray; the tenacious mothers who have tirelessly fought for changes to sodium valproate labelling; female cancers; vaginal mesh; menopause; the mental stress and health toll on WASPI—Women Against State Pension Inequality —or 1950s women; female genital mutilation; or domestic abuse survivors. All of those and so many more are health issues that affect the majority of the population, who are female. And for the avoidance of doubt, let me be clear: by female I mean women, adult human females, the kind who have a cervix and who definitely do not have a penis.

Despite women being 51% of the population, women’s health services are frequently deprioritised, with the healthcare model based on a default male, and women existing within a system built around men. The inequalities in health outcomes between men and women are scandalous. Compared with men, women are more likely to experience common mental health conditions, more likely to be misdiagnosed, more likely to receive less pain medication after identical procedures and more likely to be undertreated for pain by doctors.

A perfect example of how women must exist within a healthcare system built for men is that of heart attacks. I have recent experience of this, with my dear friend Nicky Clark experiencing a heart attack in January. She is now tirelessly campaigning, because compared with men, women are less likely to be admitted to hospital when they complain of chest pain and they have more than double the rate of death within 30 days following a heart attack. Medical professionals know that heart attacks present very differently in women, compared with men, and yet the classic symptoms listed in campaigns are specific to men only.

Recent trends in the collection of data highlight how vital the accurate recording of this is in a medical context. Women’s health issues all arise from our specific biology. A man cannot get ovarian cancer and a woman cannot get prostate cancer, for example. It may be considered good manners, kind and courteous to refer to those who identify as a different gender in the way they prefer, but for the specific purposes of recording vital and potentially lifesaving data, we must accurately record patients’ biological sex. Otherwise, trans patients may miss being called for screening for sex-specific conditions, and that has potentially fatal consequences. That has been highlighted by Professor Alice Sullivan, who was commissioned by the last Government to tackle the issue of recording sex data, including in the NHS. Her review is due to be published, and I would be grateful if the Government could confirm the date for that as soon as possible.

In the last seven years, we have had seven Secretaries of State for Health and Social Care. It is very hard to get even on the second rung of a ladder when we have to start all over again with explanations, evidence and examples relating to a campaign or specific health issue every few months because the departmental personnel and teams change so often, so women here will keep campaigning and holding debates to push women’s health further up the agenda. I will keep working with the Birth Trauma Association, the MASIC Foundation and others to help to end the postcode lottery and extreme inequalities for black and south Asian mothers experiencing what should be straightforward and perfectly safe childbirth. I again thank all those parliamentarians, campaigners and activists who just will not take no for an answer and who fight every day to bring about better experiences for other women.

15:28

[Sonia Kumar (Dudley) (Lab)]

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Dr Huq. I congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for Hastings and Rye (Helena Dollimore) on securing this important debate. Today, I want to talk about the stigma and embarrassment in relation to women’s incontinence: stress incontinence, urinary or faecal incontinence, and double incontinence. It affects so many aspects of women’s lives: where they go out, how much time they spend out, their relationships and their sleep patterns. And of course there are the effects on their mental and physical health.

Working as an NHS physiotherapist, I spoke to women about their incontinence when I did back screening, and I heard over and over again that women felt an overwhelming sense of shame—the fear of the smell, the sense of being dirty and the feeling of always having to check their pad to make sure that it is in place and has not leaked down their leg. It is estimated that a third of women in the UK are living with urinary incontinence. That means someone in this room will have those symptoms. A third of women suffer from a pelvic floor disorder after childbirth, including urinary incontinence and pelvic organ prolapse, but only 17% of women actually seek help. I would recommend to any woman who is suffering that she seek professional help from her GP or specialist. What we do not talk about for both faecal and urinary incontinence is the psychological problems, low self-esteem, anxiety, depression, sexual problems, social isolation, physical problems, skin breakdowns, and the falls when having to get to the toilet as quickly as possible.

At the moment, we also know there is an economic case that is also very compelling. Research shows that every £1 spent on women’s health services will return up to £13 back into our emergency services by reducing women going to A&E and GP appointments.

So what do I, as a clinician, propose? As a physiotherapist, of course I propose physiotherapy. Physiotherapy is the first line of intervention preventing mild to moderate incontinence and prolapse. It is therefore essential that we have women’s health physiotherapists in hubs locally as they are rolled out. We should also take a multifaceted approach to urinary and faecal incontinence, where women’s mental health, physical health, lifestyle—their caffeine and dietary intake—and the incontinence all get addressed. We should also make sure that, when people need the most help, referrals to secondary care or a surgeon are optimal.

We also need to get the first line of treatment for incontinence on to our high streets, making it more accessible for women to get self-referrals as quickly as possible. We should not have a barrier to speaking to a healthcare professional or a GP; women should be able to go into a high street pharmacist and say, “I’ve got incontinence. What can be done to help?” I welcome the Government’s steps for women’s health hubs, but we need to go further by making sure that there is a national campaign so that women know that those hubs exist.

I say to the women listening to this Westminster Hall debate: you are not alone and there is no shame. As a nation, we cannot allow women to feel shame or embarrassment about this topic any longer. Incontinence is common, so will my hon. Members join me in my mission to break the silence, end the stigma and eliminate the anxiety around incontinence?

15:32

[Wera Hobhouse (Bath) (LD)]

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Dr Huq. I thank the hon. Member for Hastings and Rye (Helena Dollimore) for bringing forward this very important debate.

The UK currently has the largest gender health gap in the G20 and the 12th largest in the world. It is high time that we focus on these disparities. Let me start with breast cancer. Breast cancer does not only affect women, of course, but the vast majority of cases are in women, with one woman being diagnosed with breast cancer every 10 minutes.

Over the last 20 years, the prognosis for women diagnosed with breast cancer has improved significantly. Women diagnosed with primary breast cancer today are 66% less likely to die from the disease within five years. That is encouraging news, but we cannot stop there.

Detecting breast cancer in its early stages drastically improves a woman’s chances of survival, but young women face huge challenges when it comes to being diagnosed. That is particularly harmful, because younger women are more likely not only to develop aggressive forms of the disease, but to be diagnosed at a later stage when the tumours are larger and have spread to the lymph nodes. As a result, younger women have a significantly worse prognosis, a higher risk of recurrence, and a greater chance of death compared with older women.

Even more alarmingly, cancer cases in women under 50 have increased by nearly 80% worldwide over the last 30 years. In the UK, breast cancer diagnoses in women under 50 have been steadily rising, and in 2013, we saw over 10,000 cases for the first time. Yet despite that growing trend, routine breast cancer screening still does not begin until women turn 50. Why do we start so late? It is an alarming trend and the Government must look at it. I know that the UK National Screening Committee advises on the decision about who to screen, and I have been assured that it will be looked into, but I mention it today to urge the Government to make progress.

Another issue affecting many women in Bath is gynaecological care. A new report from the Royal College of Obstetricians and Gynaecologists said the UK has a “gynaecology care crisis”, with over 750,000 patients currently waiting for treatment for a serious condition.

[Helen Maguire (Epsom and Ewell) (LD)]

My constituent, a GP, got in contact after she recently had to cut specialised contraception services in her practice due to national insurance hikes and inadequate funding. The services were running at a loss, making them unsustainable. Does my hon. Friend agree that that lack of funding is short-sighted and will harm health outcomes, and that all women should have equitable access to contraception?

[Wera Hobhouse]

I could not agree more. We already have a crisis, which that will only exacerbate, so I thank my hon. Friend for rightly highlighting that issue.

My Bath constituents are at particular risk. A recent report said that appointment waits have doubled since the pandemic—another serious trend that the Government need to look at. A constituent recently reached out to me about the length of time it takes to get an endometriosis diagnosis in the NHS, which has already been mentioned today. That is not only a problem in Bath; far too many women wait far too long. The Government need to look at that.

In better news, the national maternity survey 2024 found that Bath’s Royal United hospital received a top Care Quality Commission rating over its treatment of patients. The survey found that those giving birth felt confidence and trust in staff during their care at the RUH. There was also praise for the dignity and respect people that were treated with. I am grateful to the RUH and all its staff for setting such a brilliant example, and offer them my congratulations.

In such a debate, I cannot, as chair of the eating disorders APPG, leave out eating disorders. Although they affect more women than men, it is not only women who suffer from them. One issue of particular concern is online platforms recommending harmful eating disorder-related content to young users. The Center for Countering Digital Hate, whose representatives I met this week, recently published research on the dangerous eating disorder videos recommended by the YouTube algorithms. It set up an account for a 13-year-old girl searching for body image and dieting content, and found that, of the next videos recommended by the YouTube algorithm, one in four was harmful eating disorder content. That is alarming.

I urge the Government to look into that and to hold these powerful digital platforms to account. In 2025, it is not acceptable that there are continuing disparities in women’s health and, in particular, young women’s health on this issue. I urge the Government to take action.

[Dr Rupa Huq (in the Chair)]

I am sorry to do this, but I am imposing a newly reduced time limit of three and a half minutes.

15:37

[Katrina Murray (Cumbernauld and Kirkintilloch) (Lab)]

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairship, Dr Huq. I congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for Hastings and Rye (Helena Dollimore) on securing this vital debate. In the time available, I will concentrate on the importance of delivery. The hon. Member for Strangford (Jim Shannon) spoke eloquently about the experience in Northern Ireland; it is only appropriate that I, as a Scottish MP, talk about my constituency and my constituents’ experience.

In 2021, the Scottish Government published its women’s health plan, the intent of which was absolutely sound. In November ’24, they provided the final report for this plan, measuring what it had delivered. I looked at that when preparing this speech, and in particular at one of the topics that comes up regularly in my inbox—endometriosis. People, particularly younger women, are living with pain. It is difficult to get on to the referral pathway, and long waiting times for people who do get there.

The Scottish Government’s strategy detailed a clinical endometriosis pathway for women that was launched in January ’23. It was rightly lauded at the time, but the Scottish Government have a habit of announcing and launching brand new shiny things that are then not delivered operationally. There is a review date of January ’24 on the pathway, but I cannot find any evidence of that review having ever happened. It gives a set of criteria for women to be referred to specialist services, but when someone has those symptoms and declares them to their GPs, they are still do not getting that referral.

When people actually get on to a waiting list, it is endless. Unlike the experience in England, where waiting lists are starting to come down, in Scotland they are not. My constituency of Cumbernauld and Kirkintilloch straddles the periphery of NHS Lanarkshire and NHS Greater Glasgow and Clyde. On average, 65% of people referred to specialist gynaecological services in Scotland wait more than 12 weeks for the first appointment—most wait an awful lot longer than that, as the number of clinics is certainly less than when I worked in the service 30 years ago.

One of my constituents informed me that after fighting for a year with her GP to get a referral to a specialist service, she waited over a year before deciding to go private. She travelled abroad for treatment because she could not stand the uncertainty and the pain. That is just one case from my inbox; there are many, many more. Pathways and strategies are good, but they need to be delivered. I know my hon. Friend the Minister, and I am assured that the Government are focusing on delivery, not just the strategy and a publication that can be held up. I welcome that.

15:40

[Mr Paul Kohler (Wimbledon) (LD)]

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairship, Dr Huq. I thank my former colleague on Merton council, the hon. Member for Hastings and Rye (Helena Dollimore), for securing this important debate. As the proud father of four daughters—the solitary man in a family of six—I am acutely aware of the inequalities between the sexes when it comes to health provision. The evidence is clear: our health system does not accord women equal priority to men. Their health issues are often ill researched and underfunded, with women more likely to be misdiagnosed and undertreated for pain, and have their symptoms dismissed.

From a lack of research funding into women’s specific health conditions to medical textbooks using many more images of men, women’s health is often marginalised. Women regularly report feeling unheard by doctors. Surveys have found that over 80% of women report not feeling listened to by healthcare professionals, with their symptoms being dismissed. As a constituent recently told me,

“Every woman I know has a story of their pain not being taken seriously.”

That is simply not acceptable. As time is short, I will focus on two issues that I know are key for my constituents and my immediate family.

My constituency of Wimbledon has a particular concern around the levels and availability of breast cancer screening. Breast cancer is the most common cancer in the UK, with one woman diagnosed every 10 minutes. Every year in the UK that leads to, on average, 11,500 deaths. It is, however, one of the most treatable cancers if caught in its early stages, as I saw with my wife Samantha, who was diagnosed and successfully treated almost a decade ago. Breast cancer is a disease where screening programmes work and are cost-effective.

In Merton, however, where most of my constituency lies, there are genuine concerns about the effectiveness of the screening programme, with more than 40% of eligible women failing to attend when invited. That is partly due to the fact that Merton is one of the only boroughs in London not to have a specific breast screening cancer centre, despite its being recommended by NHS reports a number of times. I acknowledge that that is being worked on, as is the potential for using a mobile screening unit in the meantime, but there is still no firm commitment. Each day’s delay means more breast cancer going undiagnosed and women’s lives being jeopardised.

Finally, as it is Eating Disorders Awareness Week, I would like to focus on how this terrible disease impacts women, as women, particularly young women, are at the highest risk. As my wife and I have seen in our own family, those who take the often difficult step of reaching out for help are too often told that nothing can be done—that they are not ill enough to be treated as the resources are not there—with an underlying message that they should starve themselves more and wait until they are thinner. They will not be taken seriously until their condition has deteriorated further, at which point it is of course more dangerous, more damaging, more difficult, and more doubtful whether they will ever recover, as eating disorders have the highest mortality rate of any mental illness.

I have focused in my speech on the two aspects of women’s health in which my family has the most experience. In finishing, I want to emphasise the broader point with which I began. We have an unequal healthcare system in which women are treated as second best and often marginalised, and that simply must change.

15:44

[Sarah Owen (Luton North) (Lab)]

It is a pleasure to see you in the Chair, Dr Huq. I thank my hon. Friend the incredible Member for Hastings and Rye (Helena Dollimore) for bring this important debate to Westminster Hall.

As Chair of the Women and Equalities Committee, I will focus on our two reports on women’s health because, as we have heard, we have some way to go to improve things. The first report followed our inquiry into the need for miscarriage bereavement leave. Campaigners from all parties have been calling for that for a number of years, and it is time the law caught up with public opinion. That is what our inquiry found and what our report clearly states.

We have tabled an amendment to the Employment Rights Bill that clearly lays out the need for time to grieve following miscarriage. It is not a sickness, so sick pay is not an adequate replacement for time to grieve when it comes to miscarriage and miscarriage bereavement leave. That is what we heard from the brave women and families who gave evidence to our Committee. When I experienced miscarriage, nobody gave me a squeeze and told me to get well; they gave me a squeeze and said, “I am sorry for your loss.” It is definitely time the Government caught up with public opinion on this issue.

There are good examples: the NHS offers bereavement leave for those who miscarry, as do Dentsu and the Co-op Group. They are not all doing it out of the kindness of their hearts. When questioned by two separate Select Committees as to how much it costs the largest public sector employer of women, which is the NHS, the response was that it is de minimis—it is negligible. It costs us nothing, and we gain everything. That is incredibly important.

The second report concerns medical misogyny, which we have already heard about. There is this constant feeling of not being listened to—being patted on the head, sent off and told to get a hot water bottle and some paracetamol and just crack on with it. Fortunately, that does not happen to men in the same way. When we were looking at a title for the report, it was said that medical misogyny seems quite hard, but it is really difficult to describe it as anything else: women are subjected to painful procedures, such as intrauterine device insertions or hysteroscopies, without any pain relief, and training is far too low in gynaecology. One of the report’s recommendations is that gynaecology becomes part of mandatory rotation. More than half the population are women, yet our medical practices do not reflect that.

Women and girls on low incomes really struggle with period poverty. For example, one in three women and girls struggle with heavy bleeding, and one in 10 women and girls experience adenomyosis or endometriosis. The average wait for a diagnosis for endometriosis and adenomyosis is eight years. That is far too long. Our recommendation is to make that two years. That is still two years too long, but it would be a vast improvement. We know it is a chunky report, but I really look forward to the NHS’s response to it.

Progress is not inevitable. This is not about making women wait any longer or about making progress at the expense of men’s health either. We all benefit when we see women’s health improve.

15:47

[Leigh Ingham (Stafford) (Lab)]

It is an honour to serve under your chairship, Dr Huq. I extend my thanks to my hon. Friend the Member for Hastings and Rye (Helena Dollimore) for securing this debate on such an important issue. I know it is really close to her heart.

For far too long, women’s health concerns have been under-represented, underfunded and misunderstood. When reading the elective care reform plan, I was delighted to see that the Government are going to increase the funding available to improve capacity to tackle the waiting lists for gynaecological treatment, on which there are 260,000 women. The Government are taking sorely needed action to ensure that women across our country receive the care, respect and medical support they deserve.

My constituent Suzanne is a campaigner for women’s health and is director of the charity Bladder Health UK. She told me how woefully under-represented urogynaecology is in the medical sector. Suzanne told me that, similarly to what my hon. Friend the Member for Dudley (Sonia Kumar) said, there is currently no NHS guidance for chronic urinary tract infections, leading to a troubling gap between the lived experiences of women and the way their conditions are treated. Urologists often fail to refer patients with chronic UTIs to uro- gynaecologists, despite the need for multidisciplinary care. Organisations such as Bladder Health UK have highlighted the importance of ensuring that patients receive comprehensive, specialist-led treatments, and I hope that will be emphasised by the Government.

More widely, we need a cultural shift in the way we approach women’s health. There is a huge gap between research and study. Friends of mine have told me that they are left scouring the internet and American medical journals to find a cure for their chronic urinary tract infections, simply because GPs’ approach to UTIs is so severely lacking. It is tough to understand the true scale of the problem because of how absent the research is.

The Government have stated that women are leading in senior positions in the National Institute for Health and Care Research, which is a really promising step. However, that must be matched by a laser-focused commitment to women’s health. We need targeted research, better training for medical professionals and a system that listens to, and prioritises, women’s concerns. Women make an immense contribution to our society—in our social networks, our economy and our institutions—yet far too many are doing so while in chronic pain and discomfort. What could they achieve if they had not held back by a scandalously poor understanding of their medical needs? If we get this right for women, everybody will benefit.

15:50

[Chris Vince (Harlow) (Lab/Co-op)]

Thank you for your chairmanship, Dr Huq. I thank my hon. Friend the Member for Hastings and Rye (Helena Dollimore) for securing this really important debate.

In my first MP surgery I spoke to Debbie, a victim of the pelvic mesh scandal. I was horrified by her story, and by how thousands of women like her not only suffered enormous, life-changing pain, but many felt they were left without a voice, that their concerns were dismissed and that they were not being taken seriously. Since then, half a dozen women from Harlow constituency have come to me with similar stories.

The issue of women not being listened to goes far further than the pelvic mesh scandal. In fact, it probably goes far further than the issue of women’s health. I am deeply disappointed—I would go as far to say I am ashamed —to hear so many women in my Harlow constituency and beyond tell me that their chronic pain is going undiagnosed. They are being told terrible things like, “It’s just your period,” or, “It’s just your hormones,” or, “You’ll be fine. Go home, put your feet up, have a paracetamol”—despite the fact that 10% of women worldwide suffer from endometriosis.

The NHS website describes the symptoms of endo-metriosis as

“severe period pain, that stops you from doing your normal activities”,

and

“heavy periods, where you need to change your pads or tampons every 1 to 2 hours, or you may bleed through to your clothes”,

and pain when going to the toilet. The World Health Organisation describes how endometriosis can

“decrease quality of life due to severe pain, fatigue, depression, anxiety and infertility.”

Some individuals with endometriosis experience debilitating pain that prevents them from going to work or to school. It is fair to say that a lay down and a paracetamol does not quite cover it. The situation is made worse by the fact that some women are having to wait for up to eight years for a diagnosis. The negative impact on women’s mental health is unimaginable—it can result in the need for antidepressants—and, as we heard in previous speeches, young girls in particular are ignored. Nicola, an acupuncturist in my constituency, told me that a number of women patients had come to her feeling that they were being ignored. Frankly, in 2025, that is just not right.

My ask to the Minister is to let this Government be the Government who take women’s health seriously. Let us have a charter that says that the concerns of women suffering from chronic pain cannot be dismissed.

15:53

[Ms Stella Creasy (Walthamstow) (Lab/Co-op)]

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Dr Huq, and to hear so many brilliantly powerful speeches. I pay tribute to my hon. Friend the Member for Hastings and Rye (Helena Dollimore) for securing the debate. I am pleased to see the Minister and the shadow Minister, but I want to say in my speech why they should not be here. A Treasury Minister and their shadow should respond to this debate, because poor women’s health is costing this country billions of pounds.

We have all talked about the stats. It is not just about lady issues or even to do with ladies’ bodies—it is how women are thought about. A fifth of women report that they were called “dramatic” when they sought help for their mental health, and 27% of those who spoke up were told that their issues could be hormonal. We understand that, but even when we are not awake we are losing this battle. A 2022 study of trauma patients found that women were half as likely as men to be given tranexamic acid, which reduces the risk of death from excessive bleeding by up to 30%—literally a life-and-death division.

Women have longer life expectancy, but we spend more of our lives in ill health. As we have said, even when we go to the doctor’s, we are not believed. It is also about provision. After all, abortion is healthcare, but it is not a given that anyone can access it in this country. Nor is it a given that anyone can access sexual health services, because they are not a requirement of general practice, even in 2025.

We do have to talk about lady parts and lady issues, but I want to make this more about wonga than wombs, because we are losing billions of pounds to our economy every single year by failing to support women’s health. Absenteeism due to severe period pain, heavy periods, endometriosis, fibroids and ovarian cysts is estimated to cost the UK economy nearly £11 billion per annum. Women have lost 14 million working days a year to the menopause. Painful periods cost an estimated £531 million in sick days. One in four women consider leaving their job due to their menopause experience; one in 10 do. If we changed that, it would generate £1.5 billion a year for the economy.

But this problem is not being talked about in terms of an economic loss. Two in five women said that their professional life has been negatively affected by the gender health gap, because they have missed out on important meetings, promotions or pay rises, but the same proportion said that they would never be able to mention it to a manager. That has to change.

We also have to recognise that experience is not equal. We know about the brilliant Five X More campaign on maternity services and the shocking experiences that women have. It is not just in maternity services where we see women from the global majority experiencing negativity. Women from those communities are twice as, and in some cases three times more, likely to experience long-term conditions that can negatively affect working, whether that is chronic pain, anxiety, hypertension, osteoarthritis, diabetes or morbid obesity.

Changing the record and making this an economic issue could change the lives of millions in this country—and help our GDP, which helps the lads as well. Every £1 of additional public investment in obstetrics and gynaecology services is estimated to deliver a return on investment of £11. In other words, every extra pound gets us 10 times more than that. The gender pensions gap currently stands at 35% because women are living longer. If we sorted out their health, they could work and we could get something back for our economy. Minister, please help us to make the case to your Treasury colleagues to get the money we need to get this country moving via the women.

15:57

[Juliet Campbell (Broxtowe) (Lab)]

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Dr Huq. I congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for Hastings and Rye (Helena Dollimore) on securing this debate.

Menopause is a biological process that marks the end of a woman’s menstrual cycle and fertility, and it typically occurs between the ages of 45 and 55. It is a universal experience for women around the world. The journey to that point is known as perimenopause, which can last for several years, and that is what I will focus on today. The perimenopausal stage in a woman’s health remains in the shadows, under-prioritised and under-resourced by policymakers, employers and healthcare providers alike. Perimenopause is overlooked despite its relevance to health, education, employment and demography.

During the transition into the menopause, a woman’s body undergoes various changes as it prepares to end its reproductive years. Typically, the transition begins in the mid-40s, but it can start as early as the mid-30s and last as long as into the mid-50s. It usually lasts for about four years, but it can extend to up to eight years. During the perimenopausal stage, oestrogen levels fluctuate, leading to irregular menstrual cycles, and as the ovaries gradually produce less oestrogen, it can cause various other symptoms.

Perimenopause is diagnosed based on symptoms and menstrual history, and the treatment focuses on managing the symptoms, including through lifestyle changes, hormone therapy—although less so—and other medications. The symptoms of perimenopause can affect daily activities. They affect work and relationships. Women in my Broxtowe constituency have told me that they have needed to take time off work due to the symptoms, which they did not understand and neither did their healthcare professionals.

We know that absences from work have a significant impact on our economy. As has been said, it can cost billions of pounds per year. Some women need to reduce their working hours, to take extended leave, or to leave the workforce entirely. This can affect their career progression, depending on how young they are. At a time when the Government are focusing on growing our economy, we cannot ignore the economic costs of not helping and supporting women in their perimenopause.

Few women seek help or attention, and due to a lack of understanding they receive very little support if they do. Their symptoms might be subtle and they will come on gradually. They might not even know that they are connected to the hormone fluctuations of the menopause transition. Many women do not even understand the signs and symptoms of the perimenopausal stage, as the menstrual cycle continues. This lack of awareness and education about the perimenopause, among both women and healthcare providers, leads to underdiagnosis and undertreatment.

I raise this issue because I would like to go back to my constituency and assure people that perimenopause will be included in any future Government policy.

16:01

[Jess Brown-Fuller (Chichester) (LD)]

It is lovely to see you in the Chair, Dr Huq, and I welcome the Minister to her place. I thank the hon. Member for Hastings and Rye (Helena Dollimore) for securing this important and timely debate, and for giving a passionate and well-informed opening speech.

Women’s health has been overlooked for far too long, and today’s discussion is an opportunity to highlight the urgent action needed to address the crisis in women’s health, with International Women’s Day due to be celebrated next week. The Fawcett Society found that nearly two thirds of women in the UK believe that their health concerns are not taken seriously, and more than half have had negative experiences with healthcare professionals. I start this speech feeling very frustrated, because during the debate I have had a message from one of my good friends who was ignored two years ago when she had pain in her leg, and she has just texted to tell me that she will now have to undergo a course of chemotherapy and extremely evasive treatment so that she can retain her ability to walk. My friend is in her early 20s—she was ignored, so I am very cross.

This is not just a health issue; it is an economic issue, as has been mentioned. The UK loses 150 million working days every year due to women’s poor health and inadequate support. If we want a healthier, more productive society, we must take action to close the gender gap in healthcare. During a drop-in surgery that I ran in my Chichester constituency, a woman told me that when her daughter started experiencing extremely painful periods, with pain outside of her period, all she could do was cry at the thought of her having to go through the same painful process with healthcare professionals that she had been through herself to get a diagnosis for endometriosis, which took that lady nine years.

Gynaecological waiting lists have more than doubled since 2020, which is the biggest increase of any medical speciality. At the end of last year, 755,000 women were waiting for treatment. Behind every number is a woman experiencing chronic pain, worsening mental health and a disrupted daily life. One in four women with a gynaecological condition will end up in A&E because they could not access the care that they needed in time, yet the NHS is failing to prioritise these urgent needs. The Royal College of Obstetricians and Gynaecologists has been clear: the system needs a complete overhaul so that gynaecological care is given the attention it deserves.

An example is St Richard’s hospital in my constituency, which does not have a specific gynaecological ward. That means that women who have gynaecological issues or have received treatment are placed across several other wards. That could negatively impact their treatment as it makes it more difficult for them to receive urgent specialised support in emergencies. Also, as the hon. Member for Luton North (Sarah Owen) said, clinicians do not have to do gynaecological training as part of their mandatory training.

Delays in female cancer care are alarming. Between April 2021 and March 2024, 2,980 people waited over 104 days to start treatment on the 62-day urgent suspected breast cancer referral route. My hon. Friend the Member for Bath (Wera Hobhouse) noted that younger women have a much worse prognosis, due to a lack of breast cancer screening before they are 50. For ovarian cancer, the average wait from GP referral to treatment is 69 days. That is one of the longest delays for any cancer. These prolonged waits are not just unacceptable—they have life-altering consequences.

For generations, women’s pain, particularly in maternity care, has been dismissed. That has created a crisis of confidence in NHS maternity services. Several investigations have revealed fundamental flaws in our maternity care and how it is delivered across England. A Care Quality Commission inspection of 131 maternity units found that 65% of them were not safe for a woman to give birth in, and studies show that one fifth of all causes of stillbirth are potentially preventable.

The CQC has also warned of a normalisation of serious harm in maternity care. That cannot continue. I held a debate on maternity services earlier this week, calling for the Government to fully implement the recommendations of the Ockenden report. That is urgently needed to reform the maternity care sector for the better.

In 2024, the Patient Safety Commissioner estimated that 10,000 women in England had experienced harm as a result of vaginal mesh implants, although campaigning groups argue that the true figure could actually be closer to 40,000. One woman in my constituency asked me to go to her home because she does not leave it; she is a victim of the mesh scandal and she is totally isolated from her community because of it.

I am a member of the First Do No Harm APPG, which builds support and raises awareness of the recommendations of the 2020 Independent Medicines and Medical Devices Safety Review, and I was really glad to hear the contribution from the hon. Member for Washington and Gateshead South (Mrs Hodgson), who talked about the women living in poverty, isolation and pain, who are so often dismissed by the professionals. The review found that those suffering adverse effects from medical treatments including vaginal mesh found a system that was

“disjointed, siloed, unresponsive and defensive.”

So many of those women are still waiting for compensation. It is a national scandal and a grave injustice. I appreciate all the work that the hon. Member is doing with the APPG.

The Liberal Democrats would ensure that medical scandals that have disproportionately harmed women in the past can never be repeated, including through the introduction of a statutory duty of candour for public officials. We believe that every woman deserves high-quality, safe and accessible healthcare. We would try to tackle the maternity care crisis by addressing chronic understaffing, improving retention and modernising outdated facilities. We will continue to press the Government to expand access to screening for conditions such as breast cancer and cervical cancer. We would also make a serious commitment to investing in women’s health research.

For too long, the gender gap in medical knowledge has left women without the answers or the treatments that they need. Faster diagnoses and better treatment pathways for women’s cancers and gynaecological conditions must be a priority for this Government, not an afterthought, because this is not just about healthcare; it is about basic dignity, fairness and justice. Women should not have to fight to be heard when it comes to their own bodies. It is time to put women’s health front and centre of the NHS.

16:08

[Dr Luke Evans (Hinckley and Bosworth) (Con)]

May I, too, welcome the Minister? Gosh, what a debate to come into—it is such a wide-ranging field. I am so glad that she has been ably supported by the hon. Member for Hastings and Rye (Helena Dollimore) who put in a fantastic effort and managed to cover so many topics.

When I came to look at this debate, I thought about the best way I could try to touch on many of the topics. I thought a physiological view might be quite useful, starting with birth. Earlier this week, we had a debate on maternity services. The point is this: there is an explicit risk in pregnancy and birth, but we should do all we can to mitigate those risks. We know from the last 10 years that the maternal mortality gap has reduced from five times to two times, but much more can still be done. I am pleased that we heard that the Government are working through getting the Ockenden recommendations in place.

That leads me on to talk about postpartum depression, breastfeeding, and supporting recovery post-caesarean section delivery or episiotomy. We have heard about infertility and miscarriage. We have not even mentioned looking after a newborn. These are tough things to go through.

Young girls have to deal with body image, which is a personal hobby horse of mine. We heard about eating disorders. In 2023, we saw an investment of £4 million into new research, but there is still much more to do. Of course, that leads us to cosmetic surgery and when we need to regulate there. There is the issue of menarche and managing periods, not only from the contraceptive angle, but what to do when they are too heavy, too painful, irregular or do not happen at all. All these things require time, dedication and compassion to find out what works for that individual and what can be done to support, inform and empower that woman.

Returning to medical problems, Members have spoken eloquently about incontinence, as well as polycystic ovary disease and endometriosis, which are really common problems that are hard to diagnose and even harder to treat. I hope that the roll-out of 161 community diagnostic centres, which the new Government commit to carrying on with, make a giant leap forward in allowing women to get the diagnosis they need.

There is, of course, screening. We talked about breast screening, but cervical screening has not been mentioned. Screening is so important, and I urge every woman to consider it. What about the successful roll-out of the HPV vaccine, over a decade ago, to dramatically reduce cervical cancer? From 2019, it has also been offered to boys to help reduce that further. We need support for both lobular and ductal breast cancer. We have not really mentioned ovarian cancer and how difficult it is to pick up, often happening far too late.

Working through life, there is the menopause and the impact it can have on women: confusion, depression, anxiety and sexual dysfunction. It is still not well understood. The last Government, along with many from across the House, campaigned for better understanding to create a supportive environment. This is still developing, and long may it do so. Choice is hard too. Non-HRT or HRT? There are pros and cons. Of course, we had difficulties with shortages during the pandemic. Linked to the menopause, and not mentioned today, is the risk in old age of osteoporosis and fractures. That is critical. We know that women are significantly more affected by that than men, and prevention is much better than dealing with a broken hip or a broken wrist. I could go on.

Women’s health was rightly a priority under the last Government, which had almost 100,000 responses to their call for evidence to deal with the gender health gap. The last Government published the country’s first women’s health strategy in 2022, and expanded specialist women’s health hubs across England to improve access and quality of care for services such as menstrual problems, contraception, pelvic pain and menopause. They improved access to hormone replacement therapy and addressed barriers to health services faced by women who suffered from trauma from things like domestic abuse. Further still, the Government appointed Dame Lesley Regan as the first women’s health ambassador to step up efforts to improve women’s health, and Helen Tomlinson as a cross-Government menopause ambassador to find out the experiences of women employed in different sectors.

Turning to the issues here and now, I have some questions for the Minister, and some context. The Royal College of Obstetricians and Gynaecologists wrote to me on 29 January, just before the announcement by the Labour Government, with the following:

“We express our deep concern about the speculation of the Government’s decision to remove the target for all ICBs to set up and run a women’s health hub in the planning guidance”.

It went on to say:

“Removing the target may well lead to women’s health hubs being closed down, and a worrying rollback on the progress made in improving women’s health services for your constituents. It is self-defeating for the UK Government to close women’s health hubs when they are a clear success story for reducing waiting lists and moving care closer to home—they should instead be given ringfenced funding and expanded.”

I know the Minister cares deeply about improving women’s health, but it is hard not to see this is as a potential row back.

My first question is: what commitment can the Government give, in the light of dropping these targets, that women’s health remains a priority? Secondly, to help demonstrate this commitment, would the Government consider the call by the Royal College of Obstetricians and Gynaecologists for sustained investment in expanding women’s health hubs? Considering what we have heard today from the hon. Members for Walthamstow (Ms Creasy) and for Luton North (Sarah Owen), would the Department make a request in the spring statement and spending review to see that this would be the case? If not, why not?

I have spoken in the past in this Chamber about learning from previous work, so my third question is, how many times have the Government met with the women’s health ambassador since the general election? Can the Minister set out how this role would work alongside the Government’s new menopause ambassador? I hope that in asking these kinds of questions, it will kickstart the system into looking at how we can improve women’s health.

In the short time I have left, it would be remiss of me not to pick up on some of the key issues at the moment: osteoporosis, menopause, workforce and waiting lists. There has been some concern about the Labour Government’s commitment to their own promise of universal fracture liaison services by 2030. The Royal Osteoporosis Society has said:

“We all want to believe that Ministers will honour their promise, but people with osteoporosis tell us their faith is waning. It doesn’t need to be like this—we appeal to Wes Streeting to restore trust and confidence in the specific, measurable pledge that he campaigned on, and for which many people voted.”

[Sonia Kumar]

Will the hon. Member give way?

[Dr Evans]

I am really sorry; I am tight on time. Question No. 4 is, could the Minister kindly clarify, confirm and commit to that promise? If not, why not?

On the menopause, when the women’s strategy was announced in 2022, the then shadow Health Secretary—now the current Health Secretary—said:

“I challenge the Secretary of State to go further than the proposal he outlined to train incoming medical students and incoming doctors. What plans do the Government have for clinicians who are already practising? We need to upskill the existing workforce, not just the incoming workforce. However, let us be clear: informing clinicians is no good if we do not also improve access to hormone replacement therapy, so where is the action in the strategy to end the postcode lottery for treatment?” —[Official Report, 20 July 2022; Vol. 718, c. 977.]

As we are now eight months into the Labour Government, question No. 5 is, when will the strategy document he talked about be produced and presented to the House? Has he made an assessment since July 2024 of HRT medication access in terms of locality?

Turning to workforce, we know that the demand for women’s services is outstripping the supply of generalist and specialist support. The Royal College of Obstetricians and Gynaecologists has highlighted ongoing problems with maternity workforce staffing and agreed that the NHS long-term workforce plan was a good first step on the way to properly staffed maternity services. Therefore, question No. 6 is this: we know that the Government will be looking at a refresh of the plan this summer, so will the Minister give an undertaking today that women’s health will be a priority in both primary and secondary care? Will she update the House on the obstetrics workforce planning tool, which the DHSC commissioned to help maternity units calculate staffing requirements, and when it will be rolled out across the country?

Given that time is tight, I will close by saying that I have heard it said that a healthy woman means a healthy family, a healthy community and a healthier world. That is hard to dispute that; it is now for the House to deliver it.

[Dr Rupa Huq (in the Chair)]

Finally, for what we think is her first outing as a Minister in Westminster Hall—although she is a veteran of the Chamber already— I call Ashley Dalton.

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

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairship, Dr Huq. I congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for Hastings and Rye (Helena Dollimore) on securing this really important debate on women’s health. She and all Members who have participated today have raised a number of important points.

Let me begin by agreeing that reading the Ockenden review is harrowing, and progress on women’s health has been far too slow. I want to address some of the key issues that Members have raised; I will attempt to cover as many as I can, but if I miss anything, please get in touch, and I will endeavour to fill any gaps after the debate.

My hon. Friend the Member for Hastings and Rye raised the story of our very good friend Margaret McDonagh and how her experience feeds into the medical misogyny that has been highlighted on a number of occasions. In addition, it was very powerful to listen to my hon. Friend the Member for Washington and Gateshead South (Mrs Hodgson), who put an important focus on women’s voices and said how important it is that those are heard in this space. Those voices can lead to the important cultural shift that my hon. Friend the Member for Stafford (Leigh Ingham) raised and that underpins all of this.

The hon. Member for Strangford (Jim Shannon) and my hon. Friend the Member for Cumbernauld and Kirkintilloch (Katrina Murray) spoke about the devolved Governments. We are committed to ensuring that we have closer working between the UK and devolved Governments so that we can share insight and best practice and cut waiting lists right across the UK.

My hon. Friend the Member for Cumbernauld and Kirkintilloch and the hon. Member for Wimbledon (Mr Kohler) raised issues relating to eating disorders and women in online content. The Government inherited a broken NHS, in which patients wait too long for eating disorder treatment. The 10-year plan will overhaul the NHS, and the Online Safety Act 2023 will prevent children from accessing harmful online content on eating disorders.

The hon. Member for Canterbury (Rosie Duffield) raised the differences in heart attack symptoms between men and women. NHS staff can now access guidance through the British Heart Foundation, and there are learning sessions available to support training. NHS England ensures that there is clear messaging on atypical symptoms in women in all public campaigns, and training on heart attacks and the identification of gender and sex are a core part of the cardiology curriculum. The hon. Lady will be aware that the National Institute for Health and Care Research has a very clear definition of sex and gender, which has an important impact on delivering the right healthcare to everybody.

I was really interested to hear from my hon. Friend the Member for Dudley (Sonia Kumar), who has expert knowledge of perinatal pelvic health services, which are being rolled out across England to ensure that women have access to physiotherapy for pelvic health issues during pregnancy and for at least one year after birth. Those services incorporate a range of interventions aimed at improving the prevention and identification of perinatal tears and other perinatal conditions.

The Chair of the Women and Equalities Committee, my hon. Friend the Member for Luton North (Sarah Owen), spoke about the Committee’s recent report, which we welcome and take extremely seriously. We are grateful to everyone who gave their time and expertise to the inquiry, and to the Committee for its thoughtful recommendations. My Department has looked closely at the findings, however chunky they are, and has worked with NHS England to consider the recommendations and develop a Government response. I assure her that it will be published very soon.

The hon. Member for Epsom and Ewell (Helen Maguire) spoke about contraception. Let me make one thing really clear: we are committed to ensuring that the public receive the best possible contraceptive services, which are vital in helping women to manage their gynaecological health. Since 2023, the NHS Pharmacy Contraception Service has allowed pharmacists to issue ongoing supplies of contraception that have been prescribed by GPs and sexual health services. That service was relaunched in December 2023 and will be continued.

We have also talked about fertility issues. Access to fertility treatment across the NHS has been varied across England, and funding decisions are made by integrated care boards, based on the clinical needs of the people they serve. We expect those organisations to commission fertility services in line with the guidelines set by the National Institute for Health and Care Excellence. We recognise that provision is variable across England, and we intend to support ICBs to implement the updated evidence in the revised guidelines to benefit all affected groups.

We recognise the significant physical and psychological consequences of birth trauma and the devastating impact it has on women. I thank hon. Members for their contributions to the report of the APPG on birth trauma—the hon. Member for Canterbury was intrinsic to it. The Government will ensure that lessons are learned from the recent inquiries and investigations, including the APPG report, and that the experiences of women and their families are listened to and woven into our efforts to improve services.

For too long, women have been let down by their healthcare. The system is broken—it does not work for them. This Government are committed to fixing women’s health as a key part of building an NHS fit for the future. As a first step, we have delivered 2 million more appointments since July, in line with our manifesto commitment of delivering 2 million more appointments in the first year. We have achieved that seven months early. That includes appointments for breast cancer care, for gynaecological conditions such as endometriosis and for many other conditions.

However, we are still nowhere near satisfied with the state of women’s healthcare. Kate’s story, which my hon. Friend the Member for Hastings and Rye shared, is testament to that state.

[Wera Hobhouse]

I do not mean to be pompous, but the Minister did not mention me—it was me who mentioned the online harm.

[Ashley Dalton]

I am getting there.

[Wera Hobhouse]

May I ask whether the Minister would meet the eating disorders APPG to talk about online harm, particularly in relation to sufferers of eating disorders?

[Ashley Dalton]

I thank the hon. Member for her intervention, and I will get there and mention her. I am more than happy to have that conversation with her.

For the benefit of the shadow Minister, the hon. Member for Hinckley and Bosworth (Dr Evans), I would like to clear something up and dispel some misinformation. We have not scrapped the women’s health strategy, nor have we abandoned women’s health hubs—far from it. We are using women’s health hubs to beat the backlog. The future funding decisions around those health hubs will be taken in due course. I can also confirm for the shadow Minister that Baroness Merron is the Minister with responsibility for women’s health, and she regularly meets Dame Lesley, the women’s health ambassador. Dame Lesley attended the 10-year plan round- table in January, which was chaired by Baroness Merron. I can reassure the hon. Gentleman on that.

When we came into government, we inherited an appalling legacy of nearly 600,000 women on gynaecology waiting lists. That is why the Prime Minister kicked off 2025 with our elective reform plan. The plan states our commitment to offer women gynaecological care closer to home, an approach that has been pioneered by those women’s health hubs. As of December, nine in 10 integrated care boards had at least one women’s health hub, and some have more.

[Alice Macdonald]

In Norfolk we had a virtual health hub. When we look at whether the health hubs are working and share best practice, can we talk about whether that is the best format for a health hub or whether a physical one would be better?

[Ashley Dalton]

That is something that we will take on board and consider as we move forward.

We have heard a lot about menopause and peri- menopause from many Members, including my hon. Friend the Member for Broxtowe (Juliet Campbell). We are supporting women through the whole menopause process. Menopause and perimenopause symptoms can be wide-ranging and debilitating. NHS England is developing a range of tools and interventions to help upskill more GPs in menopause care, including awareness of mental health symptoms during menopause, and developing a menopause workforce support package for employees. I can also confirm that we are using community diagnostic centres to pilot pathways for women who suffer from post-menopausal bleeding.

[Dr Evans]

Can the Minster comment on HRT medication and making sure that there is equal access to it across the country?

[Ashley Dalton]

I will come back to the hon. Gentleman on that, but I thank him for raising the issue.

We have also talked a lot about what underpins this topic: research and innovation, and my hon. Friend the Member for Stafford raised that point in particular. We are taking strides in vital research. By the spring, the NIHR expects to launch its sex and gender policy, which will ensure that research is designed, conducted and reported in a way that accounts for sex and gender—a point raised by the hon. Member for Canterbury. That will support our understanding of how women might be impacted differently by health conditions.

The hon. Member for Bath (Wera Hobhouse) talked about eating disorders and also about breast cancer, which a number of people raised. As I am sure the hon. Lady appreciates, that issue is important to me, as I was diagnosed with a breast cancer when I was under the age of 42. It is an important issue.

Health in the workplace continues to be an important issue for us, and we are dealing with that through our make work pay strategy and the Employment Rights Bill, which will set out some of those steps, including support for women experiencing menopause in the workplace.

On sodium valproate and pelvic mesh, the Cumberlege review made nine recommendations, of which the then Government accepted seven. I can confirm that the national pause remains in place.

16:30

Motion lapsed, and sitting adjourned without Question put (Standing Order No. 10(14)).