Arrangement of Business
The Deputy Chairman of Committees (Viscount Stansgate) (Lab)
Good afternoon, everyone, and welcome to an afternoon of four Questions for Short Debate. If there is a Division in the Chamber, we will adjourn for 10 minutes—but, as you can see, they are on Amendment 1. It will be a long day and there will not be any Divisions to interrupt us. As this is the last Grand Committee before the Summer Recess, I wish everyone involved in Grand Committee work a relaxing summer and I look forward to seeing you again in September.
National Accident Prevention Strategy
(1 day, 20 hours ago)
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Baroness Crawley
To ask His Majesty’s Government what plans they have to create a national accident prevention strategy, as set out in the report by the Royal Society for the Prevention of Accidents, Safer Lives, Stronger Nation: Our Call for a National Accident Prevention Strategy, published November 2024.
Baroness Crawley (Lab)
I begin by thanking noble Lords for taking part this afternoon. It is really appreciated.
I was recently asked to be a vice-president of the Royal Society for the Prevention of Accidents, RoSPA. I am delighted to see my noble friend Lord Jordan here, as he is the lifetime president of that same organisation. There you are—forever young.
This is a body that has been at the forefront of accident prevention for more than 100 years, with landmark campaigns leading fairly directly to legislation, from its campaigns in 1917 for pedestrians to face oncoming traffic through to the Highway Code and the Green Cross Code, cycling proficiency and compulsory seatbelts in 1981—gosh, it seems so long ago now—as well as banning hand-held mobile phones while driving, up to the report in front of us today. Imagine the entire O2 arena, with all 2,000 seats filled; now imagine that crowd wiped out, not once but every single year. That is how many lives we estimate we lose in the UK to accidents. These are not rare events; they happen every day in our homes, on our roads, and in our workplaces and communities.
The Royal Society for the Prevention of Accidents reports accidental death rates surging by 42% over the past decade. It was that figure that led me to think that we need a wider parliamentary debate about this. This is not just a statistic, it is a crisis: a national failure of co-ordination, leadership and investment. I say to my noble friend the Minister, whom I respect greatly, that we really need government to champion a national co-ordinated approach to accident prevention, because the current system is just not working.
As the Minister will know, responsibility for accident prevention is currently fragmented across multiple departments: Health, Transport, Education, Housing and so on. This fragmentation leads to gaps, duplication and missed opportunities. There is a chart in RoSPA’s report, of which there are copies on the back table for anyone who wants to have a look, of the overview of government departments and agencies responsible for accident prevention, and it looks like the web of a crazed and demented spider. I would bet that no one in this Room could make head or tail of it.
I believe, too, that accident prevention aligns directly with this Government’s priorities. The NHS 10-year plan, Fit for the Future, for instance, rightly focuses on prevention and early intervention—but injury prevention must be part of that, and part of the vision of that policy, and I am not convinced that it is. Reducing unintentional injuries will lower emergency admissions, free up NHS capacity and improve population health outcomes.
We also know that accidents disproportionately affect people from more deprived backgrounds, making them a clear example of the health inequalities that the NHS 10-year plan sets out to tackle. RoSPA calculates that the cost to the NHS of treating accidents is nearly equivalent to the cost of treating obesity, and twice the cost of treating conditions related to smoking.
The Get Britain Working White Paper that the Minister will be very familiar with identified 2.8 million people out of work due to long-term sickness. Many of these cases stem from preventable injuries. A more co-ordinated approach in government to health and employment accident prevention will keep more people healthy and in work. It will reduce benefit dependency and ensure that local authorities are more financially supported in designing safer communities.
Of course, we have the Employment Rights Bill going through the House of Lords at the moment. It offers a real opportunity to improve workplace safety. Day-one sick pay rights will reduce presenteeism and injury risk. The new fair work agency will enforce safe working conditions and whistleblower protections.
As well as the opportunities inherent in the Government’s agenda, there are also opportunities for getting better co-ordinated data into the area of accident prevention. At present, data is siloed, inconsistent and incomplete. Without robust data, we cannot target interventions, measure impact or hold systems to account. Australia’s national injury surveillance unit shows what is possible and it is a good example for us. It would make sense for the Government to encourage standardised reporting across the four nations. At the moment, we cannot compare data across England, Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland. We should invest in real-time data infrastructure, as well as having an annual injury report published.
RoSPA’s headline call to government is for a national accident prevention strategy led by a named Minister, perhaps a departmental Minister who already has a portfolio, or a Cabinet Office Minister. I would like to put a few questions to my noble friend the Minister before I close. Does she agree with a named Minister heading up co-ordination? Does she think this is an area for co-ordination of data across the four nations of the UK? What provisions in the NHS 10-year plan actually address accident prevention? Can the Get Britain Working reforms be levered to reduce injury-related worklessness? Does she agree with empowerment through education, embedding accident prevention across the whole life course, from early years to old age, in schools, workplaces and communities?
I will leave noble Lords with RoSPA’s current costings for serious accidents. I found it slightly unbelievable when I first read it. Having had a deeper dive, with the help of the RoSPA team, who are sitting at the back, I understand that it is probably a conservative estimate. It estimates £12 billion as the annual cost of accidents, which is evenly split between the cost to the NHS and the cost to businesses.
Around £6 billion is attributed to NHS treatment costs, based on hospital bed days and A&E attendances, and the remaining £6 billion reflects lost productivity, calculated from working days lost due to injury, post-discharge recovery and time taken off by carers, adjusted to include the wider business impact of staff absence. For an economy in search of growth and a population in search of answers to needless and rising injury and death, this needs serious investigation.
Baroness Jones of Moulsecoomb (GP)
I congratulate the noble Baroness on bringing forward this debate. It really is about time, because this issue comes in, goes out again and somehow is never really fixed or sorted. I declare an interest as the president of the Road Danger Reduction Forum.
The one problem I have with the accident prevention strategy—I apologise to the RoSPA team, its president and its vice-president—is that we should never use the word “accident”, because accidents very rarely happen. There is almost always a cause. It is a problem with roads, vehicles or drivers. Survivors who have suffered road traffic crashes or collisions find it very difficult to stomach the fact that they are called accidents. An accident is something where you say, “Oops, I’m so sorry that happened. I didn’t mean it”. Actually, often these incidents are utterly preventable, so when we are talking about traffic, collisions and injuries, which are incredibly serious and a blight on society, we should really not be saying that they are unavoidable, which is almost what “accident” suggests.
I have been working on this issue for 25 years. When I was in the London Assembly, when Ken Livingstone was mayor, we worked very hard to reduce the number of deaths and injuries on London’s roads. By and large, we did a very good job. It is about joined-up thinking. As the noble Baroness said, this has to cut through all departments and be a common language, so that it is possible to make progress.
I got the Met Police to stop using the word “accident”. Now the Met and some other police forces do not talk about “road traffic accidents”, as they used to, but “road traffic collisions”, RTCs. This is a direct result of the work we did in London on road deaths and injuries. I often say “crash”. I was a victim of two crashes as a cyclist. The first time, on a zebra crossing, I got knocked off my bike across the middle of the road, past all the signs, and landed on my wrist. I still have a very impressive scar from that. The second time, less than a year later, I got knocked off by a cyclist and got only a black eye, so that was good. I went on “Newsnight” that night, and they had to put huge amounts of make-up on my face and film me only from one side.
When looking at these collisions, deaths and injuries, we have to look at multiple things. It can be the design of the roads or a lack of police enforcement, which comes and goes. When I was working on this in the London Assembly, we made sure that the road traffic element of the Met Police was very active and supported. Every year, people talked about cutting its budget, but we managed to stop those cuts. Crashes can also be the result of badly maintained HGVs, a lack of segregated and safe cycle paths, drugs, drink or inattention. All these things are factors, and we have to be clear that you have to tackle them in different ways and with a joined-up approach.
I was the Mayor of London’s road safety ambassador for seven years. It was a bit of a joke title at first; Ken gave it to me because he thought that I would not do much with it, I think, but actually we were very successful. In those seven years, we saw a big decline in the number of injuries and casualties on our roads. Some of that was due to the introduction of 20 mph zones, which had quite a big impact in terms of traffic calming and people being aware of the fact that cars really ought to drive more slowly and more carefully—this happened across London—and some of it was due to the extra resources for the traffic police, which was a very important component of driving down deaths and injuries.
My point is that it took political will but also money and, to some extent, research to understand how these things happen. The car lobby often did not like the things that we did, but the fact is that it worked, and people could see that it worked. The 20 mph zones became fairly well accepted in London, and segregated cycle lanes worked and made people a lot happier. The measures reduced the number of people who were killed or injured, obviously, but they also reduced the number of grieving family members and partners who had to face the fact that their loved ones were dead and gone or might never be the same again—that is, they might never walk or speak again. As the noble Baroness, Lady Crawley, said earlier, they also reduced the costs to the NHS and the care system of looking after thousands of people with life-changing injuries; on a national scale, that is absolutely huge. So, having an accident prevention strategy is worth while, but only if departments are willing both to put resources and safeguards in place, in order to make things happen, and to work together; that is a really important part of it.
On health inequalities, the poorer you are, the more likely you are to live next to a large, dirty road such as the M25, which, of course, gives you not just a huge amount of traffic and air pollution but danger.
The Labour Government are right to keep repeating that prevention is better than cure, but I am not sure that they recognise just how much that involves challenging vested interests. I know that this is not easy, whether it is the car lobby whingeing about the police doing something on our lawless roads; the development industry taking shortcuts with the regulations around fire safety; or people drinking or taking drugs and then driving, thinking that the police have better things to do. For me, it is hard to think of anything better that you can do with your time—particularly for politicians—than prevent deaths and injuries. The well-being of the people has to be our first job. So I hope that Ministers will adopt this call for a crash prevention strategy, but I also hope that they will learn the big lesson from Grenfell Tower and our lawless roads: you have to face down vested interests in order to save lives and progress this agenda.
I very much support the asks from the noble Baroness, Lady Crawley, for a named Minister and to co-ordinate the national data. In the NHS 10-year plan, where do road crash victims come in? I do not know much about the Get Britain Working reforms; they sound okay. Of course, education from primary school onwards is absolutely crucial. I would be happy to be the Minister named to do this job for the Government, because I am very well qualified and I am sure that I could get on with the whole Labour Government.
Lord Jordan (Lab)
My Lords, it is a privilege to follow the powerful remarks—we have a problem; it sounds as though my mic is reverberating—of my noble friend Lady Crawley. She laid out the scale of the challenge that we face in accident prevention. I will not repeat her words, but I hope to try to reinforce them. The astronomical costs to the nation of the rising toll of accidental deaths and injuries, as well as the unacceptable costs to every person or family whose lives are ended or wrecked by accidents, should shake any Government into saying, “Enough is enough”—but they do not and they have not.
This crisis has been 20 years in the making, but it has to be faced up to now. Yes, the solution is challenging, but if Labour’s manifesto commitment to
“embed a greater focus on prevention throughout the entire healthcare system”
is to be realised, it must be acted on where it is most needed, and nowhere is it more starkly needed than in the prevention of accidents. It can be done; it has been done before—and by a Labour Government.
The Health and Safety at Work etc. Act 1974 was a turning point in a long and deadly history of industrial accidents. Since its introduction, workplace fatalities have fallen by nearly 80% and non-fatal injuries have been more than halved. These are not just statistics; they are proof that accidents can be prevented by life-saving laws. As a result of the success of the 1974 Act, the centre of gravity in the world of accidents shifted from the workplace to the home and from factory and building workers to vulnerable ordinary people who spend most of their time confined to their house. Statistically, the home is now one of the most dangerous places to be in the UK.
When the 10-year National Health Service plan came out, RoSPA expected—indeed, hoped—that it would seriously address the needs of one of the NHS’s biggest customers: accident victims. But it does not; in fact, the document is virtually an accident-free zone. In Fit for the Future, Wes Streeting has an afterword: “Be the Change”. I say to him and the Labour Government: make a national accident prevention strategy the afterword and RoSPA’s Safer Lives, Stronger Nation report the formula for radical and proven life-saving change.
RoSPA and other safety organisations want to play their part in delivering such a strategy. We know the world of safety; we know what works. For over a century, we have been delivering accident prevention and, after decades of research, trials and pilots, we know that education, engineering and enforcement can and must work together. We also know that Governments have had the means to make a difference to the chronic and appalling problem of accidental death and injury. But, in politics, leadership is everything, and on this issue it has been lacking for 40 years.
I spent more than 20 years of my working life on the shop floor in manufacturing. That was time enough to see accidents up close and ugly, traumatic enough to make my first representative job that of safety shop steward, deep-lasting enough to make me later join Britain’s oldest and most effective safety organisation, RoSPA, and experience enough to know that the 10-year National Health Service plan presents a real opportunity for Labour. It can change the depressing recent history of increasing accidents that target in particular the elderly, the very young and the most disadvantaged people. The Labour Government now need to send out a clear signal to the whole country not only of intent but of priority that there will be a national accident prevention strategy and that a Minister will lead it. That sort of leadership will tell the British people they now have a Government who will treat the colossal cost of accidents, in lives and resources, with the urgency it deserves.
Viscount Younger of Leckie (Con)
My Lords, I, too, thank the noble Baroness, Lady Crawley, for securing this important debate. She is rightly concerned about the importance of ensuring that people’s safety should be considered, managed and overseen, not just locally but nationally, and that more should be done by government. The debate takes me back to various jobs that I held in the 1980s, when I worked in personnel in various woollen mills around the country. As the Committee can imagine, health and safety was a key part of that responsibility, on the back of the Health and Safety at Work etc Act 1974, as the noble Lord, Lord Jordan, said.
Accident prevention should be a key facet at the heart of our regulatory system and considered to be an integral feature of so many aspects of the way in which we lead our lives, at home and in the workplace. Rather like an insurance policy, we should always seek to minimise the risks. We should also take greater account of how our lives are changing—and I will say more about this later. Safety should be constantly and continuously considered in the manufacturing, purchase and use of products that we use every day, including those imported from abroad. In this respect, to what extent are imported goods regularly inspected and monitored and standards upheld? That is my first question to the Minister.
I turn to the report itself and the findings by RoSPA. As has been said, the results are worrying—and rather astonishing. First, as has been said by other noble Lords, you are substantially more likely to suffer a serious accident today than you were 20 years ago. As the noble Baroness, Lady Crawley, said, accidents take 20,000 lives each year. In England, as she mentioned, in the past decade, the accidental death rate increased by 42%. I add to that by saying that in Scotland, it was up by 57%, and in Wales, by 41%.
Last year, 7 million people attended A&E departments following accident-related issues. We always hear anecdotes circulating of the type of surprising and unusual accidents which befall people. As the noble Baroness said, the cost to the nation was £12 billion, of which £6 billion was a direct cost to the NHS in medical care, but not including ambulance callouts, and she went on to give some more granular details on that. Therefore, we can understand the scale of the diversion of NHS resources from other, non-preventable areas of the health system—something worth reflecting on.
As I said, these statistics are alarming, and we could surmise the reasons which, at first sight, seem counterintuitive, because we might assume that society makes progress, and does it not follow that we learn to look after ourselves better, mitigate risk and that government, over time, improves its regulations and oversight of accident prevention in all aspects of society? The reason for some of these sombre statistics could be construed as a result of a variety of changes in our lives. For example, the greater number of people living longer, and so the greater number of older people, means a greater number of accidents in that cohort. We should note that falls are up by 90% over the past decade and represent 46% of all accidents. It is interesting that poisonings, which represent 26% of all accidents, are up by 96%. This will, of course, give conspiracy theorists a field day, but the serious question for the Minister is: can she enlighten us as to the reason? Could it be to do with pills or greater mental health issues? It is that sort of question that I am seeking an answer to.
There are far more cycle lanes, and we keep reading about the tragic accidents that happen, often very high profile, too many involving cyclists and refuse lorries, or pedestrians killed or injured by cyclists. I am sorry to hear of the preventable accident—let us call it an “incident”—suffered by the noble Baroness, Lady Jones. Having said that, transport accidents represent only 7% of accidents and are down 17% in the past two decades.
Despite the publicity arising from these terrifying traffic accidents giving the impression of worse figures here, could these better statistics be due to improved car design, including in-car electronic systems, or all-pervasive traffic calmers and/or the sometimes iniquitous 20 mph limits? Who knows?
As the noble Lord, Lord Jordan, said, it is interesting to note that over half the accidents happen at home and it may be that the majority are related to falls—which goes back to the point about the correlation with the elderly. Why, as I assume is the case, are homes more dangerous than they were in the past? Perhaps the Minister might comment on that.
Moving forward, it is essential for us to redouble efforts to address the issue of accident prevention to save more lives and reduce the pressures on our oversubscribed health services. This disparity is a concern and it is essential that the Government put measures in place to understand the causes of these differences, close the gap and improve outcomes for all the regions.
In November last year, RoSPA’s report called on the Government to adopt a national accident prevention strategy. The report highlighted eight recommendations to the Government, calling for improved data sharing and collaboration, for inequalities to be addressed, for a joined-up approach to guide policy-making at national level and for agencies to be empowered.
From this report, we can understand that one of the underlying causes of accidental deaths is the dispersed nature of health and safety regulations between the different agencies. The Health and Safety Executive, within the Department for Work and Pensions, for example, in my view does a tremendous and robust job on regulating health and safety for UK businesses. I say this from personal experience, from my recent time in office in DWP.
However, stark differences are faced by product safety, housing and home safety, and some aspects of road safety and healthcare. This means that more cross-government work is required, with clear responsibilities for safety, notably, I would argue, in the Departments for Work and Pensions, Transport, Housing and Health, to name four. I admit that I have not gone as far as the noble Baroness, Lady Crawley, in terms of her crazed and demented spider’s web, which passed me by.
I conclude with some final questions for the Minister. Can the Government look further into why accidental deaths are higher for some of the regions, particularly Scotland and Northern Ireland? I mentioned Wales as well. What steps will the Government take to reduce the disparities? Will the Government be looking further into the causes of accidental deaths and how to reduce these? What plans do the Government have to respond to the RoSPA report?
Earlier in my speech, I mentioned that our lives are evolving. We are heading into a new era of driverless cars, air taxis, drone deliveries and the extraordinary, much greater use of airspace and the safety risks that come with this, engendering, perhaps, an image of a science fiction movie.
I mentioned also a greater use of robotics in the workplace and in the home environment. Robots are not supposed to go wrong: totally the opposite, they are supposed to be much safer because of all the testing and the integrated sophisticated technology. But how safe are they? We assume that all these modern gadgets have reached their full proof of concept and are not still at the test and learn stage. Surely, these latter points therefore are some of the most compelling reasons for stepping up our oversight on a national basis, and perhaps the Minister can comment on the most important point of my remarks.
Finally, to echo the remarks made by both the noble Baroness, Lady Crawley, and the noble Lord, Lord Jordan, will the Government acknowledge that the pressures faced by the NHS caused by accidental deaths are there? What actions will they take to prevent and reduce the number of deaths caused by accidents, perhaps as part of the 10-year plan? It is one of the few government areas of progress, I would say. There is an emerging strategy here.
The Minister of State, Department for Work and Pensions (Baroness Sherlock) (Lab)
My Lords, I am very grateful to my noble friend Lady Crawley for her powerful introduction to this short decade and to all noble Lords for their contributions. What a lot of expertise there is in the room for a short debate. I have to say that RoSPA has made a very wise choice in bringing my noble friend Lady Crawley on board. It could not have a better advocate, with the possible exception of my other noble friend Lord Jordan, its life president. I do not want to set a competition up here, but really it could not have done better in choosing advocates from this side. I pay tribute to my noble friend Lord Jordan—what an astonishing career he has had in standing up for workers and for safety in the workplace and safety more generally. I really commend him for that.
I also thank the noble Viscount, Lord Younger, for noting the importance of what can be done within the workplace, within HR and from a professional standpoint, and also the noble Baroness, Lady Jones, for her work on road death prevention. Again, we have all learned a lot from that, and we are very glad that she emerged relatively unscathed from her encounters with other traffic. I take the point made by the noble Baroness, Lady Jones, about when an accident is not an accident. It is interesting, and I do not know whether it is down to her, but I gather that the Department for Transport also now talks about road traffic “collisions”, not road traffic “accidents”. I think that there probably are some accidents—noble Lords may have seen me shortly after Christmas, returning from the Recess and hobbling around in a moon boot. I think that that was an accident; I like to try to imply that it might have been a snowboarding accident, rather than me slipping on the wet floor of a cottage somewhere in Northumberland while cooking—I think that even things with the best design in the world could not stop someone like me falling over. That has been the case ever since I was a child and probably will not stop now.
The noble Baroness’s bigger point is really important: we should not assume that these things are not preventable. In a sense, that is the whole point of the RoSPA report. It is about trying to prevent what is preventable, which is what we are all here to discuss. The report presents a striking analysis of the scale and impact of accidental injuries and deaths across the UK. My noble friend Lady Crawley talked about accidental deaths rising by 42% over the past decade—21,000 lives were lost in 2022 alone. Her vision of the O2 stadium is really powerful.
Of course, these are not just statistics: every one represents a family member or friend and a future that has been lost. The report highlights the cost of £12 billion a year, as well as the disproportionality—as mentioned by the noble Viscount, Lord Younger and others—among different vulnerable groups, including older people, children or those in areas of deprivation. I assure the Committee that the Government have noted the report’s recommendations. I commend RoSPA for the report; it is an important piece of work and we are looking at it.
We also absolutely recognise the value that strategic leadership can provide in tackling complex cross-cutting issues. We are committed to working across government to ensure that our approach to accident prevention or incident prevention is coherent, proportionate and responsive to the needs of people across the country. That is reflected in one example in the report. It mentions climate change as an emerging risk that will make accident rates worse in the future. The Government are focused on taking a coherent, mission-led approach to address that risk. We are working across regulators and across departments to take co-ordinated action to deliver the legislated 2050 net-zero target.
My noble friend Lady Crawley mentioned the key ask: that there should be a Minister. I am very grateful to the noble Baroness, Lady Jones, for volunteering—I shall be sure to pass that along to the Chief Whip. My noble friend will not be surprised to find that I am not in a position today to agree to that proposal, but the Government will continue to reflect on that proposal and on the report as we consider how best to continually improve effective co-ordination across government.
My friends Lady Crawley and Lord Jordan and, I think, the noble Viscount, Lord Younger, asked about the NHS 10-year plan. The Government’s 10-year health plan for England, published earlier this month, is backed by £29 billion of investment and deliberately sets out a strong preventive approach for improving the nation’s health, rooted in social justice and focusing on reducing health inequalities. It outlines a cross-societal approach to prevention, including action on, for example, tobacco, alcohol and air pollution, alongside strengthened screening and vaccination programmes. I acknowledge that it does not focus specifically on accident prevention, which was a point made by my noble friend Lord Jordan, but it does have a core commitment to shift from sickness to prevention. Through the plan, we will see, for example, primary care, pharmacies and community healthcare working together to help people. If they are managing their conditions at home and living independently, the support should be there to help minimise the risk of accidents and other incidents that require hospitalisation.
My noble friend Lady Crawley also mentioned something dear to my heart in the DWP: the Get Britain Working reforms—as she says, I am very familiar with them. I will keep my remarks short on those, otherwise we may be here some time. They are a real move to try to address the various things that get in the way of people working, either on grounds of sickness or disability. There is a series of partnerships with the health service, the Government and local councils, looking at the interface and looking at supporting people back into work or stopping them falling out of work. We have also, for example, asked Sir Charlie Mayfield, the former John Lewis boss, to do a report on employers and what they can do in this space. I will have a look when that comes out to see whether there are things that we could think about and what are the causes that are driving this in the first place. It is a really well-made point and I thank her for it.
However, if we are getting people into workplaces, we want them to be safe workplaces. My noble friend Lord Jordan mentioned the breakthrough of the Health and Safety at Work etc Act 1974. I was very pleased to see RoSPA highlighting the work of the Health and Safety Executive as an example of where accident prevention is working. There is a robust regulatory environment for workplace safety, owned and enforced by HSE, with the Secretary of State for Work and Pensions ultimately accountable to Parliament and for ensuring the HSE performs its duties in accordance with the law. Since the Health and Safety at Work etc Act 1974 was established, annual workplace fatalities have fallen from 651 down to 124 in 2024-25, a reduction of 81%.
My noble friend Lady Crawley and the noble Viscount, Lord Younger, asked about the role of the Government in co-ordinating data use, funding and accountability across sectors. There are some encouraging examples of cross-sector collaboration on accident prevention. The HSE’s 10-year strategy—Protecting People and Places—is a good example. The strategy spans a wide range of areas, including workplace safety, chemical regulation, environmental protection, and the adoption of emerging technologies. All those areas require co-ordinated action across government departments and industry, and the efforts there reflect a broader recognition that many of the risks people face in daily life do not fall neatly within the remit of a single agency or sector.
Similarly, the recent independent review of patient safety across the health and care landscape, which came out earlier this month, highlighted the importance of aligning roles and responsibilities to improve outcomes. It brought together multiple organisations to examine how oversight and accountability can be better co-ordinated to protect patients and the public. Collaboration, data sharing and efficient use of resources are crucial for co-ordination and accountability in accident prevention. We remain committed to working with partners to explore how best to support joined-up action. I take the point my noble friend made about the interoperability of systems between England and devolved regions, and I am happy to take another look at that.
Noble Lords will know that one of the Government’s main means of preventing accidents occurring is through regulation, which protects individuals and the environment from harm and reduces public health risks, as well as safeguarding employees from harm at work and enabling a healthy and productive workforce. It can also uphold standards in building safety—a point alluded to by the noble Baroness, Lady Jones. It is vital, though, that regulation and the actions of regulators are proportionate.
We should regulate, where necessary, allowing space for discretion and responsible behaviour, but the RoSPA report addresses the whole of society and touches on the legislation and regulatory duties of multiple government departments and their regulators. Although it is complex, our current regulatory approach does provide a focus on accident prevention that responds to those multifaceted needs. On the protections provided by that sort of regulatory and policy framework, there might be a complicated diagram, but it does mean that the best-placed organisation takes the lead on specific issues, and that is crucial to our response.
The need for data to inform accident prevention is crucial, and departments are working to improve the collection and use of accident-related data. So, for example, DBT’s Office for Product Safety & Standards works with a range of stakeholders to gather information around incidents that might be linked to product safety issues. That includes fire and rescue services, other regulators, consumer bodies and safety charities, which allows emerging issues and serious incidents to be responded to.
My noble friend Lady Crawley raised the importance of public education in preventing accidents, and I am grateful for and absolutely agree with her highlighting things such as the Green Cross Code—things I think those of us of a certain age will never quite forget, which just shows that campaigns well done stick in the mind. I can still see Tufty, I can still do “Clunk Click”. It is all in there somewhere, even though sometimes I cannot remember where I am meant to be. Those things get in very early on, and we agree that education has a vital role to play in shaping safer behaviours today. The Department for Transport’s THINK! campaign continues to raise awareness of road safety with targeted initiatives such as the Safe Adventures campaign, which helps parents prepare children for independent travel. I commend that to her, and indeed to the Committee.
I turn to the issue of road safety, raised by the noble Baroness, Lady Jones. She made some very important points, and I commend the work of the London Assembly and the work that she did, along with Ken Livingstone, in collaboration or in whatever way—it is extremely important. I reassure her that the Government remain absolutely committed to improving road safety and reducing the number of people killed or seriously injured on our roads. We recognise the importance of continued education but also of enforcement and infrastructure improvements to protect all road users. It is good to see that, between 2000 and 2024, the number of reported road fatalities fell from 3,409 to 1,633, coming down by over half, but we need to keep driving that down. The noble Baroness may be aware that the Department for Transport is currently developing a new road safety strategy that will set out our future direction in this area, and that will be published in due course.
The noble Viscount, Lord Younger, raised the question of monitoring products from abroad. The Office for Product Safety & Standards has established a co-ordinated system of product safety checks at the border, which involves proactive checks on high-risk products as well as working with businesses and supply chains to create sustainable behaviour change. In 2022-23, activity funded by that programme stopped 10 million non-compliant or unsafe products from entering the UK market.
The noble Viscount also asked about the number of poisonings. This is rather less Agatha Christie and slightly more something else. In fact, the RoSPA report attributes the high number of accidental poisonings primarily to drug and alcohol-related incidents, often exacerbated by deprivation. The Government are committed to reducing drug and alcohol-related deaths, and DHSC is currently reviewing its action plan to achieve this.
The noble Viscount mentioned the difference in different parts of the country, which is interesting. Again, the report attributes the higher level of accidental deaths in Scotland and Northern Ireland to a combination of a higher number of transport-related fatalities and socioeconomic deprivation. I do not have much more background to that, but it is an area that it would be interesting to dig into.
The noble Baroness, Lady Jones, touched on building standards and the need to tackle vested interests. Just to reassure her, because she mentioned Grenfell, the Government have accepted all 58 recommendations of the Grenfell Tower Inquiry and are implementing them all. Just to add, the Building Safety Regulator, established under the Building Safety Act 2022, is now operational, and more will be done in that area.
Finally, as I have run out of time and the machine is flashing at me, the Government are not complacent. We recognise the importance of prevention in reducing harm, protecting lives and easing pressure on public services. We also appreciate that the landscape of accident prevention is evolving, as the noble Viscount, Lord Younger, said, with emerging risks coming in—not just climate change but artificial intelligence and autonomous technologies. We may think, as he says, that we get safer and look after ourselves, but maybe we just find new ways in which to damage ourselves and other people. One day, when my promised jetpack finally arrives, I want there to be some system for making sure that I do not hurt myself and other people in the process.
No matter what the challenges are, it is the job of government to make sure that we are ready for them. The RoSPA report is a valuable contribution to the national conversation on safety, and we welcome its insights and ambition. We will continue to work across departments, with local authorities, industry and the voluntary sector, to ensure that our approach to accident prevention is evidence-led, proportionate and responsive to the needs of the country. We are committed to building a safer, healthier and more resilient society.
I thank all noble Lords and RoSPA, as well as all others involved in this work, for the continued contribution that they make.
Specialty Medical Training
Lord Lansley
To ask His Majesty’s Government what assessment they have made of the ratio of medical training posts in each specialty relative to the number of foundation year medical students choosing that specialty.
Lord Lansley (Con)
My Lords, I am very grateful for the opportunity to raise this important issue. Although it will be a short debate, this is not an unimportant subject for us to discuss. It is also very timely, coming just a fortnight after the Government’s publication of Fit for the Future and the 10-year plan. I will refer to that in some detail a little later, but it is timely for us to look at the Government’s statements in that plan and how they are to be delivered.
This autumn, something approaching 24,000 young people will go to medical school. They are among the most intelligent, passionate and motivated young people. Among many of them, there is an understanding that it is a competitive profession and that they will have to fight for their places: 24,000 of them might seek medical school places but only around 9,000 or 10,000 will achieve that. From the outset, it is a competitive situation. However, we do not want to make that competition a career-frustrating experience—something that does not enable them, having achieved their initial medical qualifications, to set out on their career. We want them to be able to see that through to a more successful conclusion.
One of the central issues is that, once upon a time, there was an expectation that there was a flow from initial medical school into foundation-year training and that, following foundation-year training, the substantial majority of people would go into some form of speciality training. This is not an assumption that we can make to the same extent now, when the proportion going into speciality training straight out of foundation year 2 has gone down from something like three-quarters to only just over one-third.
What we want is to follow through on the expectation that we can make a substantial contribution to meeting our own medical workforce requirements and, potentially, make some contribution internationally. The worldwide demand for doctors is rising. The World Economic Forum has estimated a global shortfall of 10 million doctors by 2030, so the fact that we are increasing the number of doctors and medical school places in this country should be welcomed, frankly, whether or not we subsequently employ all those young people in our own National Health Service. If they go somewhere else or work in other parts of the world, fine—so be it. We have always drawn on other parts of the world for our medical services here, so we should be comfortable with that future possibility.
Indeed, the number of international medical graduates coming to this country has substantially increased, particularly after the 2020 revision of the shortage occupations list and the resident labour market test no longer applying. This has led to a substantial increase in the number of international medical graduates. We need to focus on that issue, alongside medical training, in some of our discussions this afternoon.
When it comes to the relationships between the increasing numbers of medical school places, my noble friend may like to recall the successful expansion of medical school places over the past two decades; it happened before, while and after I was the Secretary of State, and it continues to this day. In 2023, the long-term workforce plan set an ambition—not just an ambition but a promise, I think—that there would be 15,000 medical school places by 2031. We are not far off track on that, but I am not entirely sure whether that continues to be the Government’s intention.
However, the ratio for those applying to specialty training from medical school and foundation years has significantly deteriorated. In a number of specialties, we have seen substantial numbers of additional young medical graduates coming through after finishing their foundation year—for some specialties the number has doubled or even tripled—but the number of posts available for them in speciality training has in many cases hardly increased at all. Overall, there has been something like a 34% increase in medical school places but only a 9% increase in speciality training available. Noble Lords do not need me to remind them that the ratio of applications to places in some specialities is severely distorted. When looking at the numbers, you have to do some work to establish to what extent there are unique applications as well as the total number of applications, but, even so, overall there are more than twice as many applications for specialty posts than we have places available. In some specialties, the ratio is significantly higher.
The Government’s report Fit for the Future made a number of important points, on which I think we all agree. As they put it, the Government wish to
“tackle bottlenecks in medical training pathways”.
One of the central ways they plan to do this is by working
“to prioritise UK medical graduates for foundation training, and to prioritise UK medical graduates and other doctors who have worked in the NHS for a significant period, for specialty training”.
We need to know a bit more about what is intended by this reference to
“other doctors who have worked in the NHS for a significant period”.
Are we talking about six months, a year, two years or five years? Making specialty training less accessible to international medical graduates will have a significant impact on the likelihood of their coming to this country to work in our NHS. We are not wholly reliant on that and should not be, but we need to know what the implications are. It could mean literally tens of thousands fewer doctors available in five or 10 years’ time.
The Government also committed to 1,000 new specialty training posts over the next three years. I want to be sure that I understand this. Will they increase the annual supply of specialty training places by 1,000, which would be something like a 20% to 25% increase, or add 300 or so each year over three years? That would not be quite what we are looking for. I hope I will be assured that it will be a 20% or 25% increase in the number of places available.
The Chris Whitty and Stephen Powis review of medical training is continuing and we expect to see the Government’s long-term workforce plan in the latter part of this year. I hope it will include greater detail about the expectations for the requirements for consultant posts and the consultant workforce in future years, specialty by specialty. I hope we will see more detail on the extent to which the Government expect UK graduates to remain in the NHS, and perhaps some incentives for them to do so, so that we do not rely as heavily as we have done in the past on international medical graduates. I hope that the review of medical training and the Government’s workforce plan will use the independent sector more, which supplies something like 10% of treatments overall and should supply a significant proportion of the training support available. I hope we will see more on supporting professional activities written into consultant job plans, because we cannot deliver the increase in specialty training that we are looking for without more of that being available.
I hope that where the Government say that they want to work with the GMC to get a streamlined pathway to consultant status, that means that, in addition to the specialty training places, those who go into locum and locally employed doctor status can also find their way, through certificates of eligibility or experience, to becoming consultants in due course. I also hope that, overall, the workforce plan that we will see later this year gives us many more of the answers that we are looking for to enable us to deliver this improvement in the consultant workforce in future.
Baroness Finlay of Llandaff (CB)
My Lords, I am grateful to the noble Lord, Lord Lansley, for having secured this important and timely debate, given that many doctors find in August that they are without jobs. Although those graduating in medicine in this country are guaranteed a pre-registration post, there are not enough posts for all of them in the UK. It is welcome that the Government’s 10-year health plan states that these UK graduates will be given priority for F1 posts—that is, the first year after coming out of university. In those posts, they are the responsibility of the parent university, as well as whoever is responsible for their training at local level.
It has been estimated that there will be a need for at least 1,000 extra GP training posts in the very near future, to say nothing of extra medical educators, to recognise those shaping the future workforce. Although common things occur commonly, diagnosis of complex conditions is not done by simple algorithms. There has been a potentially dangerous overreliance on artificial intelligence. That is already being discussed at major medical conferences. We need the people with the training.
Part of the welcome commitment in the Government’s plan is to reverse the decline in clinical academics, which must address the need to reimburse universities for the additional cost of the contractual arrangements for NHS substantive and honorary consultants. Worryingly, last year’s negotiations took place without the involvement of the universities or the Department for Education, yet, without research, all our medical advances and their benefits to the UK economy could dwindle.
Medical schools are committed to widening participation in the profession, with a more than 50% increase now in the entrants from disadvantaged backgrounds, and a focus on under-doctored areas to strengthen the health economies of remote and rural regions, encouraging graduates who want to return to the areas from which they come. There are, however, major bottlenecks early in training due to a mismatch between training posts and numbers and available doctors between both FY2, the second year after qualifying, and internal medicine training, and then on into higher specialist training. This is contributing to a lack of workforce capacity in higher specialty training, and that feeds on into a shortage in the consultant workforce itself.
I illustrate this from my own specialty of palliative medicine and from emergency medicine, two areas where the need for high-quality medical services is rapidly increasing because of demography and the complexity of multiple comorbidities, including presentations of new conditions and, in emergency departments, of major incidents. Competition for internal medicine training has grown rapidly. Taking into account multiple applications, there are still two doctors for every available post. Applications from international graduates doubled in the last year, and the increase from UK graduates was 33%. This leaves seven in 10 recently qualified and registered doctors concerned about their future employment, of whom a quarter were apparently unsuccessful in applying for specialty training. More than one in 10 are now applying for medical jobs abroad and more than one in five are looking for an alternative career.
One area of great pressure is the number of formal training posts. If a post is taken by a doctor who then works less than full-time, the unused part of that post cannot be filled because there is no additional marginal funding. Job shares are difficult and sometimes do not work well, and internal medicine shows that almost two-thirds of certain speciality trainees are working less than full-time. This then feeds through to the shortfall in trained doctors eligible for consultant posts, leaving many vacant palliative medicine posts, for example, unfilled for prolonged periods because flow-through is stagnant due to funding constraints. It is worsened by the reliance on charitable funding for some of these posts. For example, a colleague of mine in west Wales is struggling to do the job of three consultants because two posts are vacant due to a failure to fill these jobs because of a shortage of suitable applicants.
Given the need for more posts in the community, there is now discussion as to whether general practice and palliative medicine can come together to provide joint training, an option that has proved popular for general practice and public health. I ask the Government to actively support these and other initiatives to free up the mobility of trainees, increasing their ability to move between different disciplines and places and their sense of belonging to a team. This is essential for maintaining more care in the community, which is outlined in the 10-year plan.
I turn now to emergency medicine, routes into which are through the two-year acute care common stem, which allows trainees to train towards anaesthetics, acute medicine, emergency medicine or intensive care. At the end of the two years, they have to reapply for senior training, as there are very few run-through posts. The advantages are that they have a broad experience and can switch from one line to another, having had a common stem, but the reality is that recruitment is highly competitive. Many newly registered doctors are locally employed, which means that they are not in training posts but are doing very responsible jobs. In the London area alone, one trust that I know had more than 800 applicants for a small number of emergency medicine training posts. The bottlenecks are at every point in the system.
This is another speciality where over 60% are now seeking less than full-time training, which is understandable given the stresses of the job and the difficulties of childcare commitments and so on. But if, for example, you have five training posts, and five trainees working at 0.8, which is equivalent to four whole-time posts, currently you cannot appoint a sixth person to the remaining one whole-time equivalent because of the shortfall in additional top-up funding for oncosts and so on. That means that we are chronically underreplacing, even in those disciplines where the fill rates are high.
There is another problem. Training numbers are not evenly distributed fairly within the system and around the country. They need to be determined by population need, set as a formula. It is not appropriate for the south-east to have many more training posts than other parts of the country, such as under-doctored rural areas. Geography is an important consideration for many trainees. They often want to stay near the area where they trained in medicine. That is helpful because they have all the contacts to seek informal advice and support, but the targets to get through a certain number of patients can work against the system and the allocation of training posts. For example, pathologists and radiologists are essential to diagnostic processes but they may not feature in the target minds of many planners.
The movement of finances can underpin the workforce and it is essential that we do this if we are to have our own graduates and know all aspects and the standard of their training, and if they are to be able to work and pursue careers in this country rather than be driven abroad, pulled by the attractiveness of recruitment programmes from Australia and other places. We trained them, and we need to harness all their potential.
Lord Kakkar (CB)
My Lords, it is a great pleasure to follow my noble friend Lady Finlay and to thank the noble Lord, Lord Lansley, for the very thoughtful way in which he introduced this debate. In so doing, I remind noble Lords of my own registered interest as chairman of King’s Health Partners.
As the noble Lord, Lord Lansley, said, there is a continuum here—a continuum from establishing the number of places that we have at medical school through to the foundation years, where those newly qualified medical students are able to hone and consolidate their skills, and then subsequently to choose to go into core and speciality training and ultimately seek permanent consultant or GP posts.
It is fundamental to the process of planning that each part of that continuum is properly joined up. For instance, how do His Majesty’s Government deal with the question of ensuring that medical schools have an appropriate curriculum that is sufficiently flexible and will meet not only the training needs in the subsequent seven to 10 years after qualification of a medical student but the subsequent 30-odd years of clinical practice? In terms of expectations, how do we set the appropriate expectation for those bright young individuals, as the noble Lord, Lord Lansley, said, going to medical school, so they are better able to understand what clinical practice in future will mean? For a large number of them, with the Government’s determination that care is moved closer to home and into the community, the skills will include the capacity to apply digital technology and to be substantially literate in the use of data, as well as to be able to lead multidisciplinary teams, in addition to having a good understanding of pathophysiology, physiology, biochemistry and other clinical skills.
Once individuals enter their foundation years, we must be clear about what core skills we need to consolidate that will provide them with the ability to adapt over a lifetime of clinical practice—and so too into core and specialty training. It is quite shocking that, in 2022, for those entering their subsequent training in 2023, the General Medical Council assessed that some 75% of those completing their second foundation year did not go into a core or specialty training post. Where did they go? Some of them clearly became locally employed doctors, but it is clear that the majority of those who have gone through medical school and had their early post-qualification training are not going immediately into subsequent training. Why is that? What do we have to do to make that subsequent core and speciality training more effective and agreeable for those who need to commit themselves to it? If they are going into locally employed doctor positions, professional positions where they are locally employed by trusts, principally to deliver service, is there a way we can provide the opportunity for those locally employed doctors to undergo some form of training as well?
There is a substantial financial commitment to their employment and, given that commitment, which probably concerns at least half of the recently qualified workforce in the NHS, there should be an opportunity for training to be provided under those circumstances—as the noble Lord said, ultimately, potentially, to move to a portfolio system, whereby elements of that clinical practice, supervised and attended by training, could contribute to certification that could ultimately contribute to a pathway of accumulating experience, not only in core and specialty training posts with a number but through those locally employed doctor posts, increasing the amount of flexibility available.
Beyond that, we have to consider how we do workforce planning. The previous Government, quite rightly, in 2023 was congratulated for having agreed and settled a workforce plan with substantial ambition in increasing the number of medical school and nursing places as well as in training more clinicians, based on what I assume was a determination of the changing population demographic and therefore a greater need for doctors in certain specialties and disciplines.
With their 10-year plan, the Government have indicated that the workforce plan of 2023 is to be put aside. That, I think, is quite a problem. One of the things we need to be able to achieve in our country is a degree of consensus so that planning can be constructed and delivered over an extended period. What will be the new methodology? The 10-year plan indicates that the previous plan needs to be put to one side because we will have new models of care. We are going to be adopting digital technology and working in different clinical environments. That is all absolutely fine, but how is that to be modelled? What is the methodology? What is the certainty that we are applying the correct parameters to any modelling plan to allow us to determine which specialties and disciplines need to be expanded? Where are the geographical locations where this training should take place? What are the preferences of those who have gone to medical school and completed the early part of their training in terms of taking up such opportunities? In coming forward with the 10-year workforce plan, the Government are going to have to be very clear on these questions, so that whatever is proposed is plausible.
My noble friend Lady Finlay raised the question of clinical academics. These are a vital part of the medical workforce. The Government are absolutely committed to innovation and its adoption at pace and scale across entire health economies, but at the very genesis of that innovation are clinical academics, and we have seen an erosion of clinical academics in the National Health Service over the last 10 to 15 years, with great problems in being able to ensure that those who choose an academic, potentially research-driven commitment, as well as a proper clinical commitment, can achieve training for both those elements side by side and still be able to compete for consultant posts after that. How do the Government propose to address that issue?
Finally, I come back to locally employed doctors. It is critical that that large number of young clinicians are able to continue their early post-qualification clinical practice in a way where they remain strongly motivated and potentially determined to apply subsequently for core and speciality training posts. At the very least, they should continue to be developed in a supportive and meaningful way, so that they are fully flexible and have the capacity to make the important contribution that the health service over the coming years is going to require from all employees.
Lord Rennard (LD)
My Lords, we are all grateful to the noble Lord, Lord Lansley, for securing this debate and, as he said, it is an important issue that has been of concern for some years. It is important for our NHS and for the long-term health and well-being of our nation. We know that, in recent years, the competition for specialty training places has kept rising. There were over 33,000 applications for specialty training in 2025, compared with less than 20,000 in 2019.
There are particular problems with some specialisms. In 2024, there were 112 applicants per post for general practice and public health medicine. This shows that there has been a serious breakdown in workforce planning to date. Parties have been ambitious in their manifestos, but not always in the planning and the execution. At the last general election, the Conservative Party expressed the desire to recruit 28,000 more doctors in the NHS than we had in 2023, and to do so by the end of this Parliament. But in government, they did not will the means to enable that to happen in that timescale. Medical school numbers increased by one-third between 2014 and 2024, but specialty training places increased by less than 10% in the same period.
This disparity has created a severe bottleneck, leaving thousands of doctors who have completed their foundational training stuck outside the speciality training pathway and facing potential unemployment or having either to go abroad or to accept insecure roles as locally employed doctors. The General Medical Council observes that, of course, doctors not in training posts have a higher rate of leaving the profession, thereby exacerbating our retention crisis.
Several factors have contributed to this untenable situation: there has been a stagnation in the funding for training places; there has been a lack of funding from Health Education England for training places, which is exacerbating the problem of competition ratios in specialty training; and the career progression of medical graduates has been impeded, leading to questions arising around the quality of patient care. The Royal College of Physicians has emphasised that increased medical school places must be accompanied by a plan to increase specialist training provision. It is illogical for us to invest in initial medical training, then deny thousands of UK doctors the opportunity to advance to specialty level.
There is also the problem that training places are generally distributed based on historical arrangements rather than current population needs. The evidence suggests that trainees often remain in the area where they complete their specialist training, meaning an inequitable distribution of posts, which contributes to disparities in doctor numbers across the country. Health Education England and NHS England have a commendable programme called Addressing Health Inequalities: Distribution of Medical Specialty Training, which seeks to distribute places more equitably, but they must ensure that this leads to an overall increase in training places rather than merely redistributing existing capacity.
The challenges in general practice training are particularly acute. The ambition to increase GP training places to 6,000 by 2031 is welcome, but the current pace of increase is not meeting the need and prospective GPs are being turned away. The current competition ratio of 3.67 applicants per post is too high. General practice is often perceived as less prestigious and GPs’ practices face immense pressures, making it difficult for senior GPs to dedicate the time and resources needed to supervision and training.
I am sure that we will shortly hear more about the Government’s 10-year plan for the NHS to
“tackle bottlenecks in medical training pathways”
and,
“over the next 3 years, create 1,000 new specialty training posts”.
We know that Professor Sir Stephen Powis and Professor Sir Chris Whitty are overseeing a medical training review, but the NHS is unlikely to achieve what is needed for medical training without a clear costed plan for the NHS overall, which must involve properly addressing the social care crisis. Unless we tackle social care, we cannot tackle the problems of the NHS.
The noble Baroness, Lady Casey, was charged with reviewing social care by the Government elected in July last year, but she did not begin this role until the end of April this year and her initial report is not due until two years after the general election, suggesting that plans for conducting such a review were not made in advance of the election. Her final report is not due until 2028, some four years after the general election, suggesting, again, that much more long grass may be involved on the issue of social care. It is 26 years since the royal commission on long-term care, 14 years since the Dilnot commission and six years since Boris Johnson’s pledge to
“fix the crisis in social care once and for all”.
Bookshelves are full of reports such as these. In the meantime, hospital beds continue to be occupied by people who should be in care but lack somewhere to go or people to look after them.
There is an immediate crisis for community equipment providers, who provide much of what is needed to support disabled people. Their business model may face imminent collapse because local authorities cannot afford to pay them, cannot pay them promptly enough or—as in at least one case—are simply refusing to pay. There is much to do. We need a comprehensive, fully funded workforce plan that genuinely addresses the current shortfalls and the projected needs. This plan must be ambitious, adequately funded and published urgently. The current situation, where thousands of doctors are finishing their foundation programme only to find themselves unable to secure a training post, represents a cliff edge.
This impacts doctors’ morale, potentially leading more towards the industrial action that we seek to avoid, more migration of medical talent and further harm to patient care. The commitment to increasing medical school places must be matched by an equal commitment to expanding postgraduate training capacity, ensuring that every doctor we train has a clear and secure pathway to becoming the consultant or GP of the future.
Lord Kamall (Con)
My Lords, first, I should declare my interests. We are not allowed any more just to say, “I refer my interests as in the register”. Very quickly, I am a professor of politics at St Mary’s University, Twickenham, and I am helping that university set up its medical school at the moment. It wants to tackle some of the issues, becoming an innovative medical school looking at technology and AI, but also at doctors becoming entrepreneurs in their own right. I also teach at the Vinson Centre at the University of Buckingham and, in those seminars, I invite people to come and speak on the future of healthcare. I have worked in the past with the Institute for Economic Affairs, have written on healthcare, and Buckingham itself has a medical school. I hope I have covered all that now.
Having taken that one long minute to declare my interests, I thank my noble friend Lord Lansley for securing this debate and for sharing his experience and concern about the complex environment faced by foundation medical schools seeking to provide specialist training posts in the UK. Indeed, on entering the Chamber today, the noble Baroness, Lady Finlay, said to my noble friend and I, “It’s complicated”, and I think this debate shows that it is.
In the UK, we are proud to boast some of the world’s leading universities in medicine and science. During the Covid-19 pandemic, the nation watched with admiration as our brilliant scientists and medical experts led the UK in becoming, if not the first, one of the first countries to roll out an approved Covid-19 vaccine. This reflects not only the dedication of our scientific community and excellent research facilities but the effectiveness of well-designed systems and our huge medical experience, some of which has been on display in this Room today.
The noble Lord, Lord Kakkar, spoke of the continuum in medical training. After graduating from medical school in the UK, graduates enter the NHS’s two-year foundation programme, where they are exposed to a variety of medical specialties. Following this, they are supposed to embark on specialty training.
However, as many noble Lords have pointed out, in recent years, UK-trained medical graduates have struggled to secure a speciality training post. Recent Answers to Written Parliamentary Questions asked by my noble friend Lord Howe and I reveal the scale of the problem. In 2024, there was only one medical oncology specialist training post in the north-east training region. For paediatric training, at stages 3 and 4, in 2024 there was again only one space available in the north-east and two in the West Midlands. Furthermore, in 2024 there were 14,104 foundation programme training places in England, but only 7,929 level 1 speciality medical training posts, meaning that there were almost half the number of speciality posts available for those in foundation training.
If we look at the competition for postgraduate places, as other noble Lords have said, there has been an increase in the ratio from 1.9 applications per place in 2019 to nearly five applications per place in 2024. As my noble friend Lord Lansley said, it has been suggested that this is partly due to international medical graduates being able to apply under the same conditions as doctors in the UK.
As someone who teaches in UK universities, I believe our education system benefits from foreign students. They are good for the UK’s soft power, the health systems in the countries these trainees come from and return to, or even places our British trainees go to. I believe we should continue to train world-leading doctors. If the problem identified by my noble friend Lord Lansley is left unaddressed, it could lead to a transformation in the make-up of our doctors and a decline in opportunities for British graduates. As the noble Baroness, Lady Finlay, said, it is welcome that priority is being given by this government to UK students. In light of this, may I ask the Minister what action the Government are taking to increase the number of speciality posts available and to fill some of the vacancies referred to by the noble Baroness, Lady Finlay?
I have to admit that I have heard from some doctors I met during my time as a Minister, and now as a shadow Minister, that we should focus less on specialism and that we want more people to go into general practice. But the noble Lord, Lord Rennard, just pointed out that there is a bottleneck in GP training. The noble Lord was also absolutely right that social care has to be taken care of.
At this point, I should like to divert slightly, because the late Lord Lipsey and I were working on a cross-party solution to fund social care, but he sadly passed away recently. On behalf of everyone, I pay tribute to Lord Lipsey. I did tell him when he was ill that I would work with another Labour Peer to make sure that we work on a cross-party solution.
As the noble Lord, Lord Kakkar, said, under the previous Conservative Government, former Prime Minister Rishi Sunak unveiled the NHS Long Term Workforce Plan. At the time it was called the most ambitious transformation of NHS staffing in its history. As with any plan, there were critics, but the plan aimed to double medical school places to 15,000 by 2031 and to train 24,000 more nurses and midwives, reducing the reliance on international recruitment by cutting agency spending.
Now that the Government have launched their 10-year plan for healthcare, there are obviously many questions on how this will be delivered and the implications for the workforce. We have heard how the new Government will put aside the previous plan and will produce their own 10-year workforce plan later this year. My noble friend Lord Lansley referred to some of the commitments in the recently published 10-year plan and the noble Lord, Lord Kakkar, rightly raised some fundamental questions that need to be answered. Can the Minister enlighten the Grand Committee on some of the aspects that will be included in that 10-year workforce plan? I know the noble Baroness may have to say that she cannot jump ahead or reveal details, or that it is still being worked on, but could she say whether there are some broad issues that will be tackled at the high level, without necessarily giving numbers? I understand that it is always a challenge to ask a Minister about specific issues in advance of a plan.
Although foreign students are good for our education system, can the Minister clarify what more specific actions will be taken to ensure that there are more opportunities for new UK medical graduates. We should be clear that this is not an anti-foreigner sentiment at all. It is good that we can train people from all around the world—good for our universities, our economy and the countries they will go to. As a country, we will benefit from this in the future, but there are some fundamental questions that all noble Lords have asked. I know the noble Baroness may not be able to answer all of them at the moment, but it is critical that we address these crucial bottlenecks and understand how we can ensure that, while we want to see more students trained and new medical schools may be opening, including the one I am helping with at St Mary’s University in Twickenham, we make sure there are opportunities—to tackle not only the bottleneck but the other side of that bottleneck. Then we can make sure that those trainees, whether British or otherwise, can go on to deliver world-class care in our National Health Service and beyond.
Baroness Finlay of Llandaff (CB)
My Lords, I apologise to the Committee; I should have declared my interests. I am an observer on the Medical Schools Council, I chair the Bevan Commission in Wales and I hold the chair at Cardiff University.
Baroness in Waiting/Government Whip (Baroness Blake of Leeds) (Lab)
My Lords, I thank the noble Lord, Lord Lansley, for instigating this debate and the noble Baroness, Lady Finlay, and noble Lords for their contributions. We have had a rich discussion. I will not be able to answer all the points raised, as I am sure noble Lords are aware, but this is extremely topical and essential to determining the way forward through the 10-year plan and the workforce plan, as noble Lords have referred to. To pick up on what the noble Baroness, Lady Finlay, said, at a time when morale is quite low across the piece, for reasons we do not need to go into now, focusing on how we harness potential and make entry into these professions fit for purpose, exciting and rewarding must be at the heart of everything we do.
We must be honest that the Government have inherited a system where competition for specialty training posts has grown significantly in recent years. In 2024, there were 4.7 applications per training post, an increase from 2.4 in 2020. That is a significant change. We recognise the frustration this has caused resident doctors and that their career progression is becoming a lot more complicated. I reassure the noble Lord, Lord Lansley, that we are committed to tackling this.
There are multiple reasons why competition ratios have grown. As a result of changes to the Immigration Rules in 2020, international graduates have been able to apply on equal terms with domestic graduates. We are also seeing more people graduate from UK medical schools, as we have heard. More domestic graduates are entering training, a number of private medical schools have opened and some UK universities now run medical courses at overseas campuses. All this creates a perfect storm. Like the noble Lord, Lord Lansley, we welcome the increase in the number of graduates, but we need to work on managing the process of dealing with it.
As a Government, we have consistently acknowledged the concerns of resident doctors and are actively working to address them. As set out in the 10 Year Health Plan for England published on 3 July, we recognise that we need to work across government to prioritise UK medical graduates for foundation training. We will also prioritise UK medical graduates and other doctors who have worked in the NHS for a significant period for specialty training. We recognise that internationally trained staff remain an important part of the workforce, but there is an explicit understanding that we have become overreliant on them and must address this, as the noble Baroness, Lady Finlay, mentioned.
We are aware of the concerns about specialty places, particularly in certain specialties. Without doubt, the NHS and universities must do more to get doctors into the specialties where the NHS and patients—we must remember patients’ needs throughout this—need them. As I said, the Government will address this head-on. As the noble Baroness, Lady Finlay, mentioned, the flow of this is critical.
To respond to the noble Lord, Lord Rennard, our 10-year health plan commits to creating 1,000 new specialty training posts over the next three years, with a focus on specialties where there is greatest need. I will have to write to the noble Lord, Lord Lansley, on his point about this. We cannot make specific geographic commitments, but we recognise that this is an issue. That is why the 10-year plan focuses on neighbourhood planning, bringing together all the experts in an area.
The 10-year workforce plan will be published later this year to create a workforce ready to deliver a transformed service. This is becoming a bit repetitive, but I have to say to the noble Lord, Lord Kamall, that I cannot pre-empt the outcome of that work. However, it is significant. We recognise the comments on bottlenecks and emergency medicine and the comments of the noble Lord, Lord Kakkar, on locally employed doctors—a fundamental part of the picture—and the need for clarity. That absolutely runs through the work we are doing.
So the workforce will be more empowered, more flexible and more fulfilled. The whole basis running through the 10-year workforce plan is to ensure that the NHS has the right people in the right places with the right skills to care for patients when they need it. I emphasise to the noble Lord, Lord Rennard, that social care runs through this. We absolutely recognise that it is critical that we deal with this. We want to make sure that the noble Baroness, Lady Casey, is allowed to get on with the work. She is committed to working cross-party and bringing all the experts together to tackle this. I did not know about the work that the noble Lord, Lord Kamall, was doing with Lord Lipsey, and I am grateful for his comments.
The noble Lord, Lord Kakkar, asked about how this will be done. It is a huge amount of work, and he is absolutely right to focus on how it will be done. The important thing is that we are asking the question. Given our reform plan, what workforce do we need? What should they do? Where should they be deployed? What skills should they have? This is reflected in the three shifts in the 10-year plan. We will use a range of methods to determine this, including traditional modelling, of course, and in discussion with those who deliver these services, local system leaders and planners, higher education institutions, which are absolutely critical in this, and, of course, the royal colleges. It is critical that our whole workforce is fit for the future, and we are determined to make that happen.
Interesting comments were made about a portfolio approach. The medical training review was launched in February, the consultation has come back in and we are looking forward to the report.
The Government have also committed to training thousands of new GPs. Perhaps I should have declared that my son is a GP—he got through—so I have had some personal experience in this area. It is important that we all pool our collective experience. We are committed to training thousands of new GPs and are already well on the way, having recruited an additional 1,900, and there will be an additional 250 later this year. But it is critical that we then address how they will be employed in the current estate, for example. That of course is addressed in the 10-year plan.
I want to reassure all noble Lords who mentioned concern about clinical academic roles. We will reverse the decline through a collaboration between the Government and major charity funders. The collaboration will fund a year-on-year increase in these roles over the next five years. We are also encouraging additional funders to support clinical future leader fellowships as the scheme develops. We agree that this needs to be a co-produced piece of work across the patch.
As I said, the Government understand the high level of competition. It comes at a time when many doctors are already feeling unhappy with their experience in work and in training. That is why we have laid out the 10-year health plan and the 10-year workforce plan, working together to address these issues.
We have been listening to doctors to make their working lives better. There is much more to do, but the NHS has been making good progress. We want our trainees to stay in this country. We recognise that a number of them go abroad, but many of them come back. We need to be very careful when we analyse the statistics in front of us. We are making progress with the improved exception reporting system, for example, reviewing rotational working and reducing mandatory training, which has been something of a nightmare. NHS England is also delivering the retention programme, working with trusts so they better understand why staff have left.
I thank noble Lords again for their time today. I know it is frustrating at this moment not to be able to answer all the specific questions, but I hope all noble Lords will recognise the significant pieces of work going on—
Lord Lansley (Con)
Just to return to a point I mentioned about supporting professional activities as part of consultant job plans, I think it would be very helpful if the Minister would say that, notwithstanding the prioritisation of delivering on things such as waiting list targets, consultant job plans must make provision in their contracts for them to commit their time to training activity.
Baroness Blake of Leeds (Lab)
I would be surprised if that was not already under consideration and, when the pieces that have been out to consultation come back in, I would expect that that would be part of the consideration. I certainly recognise the significance of the noble Lord’s comments.
I just want to reinforce that, as well as being in delivery mode, the Government are in listening mode. Over too many years, there has not been enough listening and enough recognising that people out there in the workplace have a lot of the solutions to some of the problems we are facing. It is complex and challenging, but the prize at the end of this work is well worth striving for and I look forward to updating noble Lords as we go forward.
Online Communication Offence Arrests
(1 day, 20 hours ago)
Grand CommitteeRead Hansard Text Read Debate Ministerial Extracts
Lord Lebedev
To ask His Majesty’s Government what estimate they have made of the number of people arrested daily for non-threatening, online communication offences, and what assessment they have made of the implications of such arrests for freedom of speech.
Lord Lebedev (CB)
My Lords, I am grateful to have the opportunity to discuss the question of free speech this afternoon and look forward to hearing from the Minister in due course. I know how seriously he takes concerns that have been expressed across parties in this House and the other place, and I hope that we can find consensus.
Free speech is the foundational freedom, the freedom on which all our liberties depend. We recognise that parliamentarians in both Houses cannot do their jobs of checking abuses of power and upholding freedoms without having their right to free speech protected, and parliamentary privilege has long existed to defend just that right. But free speech—the ability to provoke, challenge, argue and dissent—should not be a privilege extended to a few; it is the essential right of all citizens. There is no cause so noble, no argument so sound, that it does not deserve to be challenged. Beliefs we now regard as antique, ridiculous or pernicious were once orthodoxies, which were overturned only because dissident voices challenged them. Restricting the vote solely to men who held property, maintaining a legal ban on homosexual acts and believing that prices and incomes should be controlled by legislation are all now seen as past follies. All were once the present wisdom, all discarded only because of brave dissidents.
For me, the word “dissident” has a special resonance. I grew up in Soviet Russia, a regime in which expressing the wrong opinion led to imprisonment. A famous house on Granovsky Street, where I grew up, had once been home to the likes of Khrushchev, Molotov and Trotsky. During my childhood, the presence of secret policemen, there ostensibly to protect us, was a constant reminder that a word out of place could mean cancellation in its most brutal form. In that environment of oppression, I came to admire those who were the dissidents, who spoke out so that others might live free—the Sakharovs, Brodskys and Solzhenitsyns. I have sought to honour their memory in my work as a media proprietor, always seeking to champion voices that challenge. Sadly, today, my motherland is not much better.
Comparisons with the Soviet era may seem overwrought to some. In the England of my boyhood, they would certainly have been misplaced. But consider this: in November last year a journalist, Allison Pearson, had the police at her door for a single tweet. In January this year, two parents were arrested by eight officers and detained in a cell for six hours for private messages on a WhatsApp group. In May this year, the heroic human rights campaigner Peter Tatchell was arrested for displaying a placard criticising the terrorist organisation Hamas. Last month, the Turkish human rights campaigner Hamit Coskun was found guilty of a criminal offence in court for burning a Koran. This month there have been reports of a police investigation into what a musical act at Glastonbury said on stage, and also calls from elected representatives for the arrest of a columnist, Rod Liddle, for what he said about that music festival. These are all examples of criminal justice, the system that is there to defend our freedoms, being deployed to investigate, intimidate and punish those with dissident positions.
You do not need to admire any of the people I mentioned above to find this deeply concerning. You can think them rude, mistaken or offensive, but the right to free speech means nothing if it does not mean the right to offend. I dislike the symbolism and reality of book burning but, to make a man a criminal—to find him guilty of the crime of racially or religiously aggravated hatred—for the expression of an opinion is to bring back blasphemy laws by the back door. I find calls from a public stage for soldiers to die sickening but, once we start telling artists what they can and cannot say—no matter how offensive it is—we strangle art in its cradle.
The tendency to police—literally—what people are saying has been encouraged and enabled by not just this Government but their predecessors. The Malicious Communications Act 1988 and the Communications Act 2003, specifically Sections 1 and 127, give the police the power to arrest individuals for what they say online. On average, 30 people are arrested daily. In 2014, under the coalition Government, something called non-crime hate incidents were introduced—words uttered that are not yet criminal in themselves but which the police should officially record none the less and hold against people. Since 2014, more than 133,000 such incidents have been recorded; that is more than 13,000 each year. Some of those who have had their names recorded in police files are children whose words were taken down when they were below the age of criminal responsibility and may be held against them for the rest of their lives. The innocence of youth has been replaced with the presumption of guilt.
The think tank Policy Exchange has estimated that investigating these incidents has taken up to 666,000 hours of police time. Every hour devoted to policing speech is an hour not spent investigating phone theft, shoplifting, burglary or assault. When this is juxtaposed with 90% of all crime going unsolved in 2023 and 89% of violent or sexual offences going unsolved in 2024, it is hard to conceive of a worse waste of police time. It is perhaps no surprise that Britain’s most effective police chief— Sir Stephen Watson, the chief constable of Greater Manchester—has stated that this policy is now “past its sell-by date”. He knows that Manchester is safer when his officers are chasing violent muggers rather than egregious tweeters. Sir Stephen enjoys the support of Manchester’s Labour mayor, the commonsensical Andy Burnham. I hope the Minister will follow his lead.
I had hoped that this Government, with a Prime Minister and an Attorney-General who are distinguished human rights lawyers who have represented unfashionable causes and unpopular defendants, would understand how important it is to allow dissent. But there has been no move to get rid of non-crime hate incidents and no clear message in defence of free expression. Indeed, as this House learned only last week, former Attorney-General Dominic Grieve has been asked by this Government to further restrict free speech by introducing a new definition of Islamophobia, designed to punish those who dare to question certain beliefs. What impact does the Minister believe Government-sanctioned restrictions on free speech, on Islamophobia grounds, would have had on reporting into the grooming gangs scandals? Would it have made the work of brave reporters such as Andrew Norfolk on uncovering the Rotherham scandal easier or more difficult? I think we know the answer.
I hope the Minister will give those of us who wish him well reason to believe that Labour—the party of George Orwell, Michael Foot and Tessa Jowell—still understands how precious free expression is and how important it is that we defend it.
Lord Frost (Con)
My Lords, I thank the noble Lord, Lord Lebedev, for securing this important debate and for his powerful opening speech. We now live in a world in which everyone, if they wish to, can make their views known to everybody else. It is a world where political debate is not the preserve of a small establishment group but is open to all. Yet not everyone seems comfortable with this, and rather than welcoming this uniquely open debating environment, we find many politicians talking of disinformation and misinformation and even of putting outright bans on certain kinds of speech.
Unfortunately, the British legislative framework gives them plenty of power to make these words reality. Our legal framework potentially criminalises wide categories of speech and messaging. The noble Lord mentioned a couple of them. We have the Communications Act 2003, criminalising “grossly offensive” messages. We have the Malicious Communications Act 1988, criminalising “indecent or grossly offensive” communications. We have the Public Order Act, which criminalises causing harm or distress, including the notoriously broad “stirring up” offences. All these are aggravated if motivated by “hate”. Of course, we also have the Online Safety Act 2023, which criminalises false communication by an individual; it makes fake news literally illegal.
These laws raise a number of problems. First, there is definition creep, with “grossly offensive”, “abusive”, “insulting” and “false”—says who? What these mean, in fact, depends ultimately not on law but on CPS guidance, which can easily be changed in line with prevailing fashion and fashionable beliefs. Secondly, there is the chilling effect. In a country where, clearly, there are problems of immigration and integration, one person’s fair commentary is another’s abuse or insult. For example, is commenting on different characteristics of migrant communities in the UK and crime levels among such communities fair political comment or is it “stirring up” racial hatred? The risk of drifting over that border and committing an offence creates a chilling effect that means that people are frightened to comment.
Thirdly, all these laws were written either well before this great democratisation in political debate or by legislators who had not caught up. They are written for a world of green ink letters and shouting in the street; they are not written for the very punchy, sharp, meme-based, satirical social media world. In my view, these laws should mostly be abolished or at least focus much more clearly on genuine incitement. Until that happens—and I am not exactly holding my breath about it—our only protection is a Government, an establishment or a wider climate of opinion supporting free speech. Unfortunately, of course, we have no such thing.
We know from the Covid era that the commitment to free speech is thin to start with. Politicians of all parties muse about controlling social media further; they often believe that, in this new world, the ill-informed populace is easy prey to false beliefs and conspiracies. The Government are particularly well placed to do that because most misinformation actually comes from Governments. Trump’s supposed collusion with Russia and the Covid lab-leak theory are two outstanding examples of that. On most political issues there is simply no authoritative interpretation of the facts. Instead, what a fact tells you depends on the interpretation you bring to it, what you see as the goals of a policy. The same fact or number can be used to support very different arguments, depending on your prior beliefs, your interpretative framework and what you are trying to achieve. Thus, the only way to reach an outcome is to have a free debate and see who wins the argument.
I worry that we are heading towards a real crisis. There has always been some censorship in Britain—more’s the pity—but, until recently, it was more artistic and cultural, rather than political. We prided ourselves on being a free country in which we could speak freely. We simply cannot say that now. We are, in fact, all vulnerable. Say the wrong thing in the wrong way at the wrong moment, and any of us might find the police at our door. I hope that the Minister will be able to reassure us when he responds.
Baroness Fox of Buckley (Non-Afl)
My Lords, I too congratulate the noble Lord, Lord Lebedev, on securing this short but crucial debate on free speech. Usually, when I talk about the concerns that my organisation, the Academy of Ideas, has about the erosion of free speech as a key factor in the public’s distrust of state institutions and fury at feeling that their views are not just ignored but silenced, or when others, such as the noble Lord, Lord Young of Acton, talk about the work of the Free Speech Union, we get a groan in the House. “There they go again” they say, “scaremongering”, “hyperbolic”, and all the rest of it, so it is great that the issue is being taken seriously today. When, as in May, the Economist headlines with “Europe’s free speech problem” and identifies the UK as one of the most censorious countries, we should all be worried, and I hope that the Government are.
The figures for arrests tell their own story. As we have already heard, there are 12,000 arrests a year, a 58% increase since 2019. I note that the Library briefing for this debate stresses that convictions and sentencing for relevant offences are decreasing dramatically and tells us not to worry, but I find that even more worrying, because it suggests that arrest is being used promiscuously to set an example, a warning to others that if they post or say the wrong thing, the police will turn up at their door, enforcers of conformism and suppressers of dissent, regardless of the law.
The journalist Fraser Myers recently asked:
“So what are we allowed to say in Britain that won’t get us arrested?”
Something certainly seems to have gone awry in the police and criminal justice system. Every force in the country has a team of officers sifting through people’s posts, trying to determine whether they cross some undefined line. The Economist, discussing this special zealotry, concludes:
“It is much easier to catch Instagram posters then thieves; the evidence is only a mouse-click away.”
Does the Minister worry that the police indeed seem to have become distracted?
Some of the detail in recent high-profile cases suggest skewed priorities. The noble Lord, Lord Lebedev, has already referred to the Times Radio producer Maxie Allen and his partner, who were arrested for the crime of posting disparaging messages about their daughter’s school in a private WhatsApp group, but the detail that I noticed was that Mr Allen’s partner asked the police officer for an example of malicious communication. The detective stared blankly and then had to google the crime.
There is the case of the Met Police intelligence unit, which usually deals with terrorism and extremism, sending Kent Police to investigate tweets from Julian Foulkes, a former police officer, about the rise of antisemitism since the 7 October pogrom. The body-cam footage from that raid showed a police officer rifling through Mr Foulkes’s book collection and expressing alarm at some of the “very Brexity” things on his shelf. Does the Minister, like me, wince when he hears that and wonder whether the police have become politicised in their actions and what they are up to? I am worried that the police will lose credibility over this.
On Saturday 29 June, 20 year-old Montgomery Toms, known as Monty, was arrested while standing alone quietly at the side of the London Pride march. His crime was wearing a handmade cardboard sandwich board showing a “trans flag = mental illness” message. Monty left the scene when approached by two officers but, two streets away, he was surrounded by 11 officers, handcuffed, held in solitary confinement for nine hours at Charing Cross police station and, while not charged with a crime, placed on pre-charge bail conditions. Such ludicrous overreach led Douglas Murray to write in the Spectator that if Monty had wanted to avoid being arrested, he should have worn a pro-jihad sign; or, even better, have indulged in a bout of phone thefts, and then he would not have seen a police officer for miles.
I do not want to just blame the police here: they take their direction from the top. The message is clear: speech crimes are on a par with or even more dangerous then real crimes. The UK Government’s public information campaign in relation to the riots was menacing. “Think before you post”, was their meme. The public fury about the excessive 31-month sentence for Lucy Connolly’s offensive Facebook message about setting fire to hotels was partly because Philip Prescott, an actual rioter who physically attacked a mosque, was sentenced to only 28 months. No wonder the police see online communication as on a par with violent actions.
Finally on the data, we need to note that communications offences are not the only gauge of attacks on free speech. Criminal lawyer Luke Gittos warns us that public order legislation, especially stirring up hatred, as we have heard, is being defined too broadly and making people feel too
“scared to speak out about important topics in case they face criminal prosecution”.
Mr Gittos recently successfully defended an ex-Royal Marine, Jamie Michael, charged with that offence simply for posting a video of himself ranting about illegal migration. He was held for 17 days, but acquitted in 17 minutes by a jury, and Mr Gittos reminds us that the jury system often acts at a curb on the worst excesses of the state. Now even that is under attack. Can the Minister assure us that it will be protected?
Lord Sarfraz (Con)
My Lords, I, too, congratulate the noble Lord, Lord Lebedev, on securing this timely debate. I know that he has been a great champion of the media and free speech for many years.
At the heart of this debate lies the matter of ensuring that the police have the resources, tools and training to arrest the right people, without compromising freedom of speech or privacy online. We cannot expect the 45 territorial police forces in this country suddenly to get it right. There are more than 33 social platforms with over 100 million monthly active users. Each is very different, with different interfaces, community rules and approaches to content monitoring. To expect police officers to do their offline jobs while monitoring online non-threatening communication is very difficult. To meet the challenges of the future, the police need the tools of the future. I look forward to hearing what the Minister has to say about that.
What might it look like? First, we need to get the basic tech right. The police national database has not been upgraded since 2019. That is a lifetime in tech; their systems are pretty much obsolete. That is the database that records data on arrests that have not led to conviction, which goes to the very heart of the Question from the noble Lord, Lord Lebedev. If the police are not able to efficiently collect and manage data, they can hardly use it in a useful way.
One promising area is predictive policing. A number of trials are happening around the country, and the focus is on crime prevention—for example, trying to predict where a discussion in a group is heading before it escalates. Like all tech, it has great potential but must be deployed ethically to avoid overpolicing. Like all these things, the platforms have and will continue to have an important role to play.
Let us take, for example, basic content filtering. If you turn on Google’s SafeSearch, there is a pretty decent chance that you will not receive harmful content when you do a search, but that is really difficult to do on a messaging platform, for example. There is no setting on WhatsApp to block explicit unwanted photographs from coming in. The tech exists and is being trialled on a number of platforms, but these tools are still optional and require users to opt in. Perhaps they should be the defaults, requiring users to opt out instead of using opt-in filters.
One other big area of potential is AI-powered content moderation. This is real-time monitoring of content, analysing text, images and videos to identify non-threatening but potentially very harmful content. Several platforms are trialling this but we do not yet have the standards for deployment around transparency, accuracy and bias mitigation. Just as we are putting technology at the heart of our defence and national security strategy, we must facilitate innovation across all forces, not just within specialist units. Only then will we have arrests that lead to conviction and only then can we do a better job of ensuring a free and open internet.
Lord Strathcarron (Non-Afl)
My Lords, I, too, thank the noble Lord, Lord Lebedev, for this debate. I declare an interest as an author and publisher. With the noble Lord’s blessing, I should like to extend the Question from freedom of speech to freedom of expression, as non-crime hate incidents, which I believe are in scope of the Question, affect the written word just as much as the spoken word. I am talking about authors rather than journalists or users of social media.
Apart from targeting high-profile authors such as JK Rowling, the mere existence of non-crime hate incidents has a deterring effect on all authors’ freedom of expression, not because they have committed a crime—after all, we are talking specifically about a non-crime—but because non-crimes nevertheless affect authors through the three first cousins of non-crime hate incidents: cancel culture, which can ruin an author’s career; the empowering of the Twitter mob, who can endanger an author’s physical safety and mental well-being; and mealy-mouthed publishers employing sensitivity readers to scour texts for anything that someone somewhere might find offensive and use non-crime hate incidents and its first cousins in retaliation, thus stifling freedom of expression.
Fortunately for those of us who believe in free markets, although the censors may have the first word, the readers often have the last word. After Puffin Books sanitised Roald Dahl’s Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, there was outrage from not just literary figures of all persuasions but even politicians, such as the generational smoking ban enthusiast Rishi Sunak. Customers voted with their bookmarks and, consequently, the rereleased original version by Penguin Classics continues to outsell the neutered Puffin version by three to one—but still it persists.
As a publisher, I have a worrying example in front of me now: a title called The History of Islamic Art, written by an Oxford University postgraduate. The work includes a study of images depicting the Prophet Mohammed. As the book points out, and as is well known by Islamic scholars—including the Koranic scholar who addressed the Islamophobia meeting that many of us here were at yesterday—the banning of such images is a fairly recent Sunni phenomenon. The fact is that such portrayals continue to this day among the Shia and other sects. However, such is the febrile atmosphere created by non-crime hate incidents and its cousins that Oxford University Press turned the book down purely in fear of a reaction to it by the student mob. I am pleased to say that we are going to publish it—and with an American co-edition, so the book will enjoy a far wider circulation than it would otherwise have had. Again, this is proof that censorship is counterproductive for those who propose it.
Talking of counterproductivity, I agree with Sir Andy Marsh, the chief constable of the College of Policing, who addressed many of those of us who are here, as members of the free speech Peers’ group, about three months ago. Last month, he said that non-crime hate incidents should be scrapped and that police officers should refocus on crime rather than non-crime. It is not as though non-crime hate incidents actually do any good. As freedom of information requests have shown, there is no evidence at all that, nationally, they are even logged properly or prevent crime.
Scrapping them would also help the police recover their reputation as they become a laughing stock in their overreaction to thought crime while leaving real crime more or less completely undetected. It has got to the stage where, if you have been burgled, the police will not come round unless you also tweet that the burglar was in some way being dishonest, in which case half the force will descend on you. The problem that the Minister might address—apart from encouraging the Home Secretary, who seems worryingly keen on non-crime hate incidents—is that different forces completely ignore the College of Policing’s guidance. This begs the question, “What is the point of the College of Policing in the first place?”, but that is a question for another day.
Lord Kempsell (Con)
I declare my interest as a freelance journalist and publisher and, therefore, as somebody who makes his living from freedom of speech. I join noble Lords in thanking the noble Lord, Lord Lebedev, for securing today’s timely and important debate. As I find myself the last Back-Bencher on the speakers’ list, perhaps I might venture to sum up the situation.
Anybody listening to the debate in this Committee today will have concluded that, in 2025, the United Kingdom is in a state of free speech emergency. As we have heard, the police are now making more than 30 arrests a day for online offensive messages—an increase of 121% from 2017. As the noble Baroness, Lady Fox of Buckley, adumbrated so well, every police force in this country has a dedicated team monitoring social media. My noble friend Lord Frost’s point deserves further weight, to emphasise that, in the modern online world, communication has changed. It is the internet of 2025 that authorities are observing, with memes and rapid forms of communication, when the legislative framework feels as though it was built for the internet of 20 years ago.
I turn to another topic that we are yet to cover in the debate, which is the free speech of parliamentarians. I am now not the only media publisher or journalist in your Lordships’ House; in fact, our number is ever increasing. However, as a publisher, I found myself in January served with the super-injunction—now lifted—that precluded and prevented the reporting of the scandal of the Afghan response route being exposed. I was served with that super-injunction in my capacity as a journalist and reporter. I had no knowledge of the scheme or the policy while in government, but it of course prevented me reporting the facts of this enormous debacle, which is of huge public concern.
Could I have made those points in your Lordships’ House? Well, I took advice, and there are limits to parliamentary privilege in both the other place and your Lordships’ House. There are a large number of Ministers and parliamentarians who were also effectively gagged from exposing the truth of this scandal to the public, even in Parliament. In a rare note of congratulation, I note that the Government have, in my view, done completely the right thing in supporting the lifting of this super-injunction. It gives me some regret—and, I am afraid to say, shame—that my own party, the Conservative Party, instituted this super-injunction and supported it while in government. I note, though, that the current Labour Government chose to extend its application until recently.
As I said, there are limits to parliamentary privilege, but there was also a moral dichotomy in this case. Those who were served with the super-injunction were told that breaking it would constitute an immediate and real threat to life but, lo and behold, we now learn from the Government’s own recent review that the basis for that assumption may well have been faulty. That review has cast considerable doubt on the notion that those whose data was subject to the leak were in fact at imminent and real risk. The reviewer wrote:
“There is little evidence of intent by the Taliban to conduct a campaign of retribution against”
former officials. Indeed,
“the wealth of data inherited”
by the Taliban would have already enabled that, notwithstanding the leak of the spreadsheet. That claim has also been repeated by the Talban themselves.
Why was it, then, that parliamentarians were even gagged, let alone the media prevented from reporting this outrageous scandal of high and real public interest? As a parliamentarian, I find it deeply troubling that that was the case. I urge the Government, in their response to the wash-up of these issues, to adumbrate what they will do to ensure that the privilege of parliamentarians is protected and that never again can a scandal on this scale be concealed from the public.
Baroness Meyer (Con)
My Lords, like the noble Lord, Lord Lebedev, I too consider freedom of speech very close to my heart for personal reasons. My mother was born the day before the Russian Revolution, in February 1917. I can only imagine my grandmother, having just given birth, hearing the chants of over 100,000 women marching through Petrograd demanding bread. They were soon joined by peasants, workers and soldiers, exhausted by war. The Tsar was forced to abdicate and a provisional Government was formed, but Soviet committees quickly sprang up. By March, the revolution had spread across all of Russia.
Amid the chaos, Germany saw its chance and transported Lenin from exile in Switzerland to Petrograd. He called for
“All power to the Soviets”
and the overthrow of Kerensky’s fragile Government. In October, Lenin seized power. One of his first acts was to establish the Cheka, his secret police. Anyone deemed a threat was arrested, deported or executed. That is how most of my grandparents’ family disappeared.
Once in power, Lenin built a one-party state, starting with the restriction of any political opposition and the arrest and deportation of anyone who did not support communism. Titles and ranks were abolished. Land was confiscated from landowners and farmers. All schools were brought under state control to include ideological teaching. Newspapers were censored. Political opposition was suppressed. Workers’ rights increased, and there was a reduction of working hours. A state planning body—Gosplan—was established. Does it all sound very familiar?
These policies devastated Russia. Industrial output fell by 40%. Some 6 million people died of famine. Then came Stalin’s purges, the reign of terror, where more of my family were arrested and executed, and another 1.2 million people perished. These events destroyed a civilisation and replaced it with a regime built on fear and silence. We must not assume it could never happen again.
Today, in Britain, we face a quieter, but troubling, assault on freedom of expression. This is not the mark of a confident democracy. Once the state begins to police thought and language, the line between protection and repression vanishes. Freedom of speech is not a luxury. It is the foundation of all liberties. Let us not ignore the lessons of history. If we allow fear or ideology to override our freedoms, history may not just echo, it may repeat itself, and on our own soil. Will the Minister agree to revise and scrap the non-hate crimes that make our freedom of speech practically impossible?
Baroness Doocey (LD)
My Lords, as I understand it, this debate was not about non-crime hate incidents; it was about non-threatening online communication offences, so I shall confine my remarks to that.
Many of the points I would have made have already been made and it has been a very interesting debate. Those arrested under these laws are considered to have communicated something that has been deemed grossly offensive, indecent, obscene or menacing, or to have said something false, intending to cause distress, annoyance, inconvenience or needless anxiety.
I want to highlight two issues, which I think are very important, which have not yet been covered. In some cases, this will not be a difficult call for the police to make, but in others, the judgment call will inevitably be much harder. In practice, these cases are often very complex. Arrests for malicious communications are rarely made in isolation; they frequently overlap with sexual offending, harassment, or hate crime. We also know that some police forces include serious domestic abuse-related crimes within this category. This complexity makes it difficult to isolate online offences in the data, or to calculate how many might rightly be classified as “non-threatening”.
Nevertheless, as other noble Lords have mentioned, arrests for malicious communication have risen sharply—up by nearly 60% between 2019 and 2023. But although the police are making more arrests, many of these cases never get to court. Some of this will be because of huge court backlogs—some cases are now being listed for 2029, which almost beggars belief—but the falling conviction rate also raises legitimate questions about how the police are enforcing these laws, with genuine concern that, in some cases, their approach may be too heavy-handed, with implications for freedom of speech.
We can change laws and update guidance, but fundamentally we must ensure that our front-line police officers receive the training necessary to respond proportionately and effectively in these often sensitive situations. Yet the police workforce is now less experienced than at any time since records began. As of last year, more than one in three officers had fewer than five years of service. Despite this, there has been no independent review of police training since 2018, which I find frankly disgraceful. The Minister will be aware that HMICFRS has linked inexperienced officers and inadequate training and support to poor investigation standards. It has also repeatedly recommended independent evaluation processes and better feedback mechanisms. What steps are the Government taking to address this serious issue?
Secondly, improved accountability for social media platforms is long overdue. This is not universally popular. Indeed, whenever this is raised, the big tech companies and even some high-profile international figures express concern. Can the Minister assure us that the Government will not water down vital protections under pressure from either industry or abroad? Protections against online harm must not come at the expense of free speech, but neither is free speech absolute. Online abuse can have a devastating impact on lives. Criminal sanctions must be applied proportionately, with appropriate safeguards in place.
In conclusion, we must strike a careful balance. The Government must ensure that police officers receive the training and support they need to make difficult judgment calls. Police powers must be exercised wisely, and online platforms must be held accountable. More than anything else, victims must have confidence that the law is on their side.
Lord Sandhurst (Con)
My Lords, I too thank the noble Lord, Lord Lebedev, for securing this debate and for his compelling opening speech.
Freedom of expression is a fundamental right for us. Recently, the future of free speech on the internet has become a contentious topic in the United Kingdom. It is right that we examine the implications of this trend for our society and democracy. The noble Lord, Lord Kempsell, has also raised interesting questions regarding the Afghan super-injunction. I cannot go there today.
In 2023 alone, the police made 12,183 arrests under Section 127 of the Communications Act 2003 and Section 1 of the Malicious Communications Act 1988. Of those arrested, fewer than 10%—some 1,119—have been convicted and sentenced. The criteria for arrest appear seriously flawed. Police are wasting their own time.
Freedom of speech is a right of the utmost importance, but I acknowledge that it is not unqualified. Under the previous Conservative Government, the Online Safety Act created new offences for false and threatening communications online. Its prohibitions, if properly and sensibly applied, are sensible. They include content relating to child sexual abuse, extreme sexual violence, extreme pornography, the promotion or facilitation of suicide, sexual exploitation and promoting terrorism. All of that is obviously right. Our concern should be to criminalise violence and words leading to acts which harm our citizens, but not merely what offends some people. That includes blasphemy or so-called blasphemy. At a meeting with President Trump and Vice-President Vance, the Prime Minister defended the United Kingdom’s stance on freedom of speech. He promised to protect this right for a very long time, but is that being done?
The noble Lord, Lord Strathcarron, made compelling observations about non-crime hate speech. As I have shown, thousands have been arrested and questioned for messages that have somehow upset others but have not ended in conviction. Our police must be getting too many things badly wrong; that must cease. Let me give an example. Earlier this year, Maxie Allen and Rosalind Levine were arrested by at least six police officers. They had expressed concerns on a WhatsApp group about their daughter’s primary school. The chief constable later conceded:
“With the benefit of hindsight, we could have achieved the same ends in a different way”.
Did they really need hindsight to see that sending six police officers to a suburban house was unnecessary? This case raises serious concerns around the treatment of those arrested. It raises questions about the thoughtless interpretation of legislation. In that case, and in many others, did no senior officer ask: “Is this really criminal activity? Do we need to send six officers?”
We on this side of the Committee are clear that free speech is being mispoliced. This is serious. Those in authority must cease intrusive bullying and we, as legislators, must act to prevent this continuing. As I have explained, the intentions behind the current legislation are worthy and legitimate, but let us all remember that the way to hell is paved with good intentions. We must be free to provoke, to challenge, to dissent and, within reason, to offend. We rightly pursue the removal of harmful and dangerous content online, but the ability to speak freely is a defining pillar of our democratic society. In common law, everything is permitted that is not forbidden by law; that truism goes back to the 19th century and Dicey.
Is the Minister confident that police resources are being directed properly in this field? Will the Government issue guidance to ensure that, while probable online offences are properly examined, freedom of expression is robustly protected for all United Kingdom citizens? I hope that the Minister will set out what the Government intend to do to restore public confidence, to uphold the law as it was intended and to ensure that freedom of expression is protected in the United Kingdom.
The Minister of State, Home Office (Lord Hanson of Flint) (Lab)
My Lords, I welcome this debate. As of this week, I have been in your Lordships’ House just over a year and today is the first opportunity I have had to exchange views with the noble Lord, Lord Lebedev. I appreciate the opportunity to do so and thank him for the powerful case that he made and the arguments he has put forward. I thank noble Lords from across the House—though mostly not from my side of it—for their contributions to this debate.
I want to make an initial statement which, I hope, will resonate with noble Lords across the Committee. The Government are clear that freedom of speech is a fundamental right and underpins our democratic society. I stood at the Dispatch Box in the wake of the offences committed in the August riots last year, after three young girls were murdered, and set out clear boundaries on those issues. However, I also said that there was an important point around protest and people expressing a view on political issues.
I have said things that are controversial. I have stood in open debate as a Member of Parliament, as a Member of this House and as a person outside both Houses. I have undertaken protests against causes that I felt were unjust. I have ensured that, within the legal framework, individuals are allowed to express their views freely. That is sometimes controversial and unpopular but, as even the noble Lord, Lord Sandhurst, just echoed, freedom of speech comes with responsibilities and is rightly qualified by legislation from Governments of my party and of other political parties.
The law rightly sets proportional limitations where necessary to protect public safety, to prevent crime, and to safeguard the rights of others, particularly minorities. That legal framework also ensures that individuals are protected from criminal conduct, including threatening, harassing and abusive behaviour. The Government are clear that there is freedom of speech, but that freedom of speech cannot be used as a justification for breaking the law. That means that that speech must not incite criminal activity that this House—and the House of Commons—have deemed to be a line in the sand. Non-threatening communication offences are captured across multiple pieces of legislation to which noble Lords have referred to today.
Section 1 of the Malicious Communications Act 1988, passed under the Government of Mrs Thatcher—who I spoke out and protested against in a free and open society—was passed in 1988. That concerns messages of an
“indecent or grossly offensive nature”
and I hope that there is a shared understanding across this House that messages that are indecent or grossly offensive do cross a line. Section 127 of the Communications Act 2003—passed by the Government of Tony Blair, in which I served as a Minister—again looked at messages which are obscene or menacing, or persistently making use of public electronic communication networks in a way that encourages those offences. I do not know whether noble Lords want to see that repealed. Let us discuss it and we will see where the line in the sand is drawn.
The Online Safety Act 2023, passed by the Government of Rishi Sunak, which the noble Lord, Lord Sandhurst, mentioned, includes new communication offences—including false communication offences—and deals with a range of issues, including issues of sexual abuse and exploitation. That is a line that both Houses have drawn, and I reference those three Acts because they are from three different political parties from even within, dare I say, several different shades of blue within the Conservative Party. That is a complex area, but it has been agreed to be a line in the sand. But again, if Members wish to challenge, let us discuss where that line is drawn.
Under our legislation,—and I hope this reassures the noble Lord, Lord Lebedev, and others who have spoken—arrests by the police are manifestations of what the public expect them to do, which is to enforce the law as passed by both these Houses, without fear or favour, based on the information they have—or is put before them—at the time. The police are operationally independent. Noble Lords would not wish me to be directing the chief constable of Greater Manchester to make arrests, or indeed to not make arrests. That is not the job of a Policing Minister, nor does it come under policing responsibilities in the Home Office.
We do expect the police, who are operationally independent, to fully investigate potential alleged offences, to work with the Crown Prosecution Service—which will test whether the police have acted fairly—and, if they both believe that there is a case to answer, to put it before a jury of 12 good and true peers, who will determine, rightly or wrongly, whether an offence has been committed. That is the basis of where we are today. In response to the Noble Lord’s initial headline for this debate, we do not collect or publish data on the number of arrests by police forces for communication offences as such. However, it is not unlawful to be arrested—it does not mean you have committed the crime. Many of those arrests do not lead to crimes which go before the court, because the CPS has tested them and/or the police themselves have determined that it is not appropriate to do so. Importantly, however, through freedom of information requests to police forces, arrest data under the offences can be gathered and the findings have suggested that the number of arrests has broadly doubled in the past seven or so years.
In response to a couple of the points that have been made, first to the noble Lord, Lord Sarfraz, there has been £1 billion in extra investment in policing this year: £1 billion over last year’s investment that is being put to local police forces, 43 across the country. It is important they look at modernising the equipment that they have and making sure that they are fit for purpose.
The noble Baroness, Lady Fox, and others asked where the boundary will be drawn. We have talked about challenges with AI and there will be further challenges in future. It is important that we reflect on those issues in a positive way and that this legislation is enforced, but at the moment our police focus as a Government is on neighbourhood policing, tackling knife crime and violence against women and girls, increasing the number of neighbourhood police officers and putting 13,000 more police on the street to give community resilience and support. The legislation is there—if Members do not like it, in this democracy they can put forward amendments to try to change it—for the police to operate in a fair and appropriate way.
The noble Lords, Lord Lebedev, Lord Strathcarron and Lord Kempsell, and the noble Baronesses, Lady Meyer and Lady Doocey, raised non-crime hate incidents. The noble Baroness, Lady Doocey, made an important point about training standards for national police, so that they understand the remit and limit of the current legislation. That is for chief constables, but there is a need for guidance, training and support.
Importantly, the National Police Chiefs’ Council and the College of Policing, at the request of the Home Secretary, are currently undertaking a review of how non-crime hate incidents are dealt with. We expect to see some information from the police on that. It is self-evidently important that some of those incidents help us gather intelligence on potential future crime, but, equally, we do not want the police to do things that waste their time and not focus on the type of crime that the noble Lord rightly mentioned in his introduction. Violent crime, knife crime and sexual grooming are really important issues.
However, that does not get away from the fact that, if someone incites racial hatred or hatred against an individual for their sexuality, that needs to be considered in the framework of the law of the land. If noble Lords have concerns—and a number of views have been expressed today about the operation of this—the bedrock is the legislation currently on the statute book. That has been passed by different Governments of different political parties and it is meant to ensure that we take action to stop harassment, malicious information or potential activity that leads to physical or mental violence. That is what it is designed to do. If noble Lords want to tighten or change that, they should put their proposals before both Houses and let us debate them. I believe in freedom of speech, tempered by the freedom to enjoy life without harassment, attacks or information online that says, “Let’s take action against this individual for what they are doing”, which is beyond their responsibility.
The noble Lord, Lord Kempsell, mentioned the very complex Afghan issue. We in the Home Office have been subject to those injunctions as well. They were passed by the court, not the current Government, who set out their position clearly in a Statement made in the House of Commons earlier in the week and repeated in our House yesterday. I refer him to that, because it sets out the justification for the original injunction, the super-injunction and the Government revising that procedure to date.
I am conscious that I have about one minute left. This has been a useful debate that has surfaced issues that I am trying to respond to in a way that sets out my and the Government’s view in a positive way, but recognises that there will be opportunities for Members to address further the concerns they have expressed. We must remember that online abuse is neither a trivial nor an inconsequential matter. At the heart of each instance that I have mentioned under the legislation is a victim—a person or group of persons—who has been potentially subjected to vile, dreadful abuse. We must also remember that it is a complex area where no data held by the Home Office can draw sufficient conclusions. The police are continually negotiating a difficult balance between freedom of speech and enforcing our laws on malicious communications to make them fair and proportionate. We must support them in doing so. I commend the debate to the Committee. If I have not covered all the points, at least in part, I will reflect on them once Hansard has been read.
India and Pakistan: Peace Representations
Lord Hussain
To ask His Majesty’s Government what representations they have made to the governments of India and Pakistan to bring about peace between the two countries, including with regard to Kashmir and the suspension of the Indus Water Treaty.
The Deputy Chairman of Committees (Baroness Garden of Frognal) (LD)
My Lords, we are starting slightly late, so we will go on to 5.02 pm.
Lord Hussain (LD)
My Lords, I will begin by reminding your Lordships that the issue of Kashmir is the oldest dispute in the history of the United Nations and has been a bone of contention between India and Pakistan since their independence. According to United Nations resolutions in 1948-49 and many subsequent ones, both countries agreed to hold a ceasefire, withdraw their military and help the UN Commission hold a plebiscite. As a result, the ceasefire took place, but the plebiscite did not, hence the state was divided between the two countries, with both claiming the entire area. Both countries have been to war several times over this, but Kashmir remains unresolved and divided.
The human rights situation in the state, particularly in the Indian-controlled part, started deteriorating from day one. With time, Kashmir has become the biggest militarised zone in the world, with 900,000 military and paramilitary personnel operating with complete impunity under the Indian Armed Forces (Special Powers) Act. According to renowned international human rights organisations, including Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, the UN Commission on Human Rights and Genocide Watch, more than 100,000 people have been killed, with many more injured, and thousands are held in detention centres and prisons in Kashmir and other parts of India.
The Indian Army is reported to be involved in illegal detentions, torture, extrajudicial killing, rape, fake encounters and enforced disappearances, while more than 3,000 mass graves have been identified. The Amnesty International report, A ‘Lawless Law’ illustrates a catalogue of cases where individuals were subjected to repeated use of draconian laws such as the Public Safety Act and the Unlawful Activities (Prevention) Act, detaining them in custody from two years to more than 30 years. The victims of a widely publicised case of gang rape in the remote village of Kunan Poshpora, where more than 100 women and girls were reported to have been raped by the Rajputana Rifles 68th Mountain Brigade of the Indian Army, are still waiting for justice.
Prominent Kashmiri leaders Maqbool Bhat and Afzal Guru were hanged and buried in New Delhi’s Tihar prison, while Mirwaiz Mohammed Farooq, Ashfaq Majeed Wani, Burhan Wani and many others were shot dead, and 90 year-old Ali Gilani died under house arrest. Other prominent leaders, including Shabir Shah, Yasin Malik, Asiya Andrabi and dozens of others have spent most of their adult lives in torture cells, detention centres and prisons.
In its reports of 2018 and 2019, the UN Commission on Human Rights asked for free access to both sides of the state to investigate all the reports of human rights abuses, but India has refused to co-operate. Instead, the Indian Government unilaterally abrogated sections 370 and 35A of the Indian constitution, which gave some internal autonomy and preserved the state’s Muslim identity. According to a 2019 Genocide Watch report, Kashmir is at the brink of genocide.
With this grim picture of India’s human rights record in Kashmir, all 1 million British Kashmiris are dismayed to know that the British Government are not even prepared to include a human rights clause in our free trade agreement with India. Many call this double standards. Perhaps the Minister can tell us what more must happen in terms of human rights abuses in Kashmir to convince the British Government to include human rights in our free trade agreement with India. When was the last time our Government raised human rights in Kashmir with their Indian counterparts?
Recent India-Pakistan military clashes started after a massacre of tourists in the Indian-controlled part of Kashmir, which killed 26 innocent tourists. This was a cowardly act of terror, and it received international condemnation. India blamed Pakistan-based insurgent groups for the attack, an allegation Pakistan disputed. It is reported to have offered full co-operation in any joint or international investigation, but India instead announced Operation Sindoor to hit what it called “terrorist infrastructure” in Pakistan and Pakistani-administered Kashmir.
Soon after this terror attack, India closed its border with Pakistan, stopping bilateral trade and unilaterally suspending the Indus Waters Treaty. The treaty was signed in 1960 to regulate the management of the Indus river basin, which is important for supplying both countries with water for irrigation and hydropower. Those tensions turned into a conflict between 6 and 10 May 2025. India and Pakistan conducted a series of military strikes that saw the countries strike deep into each other’s territory, and civilians and soldiers killed on both sides of the line of control.
One of these Indian strikes hit a residential area in my parental town of Kotli in Azad Kashmir, where some of my close relatives escaped very narrowly, while two of their neighbours were not so lucky and were killed while asleep in their homes. The scale of the recent conflict took many international observers by surprise, leading to fears of further escalation between two countries which both possess nuclear weapons.
According to the Center for Strategic and International Studies, this is the first time India and Pakistan have engaged in drone warfare in their rivalry, indicating a new era of technological conflict in the region. Similarly, the Asia Pacific Foundation of Canada noted how close the conflict came to sensitive sites in both countries, including nuclear command and control installations.
International mediation, including the British Foreign Secretary and American President Donald Trump, who offered to help resolve disputes, including the Kashmir issue, and greater trade with both countries, secured a ceasefire on 10 May 2025. Despite that ceasefire agreement, according to Al Jazeera on 22 June 2025, the Indian Home Minister Amit Shah reportedly said that India would “never” restore the Indus Waters Treaty and that the water flowing there would be diverted for internal use. Pakistan has previously suggested that any such move would breach the terms of the treaty and would constitute an act of war. Using water as a weapon of war is a highly dangerous and inhumane act. Water is a lifeline for the people of Pakistan and any attempt by India to disrupt the water supply would have serious consequences. Hence, I ask the British Government to use their friendly relations with India to encourage it to restore the Indus Waters Treaty with Pakistan to avoid any future conflict on this issue.
The ceasefire agreement of 10 May 2025 is hugely welcomed by all, but the world has seen many ceasefires signed by both countries in the past, with commitments to resolve disputes—including Kashmir—peacefully, and they have never reached an agreement for the past 78 years. I therefore believe that third-party mediation is the only way to get the leadership of both countries to sit down and agree on a settlement, taking the aspirations of the people of Kashmir on board. The road to long-lasting and sustainable peace in the region goes through Kashmir. As long as this open wound keeps bleeding, any prospect of peace in the region will remain pie in the sky.
The majority of the people in India, Pakistan and Kashmir want peace. Now that the US President has made the offer to help to resolve the Kashmir issue to bring peace, stability and prosperity in the region, countries such as Britain must seize this opportunity and join these efforts to bring a solution to this issue that is acceptable to India, Pakistan and the people of Kashmir. Finally, I ask the Minister whether the British Government would join the mediation efforts to bring peace between India and Pakistan.
Lord Parekh (Lab)
My Lords, I congratulate the noble Lord, Lord Hussain, on securing and initiating this debate. I will not pay particular attention in this address to the question of Kashmir. For me, Kashmir is a legacy of the partition of India. If the partition had not taken place, Kashmir would have had a very different character. To link Kashmir and India in this way is a mistake, because Kashmiri Islam has very little in common with Indian Islam. It is also the case that Kashmiris define themselves primarily as Kashmiris, rather than as Hindus or Muslims. So, left to itself, the Kashmiri problem would have been solved in a normal, amicable, political manner.
Thanks to the partition, the Kashmir issue has become acute. The partition in turn took place as a result of the British Empire. Wherever Britain has been faced with multi-ethnic societies, it has left many of them after partitioning them—we can think of Malaysia, Cyprus, Ireland and many other countries. Britain has had limited capacity to handle multi-ethnic societies. Therefore, when confronted with India, the problem became even more acute and the partition that took place was the most horrendous event in the history of these two countries. We here do not appreciate how much it is seared into the consciousness of people in India and Pakistan. It was a partition in which millions moved across the boundary and thousands were raped or wounded. That partition is remembered daily by those people who suffered at the hands of it, in broadly the same way that the Holocaust is remembered by Jews whose families suffered.
Given all that, the question for us is not to get into the debate about what to do, but whether something can be done to reconcile these two countries to the existence of each other. India and Pakistan were both born within the crucible of the partition. This horrendous event has now built up mutual hatred, so that India cannot say anything good about Pakistan, nor Pakistan about India.
In that kind of situation, how can we get these two countries to accept each other as the neighbours they are? I end by suggesting two or three ideas which need to be pursued. The first important thing is that there is a phobia. In India, there is a tendency for people to refer to Pakistan in a very elder brotherly and cavalier kind of manner, saying that they do not expect anything civilised from that part of the world. Conversely, in Pakistan there is a tendency to have a kind of younger brotherly hatred towards India, dismissing the idea that India could ever do anything good. That kind of phobia, with a built-in incapacity to see the good in the other, has to be broken. Unless you do that, you cannot make any sensible reconciliation. To respond to that phobia, you require not just ordinary political forms of co-operation—you need the capacity to appeal emotionally to people, so that they can respond to each other in terms of those historically shared memories, triggered by events.
The other thing would be that there are no deep conflicts of interest between India and Pakistan—no economic or political conflicts. They even look alike: culturally, they are similar. The question therefore would be for these two societies to establish institutional relations for clearing up misunderstandings and to create a situation in which they can talk to each other intelligently and peacefully.
Lord Ahmad of Wimbledon (Con)
My Lords, I thank the noble Lord, Lord Hussain, for tabling this debate. Two lands, two people, two nuclear powers—yet, despite the borders that exist and the wars that have been fought, there is a shared history, intertwined with our own. It was two days in 1947, as the British left India, that changed history and the destiny of this region—14 and 15 August 1947, which saw the birth of two independent nations, Pakistan and India respectively.
In my view, war lays the foundations for an inevitable peace, but peace itself is not the mere absence of war. It is the recognition of each other’s rights, embedded in respect and justice, which is ultimately the destiny of these two nations and of Kashmir. At the heart of this inevitable peace is the peace across the lands, often referred to as “heaven on earth”, the state of Kashmir. It was after the Kargil war of 1999 that the late General Musharraf of Pakistan, together with Prime Minister Vajpayee of the BJP, and subsequently Prime Minister Manmohan Singh of Congress, recognised the opportunity that it was peace that was the ultimate victory for all. In that respect, they proposed a four-point plan: no change of borders, but free movement of people across the line of control; self-governance and recognised autonomy for Kashmiris; the demilitarisation of Kashmir; and a joint mechanism, with India, Pakistan and Kashmir all involved. Sadly, political change and instability, and of course the tragic and abhorrent terror attacks in Mumbai in 2008, ended that track of hope.
Yet if, as we often say, lessons are to be learned from history, it shows that mediation is key and peace is possible—and that is what we need now. It was only a few days ago that we saw these two nations at war, yet I pay tribute to the role, the leadership and timely mediation, of the kingdom of Saudi Arabia, the UAE, the US and Qatar, friends to both nations, which saw the shocking prospect of two nuclear powers in full-scale war recede. What we saw was a courage and recognition by both sides that there would be no eventual winner of the war; therefore, the next step must be respect and trust, as the foundation for confidence-building measures, along with the four principles that I have outlined: respect for peace, and respect for treaties signed and agreements reached, be they the Simla accords or the Indus Waters Treaty, and an end to terrorism, with joint efforts to eradicate the scourge of this abhorrent evil, and ultimately a vision of an inclusive and prosperous future for Kashmiris, which is possible and in reach, based on the framework that I have outlined for the inevitable benefits to both nations and the stability of the wider region.
Our role is as a friend to both nations. Yet I would argue it is more than others. We have a legacy, as we have already heard, that we left behind—a legacy I feel most personally attached to, with family and friends. It is a history etched into my own DNA of a shared heritage of both nations. Therefore, I ask the Minster, for whom the whole Committee has great respect, to now be proactive in our facilitation, which provides the basis of direct mediation efforts between our two friends—two nations of the Commonwealth. Let us be proactive in averting the next crisis, the next war, through whatever channels necessary to ensure that vision of peace for Kashmir becomes a living reality.
Baroness Gohir (CB)
My Lords, I thank the noble Lord, Lord Hussain, for his powerful opening to the debate. I want to express deep concern about India’s decision to suspend its participation in the Indus Waters Treaty. It is a breach of international conventions. It is also a highly unethical action. Water should never be weaponised. It is not just a resource; it is a basic human right. For decades, even in the face of war and hostilities between India and Pakistan, that treaty was maintained. It has long been a good example of co-operation and diplomacy, despite the tension between the two countries. That is no small achievement and something both countries can be proud of.
What has changed? Why is India now threatening to cut off the water to Pakistan? Even if India has legitimate grievances and concerns about terrorism, its response is disproportionate, because it punishes Pakistan’s 240 million civilian population. This will not increase its security. In fact, it is more likely to destabilise the region. India’s decision has not emerged in a vacuum. In other parts of the world, we are witnessing the dangerous normalisation of weaponising water. The most glaring and disturbing example is Israel’s systematic use of water as a tool of domination and deprivation in Gaza. The world has failed to hold Israel accountable; that failure has likely emboldened India and will embolden other countries in the future, who will weaponise water and punish civilian populations. This could happen to India too in the future, which has upstream neighbouring countries.
We must not stay silent given what is at stake. Water from the Indus basin is a lifeline for the population of Pakistan. It relies on the Indus basin’s water for around 80% of its agriculture, which accounts for over 20% of its GDP and supports over 40% of its workforce. One-third of Pakistan’s hydropower also depends on the basin’s water. Inaction now will lead to crop failures, deepen food insecurity and increase poverty. Even a small diversion or blockage will have catastrophic consequences. For example, Pakistan could feel the impact during the dry season when water availability is already at its lowest. The suspension of the treaty also means that data-sharing mechanisms on river flows have been suspended. Without real-time data, Pakistan will not be able to forecast and prepare for floods or droughts, or plan for irrigation, hydropower or drinking water.
India could also use other tactics to cause harm to Pakistani civilians, such as temporarily holding back water and then suddenly releasing it, without warning, causing massive damage downstream. Sudden flushes of silt that can build up in dams could also cause significant damage downstream to crops in Pakistan. The world cannot look the other way, and the UK can play a crucial role as a mediator and involve the World Bank. Does the Minister share my concerns? Are our Government willing to get involved? Can she share what representations she has made to the Indian Government? How confident is she that she can get representatives from both sides to sit down and try to talk through and resolve this issue?
The time to act is now because, once the flow of water stops, so does the hope for peace between India and Pakistan.
Baroness Verma (Con)
My Lords, I am also grateful to the noble Lord, Lord Hussain, for initiating this debate. Of course, all of us come with very different viewpoints from where we originate. The ultimate goal is to ensure that there is peace in the region. Therefore, the first thing we need to do is look at the elephant in the room: why we cannot have a discussion without it becoming so toxic in this country with the diasporas here. We need to remember that words matter when they are expressed here to what happens in the countries of India and Pakistan.
The Minister will of course agree that the recent attack was abhorrent. Every community in India united against the attack and came together. That is how this debate should be framed: wherever there is an attack, we come together. Far too many times, I have been in this House listening to attacks on one country or the other in a way that is unhelpful to the UK being able to be a friend to both. We, as those of that diaspora, need to start playing a constructive role in the way that we approach the debate.
I know that the noble Lord, Lord Hussain, often talks about the people in Kashmir. I am not going to talk about Kashmir, apart from to repeat what I have said to him before: that I hope that he is as affected by the deaths of all the murdered Kashmiri Pandits as he is of any other Kashmiri. We need to show that every human being matters to us, not just those who we seek to represent.
I turn to my questions to the Minister. After the attacks in Pahalgam recently, most of us will have seen the report of a Pakistani diplomat making slitting throat gestures to British protesters. That cannot be allowed in our country. I raised it in the main Chamber, but I did not get a response from the Foreign Office on what action has been taken about that incident. Will the Minister also tell the House what is happening about the aid we give and how it is utilised and monitored, so that we are not inadvertently aiding that minority of people who perform terrorist attacks? The large population of Pakistan and the large population of India do not want to be involved in such heinous crimes. Will the Minister respond on those two points?
The largest democracy on the planet is now understanding its responsibility, and we need to make sure, in the way we perform with both countries, that Pakistan, too, becomes a thriving democracy.
Lord Mohammed of Tinsley (LD)
My Lords, I support the vital question from my noble friend Lord Hussain, and speak to a crisis that has profound implications for not just peace between India and Pakistan but for the foundations of international co-operation in our water-stressed and climate-vulnerable world. I have noted a number of comments made by noble Lords during the debate on Kashmir. I stand behind every word of the 2019 UN report. I hope that the Minister will read it, and I am happy to provide a copy, but I must warn her that it makes for grim reading. Matters have only got worse since July 2019, and we need an urgent update of that report.
The violence in Kashmir, as other noble Lords have said, and the aerial strikes that followed between India and Pakistan earlier this year, shocked the international community, but the most devastating development was India’s unilateral suspension of the Indus waters treaty of 1960, a move that was less visible than air strikes but whose long-term consequences may be greater. For Pakistan, a nation of 240 million people, the Indus River system is the backbone of its agricultural economy. It grows crops and sustains entire communities. Suspending the treaty is not a mere diplomatic gesture, it is an act directly threatening the livelihood and food security of millions. Access to water is not a luxury; it is a right.
The treaty itself has no provision for unilateral suspension or termination. Article XII(4) explicitly states that the provisions remain in force unless replaced by a new treaty, mutually ratified. India’s action is a flagrant violation, as my colleague, the noble Baroness, Lady Gohir, said, of international law. Our commitments and principles are that agreements between states are to be upheld.
This move sets a dangerous precedent. If one country can arbitrarily suspend a decades-old treaty, what becomes of the entire framework of bilateral and multilateral agreements that underpin peace, trade and co-operation around the world? In other parts of the world, such as the Nile basin, the Euphrates, the Tigris and central Asia, Governments will take note of how the Indus Waters Treaty is treated; if one treaty can easily be cast aside, others may follow.
Beyond India and Pakistan, others are watching. China, upstream of both nations, is already constructing dams and diversions in the Tibetan plateau. Altering river flows will have implications for not just India and Pakistan but Bangladesh and the entire Ganges-Brahmaputra basin. Victor Gao, a Chinese commentator, recently said, “Do not do down stream what you would not like others to do up stream”. The logic is simple: today, it is India’s up stream; tomorrow, it could be China or another power cutting off a vital river.
The unintended consequences of escalating water conflicts, particularly with Bangladesh caught in the crosshairs, are too grave to ignore. It is vital not to forget that climate change is already compounding water scarcity. Suspending the treaty on preventing conflict is a reckless act and, as such, creates a fragile environment. We should welcome the offer from the US to mediate. I hope that the Foreign Secretary will follow suit; I would like the Minister to comment on that, on the back of the recent engagements with Delhi and Islamabad.
We urge the Government to go further and to act as a guarantor of peace. We call for the immediate reinstatement of the Indus Waters Treaty and support dialogue not just on the treaty’s revival but to modernise in the face of the climate realities and to look towards resolving the Kashmir conflict. The Indus has sustained civilisations for millennia. If the river runs dry and co-operation fails, it could be not just an ecological disaster but a geopolitical one.
Lord Bilimoria (CB)
My Lords, last month, as co-chair of the India All-Party Parliamentary Group, I hosted a delegation of cross-party Members of Parliament from both houses of the Indian Parliament to the UK. They were sent by Prime Minister Narendra Modi to communicate to us the horrors of 22 April in Kashmir and the horrors that followed.
Similarly, Shashi Tharoor, a member of the Indian National Congress whom I have known for many years, led an all-party delegation to the United States. There, he said that there were three particular reasons for this situation and stated:
“The first is that we have had a 37-year pattern of repeated terror attacks from Pakistan accompanied by repeated denials … Pakistan didn’t know allegedly where Osama bin Laden was until he was found in a Pakistani safe house right next to an army camp in a cantonment city … Mumbai attacks, they denied having anything to do with it; one of the terrorists was captured alive, his name, his identity, his address in Pakistan, everything was revealed under interrogation. He told us where he was trained, what was done. The US intelligence as well as ours recorded the chilling voice of the Pakistani handler giving minute by minute instructions to the killers in Mumbai, telling them where to go and they were monitoring Indian TV and saying there are people hiding on the third floor of that hotel, go and shoot them there … they will deny, they did so until they are actually caught red handed”.
He went on to say that, secondly,
“within 45 minutes or so”
of this attack happening,
“a group called the Resistance Front claimed credit … It is a well-known proxy front of the Lashkar-e-Taiba, a banned terror organisation listed by the United Nations, listed by the US State Department”.
The third reason he gave was that,
“when the first strikes happened on the terrorist camps … funerals were conducted, including for members of some of the key … organisations, the Jaish-e-Mohammed in particular and the Lashkar-e-Taiba. The funerals were conducted and photographs emerged on social media showing Pakistani generals and police officers in uniform attending these funerals, being conducted by relatives of these terrorists. So we are looking at three concrete pieces of evidence as far as India is concerned”.
On 12 May, Prime Minister Narendra Modi said:
“During Operation Sindoor the world has again seen the ugly face of Pakistan, when top Pakistani army officers came to bid farewell to the slain terrorists. This is strong evidence of state-sponsored terrorism … The way the Pakistani army and Pakistan government are encouraging terrorism, it will destroy Pakistan one day … Terror and talks cannot go together”.
Climate change-driven water scarcity and sweltering summers have deepened resentment in Kashmir over the Indus Waters Treaty, with increasing support locally in Kashmir for its suspension. For example, Kashmir’s famed saffron, which depends on rains, has shrunk due to inadequate irrigation facilities. In Gulmarg, there was hardly any snow last year, when 70% of the Kashmiri population depends on farming and its mountain cultivators depend on water. China has gotten involved in this as well, and interventions from Beijing over the Indus Waters Treaty risk stirring up regional tensions. Does the Minister agree with this?
To conclude, India is now the largest south Asian country in the world by population. It is an oasis of democratic stability: since its independence in 1947, it has never had a coup and never had its Armed Forces interfering in its politics, unlike many of its neighbours. It has a robust democracy where people speak. It is now the fastest-growing major economy in the world, growing at over 6% a year, and is the fourth-largest economy in the world. I predict that, by 2060, it will be the largest economy in the world. It is not in India’s interests to have conflict with its neighbours, including Pakistan. India wants peace with its neighbours. It wants to get on with growing its economy, bettering the livelihood of its people and making a huge, positive contribution to the global community.
Lord Purvis of Tweed (LD)
My Lords, I commend my noble friend Lord Hussain on securing this short but significant debate. I have been struck by the expertise and knowledge of all those who have contributed so far; I most certainly will not be able to do the debate justice in the few moments I have to speak for my party.
As a result of the reprehensible terrorist attacks that took place, for which there should be no impunity, we saw the most intense use of violence in more than 50 years between two nations that are friendly to the United Kingdom and have populations of more than 1.25 billion. As my noble friend Lord Hussain said, it was the first time that the two countries had engaged in drone warfare.
However, as my noble friend Lord Mohammed said, there is also concern over the 65 year-old Indus Waters Treaty and the consequences that that may bring—and not just because of the potential, as the noble Baroness, Lady Gohir, said, for wider humanitarian catastrophe. There are other areas of the world where we see the potential for conflict over water. I have made many visits to the Nile area, and I agree with my noble friend that we should be extremely cautious when we see breakdowns of dialogue and diplomacy when it comes to sources of water and irrigation. The ramifications are wider, which is why the breakdown of the India-Pakistan Indus commission is also a significant worry—especially given the fragility in the area, which is, as we have just heard, being exacerbated by climate change.
All bilateral treaties between the two nations are now vulnerable but I hope that the degree of stability since might be the basis, as we have heard in this debate, for building some degree of trust. I hope that the UK can support organisations that do the work, quietly and behind the scenes, to start building trust and dialogue on a community basis.
We have also heard about the concerns shared by my party with regards to the decision in 2019 by the Government of India on the revocation of Article 370 of the Indian constitution. Notwithstanding the 2024 elections that took place in Kashmir, it should be recognised that Kashmir continues to have less autonomy than India states. I want to ask the Minister about the views of Human Rights Watch when it comes to the denial of freedom of speech and association in that area, as well as the restrictions on broadcasting in India as a whole; the relationship with the BBC has been raised as a matter of particular concern.
As my noble friend Lord Hussain and others have said, this may be an opportunity for engagement and, ultimately, mediation. Is it the view of His Majesty’s Government that there is an opportunity ahead for the UK to play a part with two of our allies, who are Commonwealth members and with whom we have such deep and profound diaspora community relationships? Is it not in our interests to support them and the wider humanitarian need for there to be dialogue, understanding and mediation so that we do not see a repeat of the tensions from just a few weeks ago? As the noble Lord, Lord Ahmad, said, we might be able to see a different future for the whole community in this important part of the world.
Lord Callanan (Con)
My Lords, I join in thanking the noble Lord, Lord Hussain, for securing this important debate. He is rightly concerned about the importance of restoring peace to the region.
With more than 3 million British nationals of Pakistani and Indian origin, of course the UK shares strong and long-standing ties with the region. Those ties are rooted not only in modern migration patterns but in a deep, shared history—from our intertwined legacies as Commonwealth nations to our enduring cultural, economic and familial ties. The UK has long valued its partnerships with both India and Pakistan, forged through decades of diplomacy, trade and shared values. These relationships continue to shape our society and contribute meaningfully to our national life. We recognise that rising tensions between the two countries inevitably cause concern and anxiety among those communities.
The UK is a close partner to both India and Pakistan, and we on these Benches rightly welcome commitments from both nations to end further military action. We back efforts to support both nations on their path to establishing a lasting ceasefire to restore regional stability and help safeguard civilians in the longer term. We all know that the path to peace is rarely smooth, and these developments, however incremental, are to be welcomed. My colleagues and I remain hopeful that these steps can be built on and that further confidence-building measures can lead to a more stable and secure relationship between these two important states.
However, we cannot speak of peace without addressing the horrific act of terrorism that took place in April in the town of Pahalgam, where 26 innocent lives were taken in a brutal and deliberate attack. This was an act of terrorism, and we should call it out clearly and unequivocally as such. Terrorists and their networks are not bound by national borders; they pose a threat to peace and stability far beyond that region. That is why, in my view, the UK should work with the Governments of both India and Pakistan to tackle these threats head on through robust counterterrorism co-operation, intelligence sharing and support for initiatives that promote peace and deradicalisation.
It is in the interests of the international community that this conflict does not escalate and that we take meaningful steps now to reduce the chance of future surges in tensions, which would have serious ramifications not only in Kashmir but in this country and the rest of the world. My colleagues and I have long recognised this, and we welcome the fact that the UK has for a long time maintained a deep and historic security relationship with India.
Our counterterrorism co-operation stretches back decades, from the New Delhi declaration of 2002 to the India-UK strategic partnership of 2016 and the comprehensive strategic partnership of 2022. These agreements—many of which were reached under successive Conservative Governments, I am pleased to say—have enshrined our commitment to India’s security and our shared interest in combating extremism. We must continue to strengthen those ties under the 2030 road map, ensuring that they remain watertight and fit for today’s security challenges. I hope that the Minister will take this opportunity to set out what further steps the Government are taking to further this partnership and, specifically, how she is working with counterparts in India to limit the spread of radical nationalism, which directly pertains to this debate.
Of course, we must also retain dialogue and co-operation with Pakistan. We are rightly concerned by the continuing presence of terrorist infrastructure within its borders. That is why we support calls for the Government to obtain secure, firm and verifiable commitments from Pakistan to dismantle those networks. The shadow Foreign Secretary has raised this issue directly and forcefully, and we will continue to monitor closely the Government’s efforts, to ensure that they are not just rhetoric but backed by practical steps.
The Minister of State, Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office (Baroness Chapman of Darlington) (Lab)
I thank the noble Lord, Lord Hussain, for securing and introducing this important discussion. We focused particularly on issues around water and Kashmir, and I will do my best to set out the representations that the Government have made to the Governments of India and Pakistan to bring about peace between the two countries. I will specifically make sure that I include Kashmir and the suspension of the Indus Waters Treaty, as he asked me to do.
I begin by reaffirming the United Kingdom’s long-standing commitment to peace, stability and prosperity in south Asia. Both India and Pakistan are valued and long-standing friends of the United Kingdom. We enjoy deep and historic ties with both countries, underpinned by vibrant diaspora communities, strong economic links and shared democratic values.
The recent terrorist attack in Indian-administered Kashmir on 22 April, which many noble Lords referred to, was a horrific reminder of the fragility of peace in the region. This Government condemned the attack in the strongest possible terms, including directly from the Prime Minister and the Foreign Secretary, and I am sure that all our thoughts remain with the victims, their families and the people of India. Both the Prime Minister and the Foreign Secretary have expressed their condolences and we continue to endorse efforts to bring the perpetrators to justice.
In the days following the attack, tensions between India and Pakistan escalated significantly. The military exchanges that followed between 6 and 10 May raised serious concerns about the risk of escalating conflict between two states armed with nuclear weapons. Against this backdrop, the agreement reached on 10 May to cease further military action was a welcome development. Indeed, we commend both Governments for taking this important step and urge them to continue along the path of de-escalation.
The Government have made clear representations to both New Delhi and Islamabad at all levels. The Foreign Secretary visited Pakistan on 16 May and India on 7 June to convey our strong support for a continued cessation of hostilities. In both capitals, the Foreign Secretary engaged directly with senior leaders to convey the UK’s strong support for regional stability and encourage continued dialogue. In Islamabad, he met the chief of army staff, the Prime Minister, Foreign Minister Dar and the Interior Minister. In New Delhi, he met Prime Minister Modi, the External Affairs Minister and NSA Doval. These visits were not only timely but essential in reinforcing our message that peace is in the shared interests of both nations and indeed the wider international community.
On the matter of Kashmir, the UK’s position remains unchanged. We regard the status of Kashmir as a bilateral issue to be resolved between India and Pakistan, taking into account the wishes of the Kashmiri people. We do not prescribe solutions, neither do we seek to mediate. However, we continue to encourage both sides to engage in meaningful dialogue and avoid actions that could further inflame tensions. We are acutely aware of the sensitivities surrounding this issue and our goal is to support a peaceful and lasting resolution that respects the rights and aspirations of all communities.
Turning to the Indus Waters Treaty, we recognise its importance as a cornerstone of co-operation between India and Pakistan. Since its signing in 1960, the treaty has withstood numerous political and military crises. The treaty has served as a rare example of sustained bilateral engagement even during periods of heightened tension. Through our diplomatic engagements, the Government have made clear the importance of both countries finding a way to share water resources. This is critical, as noble Lords have said, both for regional stability and sustainable livelihoods. We have urged both parties to uphold their commitment and resolve any disputes through the established mechanisms under the treaty.
Water security is an increasingly pressing issue in south Asia, particularly in the context of climate change and growing demand. The UK is supporting efforts to improve water governance through our water resources accountability programme in Pakistan. This initiative is helping both federal and provincial governments make decisions about water use more fairly and efficiently. We continue to engage with international partners to support peacebuilding efforts in the region as well. We are in regular contact with our partners in the United States, the European Union and the Gulf states and believe that a co-ordinated consistent international approach is essential to encouraging dialogue and reducing the risk of further escalation.
In conclusion, His Majesty’s Government remain committed to supporting peace and stability in south Asia. As noble Lords have suggested, we will continue to use our diplomatic channels to encourage dialogue, promote co-operation and support efforts to address the underlying causes of conflict and, with sustained political will, work to build mutual trust and a commitment to dialogue from all parties involved. We believe that a peaceful and prosperous future for the region is possible. I express my thanks to noble Lords for their continued engagement on this important issue and I commend this debate to the Committee.