Westminster Hall

Thursday 3rd September 2026 Westminster Hall

Thursday 3 September 2026

[Paula Barker in the Chair]

Children in the Social Care System: England

Thursday 3rd September 2026 Westminster Hall

Joint Committee on Human Rights

Select Committee statement

15:34

[Paula Barker (in the Chair)]

We begin with the Select Committee statement. Peter Swallow will speak on the publication of the second report of the Joint Committee on Human Rights, “Human Rights of Children in the Social Care System in England”, HC 161, for up to 10 minutes, during which no interventions may be taken. At the conclusion of Peter Swallow’s statement, I will call Members to put questions on the subject of the statement, and call Peter Swallow to respond to them in turn. Questions should be brief and Members may ask only one question each. I call Peter Swallow on behalf of the Joint Committee on Human Rights.

[Peter Swallow (Bracknell) (Lab)]

Thank you, Mrs Barker; it is an honour to serve with you in the Chair.

I thank the Backbench Business Committee for granting the time for this statement, and my fellow members of the Joint Committee on Human Rights for asking me to make it. I am also grateful to the Under-Secretary of State for Education, my hon. Friend the Member for Whitehaven and Workington (Josh MacAlister), for his attendance. As he knows, I never miss an opportunity to raise with him the progress of my local special educational needs and disabilities school, but I am getting that in at the start of my speech so that we can focus on what we are actually here to talk about: the very important matter of children’s social care.

This statement sets out the work done and recommendations made by the Joint Committee on Human Rights in the report “Human Rights of Children in the Social Care System in England”. It goes without saying that the state’s ability to intervene in families to remove children where, and only where, deemed absolutely necessary for a child’s welfare in the first instance is among the gravest and most serious of its responsibilities. But the responsibility the state takes for that child and how they are cared for next, which has the capacity to shape the rest of their life, is equally as serious.

No parliamentary speech can do true justice to the experiences of the care-experienced young people whom the Committee spoke to during its work on the report, in Leeds, in York and at a roundtable in Parliament. What we heard from them will stay with me for the rest of my life. I extend the sincere thanks of the Committee to every one of them for giving voice to their experience in the report, and I hope they see their voices reflected in the recommendations we have made. Many of the young people I spoke to were curious about how a Select Committee inquiry works, but sceptical of there being any hope that anything they may say could make a difference to the social care system in the UK. I hope that scepticism may prove unfounded. Given that my hon. Friend the Minister is in his place, I take it that he is willing to listen to the experiences of those young people.

If I had to summarise all that the Committee heard in one sentence, it would be this: the outcomes of children in and around the care system are too often marred by challenge and difficulty, and too often end in tragedy. Children in the care system are regularly left with inadequate mental health support, despite the substantial trauma they may have faced. For some young people, that means that challenging behaviours that may be met with support and love in a family home are often handled by services including the police, which means that the care system can be a driver of criminalisation. The Committee also heard that when young people leave care, they too often face a cliff edge, and are left alone to navigate adult life without suitable support and the enduring social networks that so many of us rely on. That means that some young people fall into destructive behaviours and relationships, which can end in criminalisation, mental health difficulties or isolation.

Those outcomes are troubling in and of themselves, but they can also lead to something far more tragic. The recent review into early deaths of care leavers, which was commissioned by my hon. Friend the Minister, led by Ashley John-Baptiste and Clare Chamberlain and published just after the Committee’s report, demonstrates that point exceptionally starkly. In 2025, the death rate for care leavers aged between 18 and 24 was three to four times higher than that of the general population.

The report offers a window into the lives and experiences of some of those young people who died far sooner than they should have. It sets out how the services that are supposed to support them, both during and after their time in the social care system, could and should have served them better. That is why the Committee is clear that more targeted support must be made available for young people when they are in and once they have left the social care system, and that there should be greater discretion to extend that support past age cut-offs where necessary. The Government must do more to work with young people, local authorities, the police, social work professionals and others to address the root causes of the challenges too often faced by care-experienced children and adults.

Throughout our evidence gathering, the Committee heard that the legal framework around children’s social care must be reformed and strengthened to deliver a reality where children and professionals understand and can advocate for their rights. One of the recommendations we received most often was also one of the simplest. Despite what I know to be the genuine commitment of this and previous Governments to the UN convention on the rights of the child, the convention remains unincorporated into domestic law in England. Bodies including the Children’s Commissioner, UNICEF and ECPAT UK all highlighted in their evidence to the Committee that the incorporation of the convention could have significant and wide-ranging impacts on children’s rights. The Committee recommends its full incorporation.

All children who are in or around the social care system are vulnerable, but those who have disabilities often face extra barriers and challenges. The Committee heard that those difficulties were often exacerbated by the disjointed and piecemeal legal landscape that comprises the disabled children’s social care framework. The framework is complex and difficult to navigate for professionals, let alone families and the young people themselves. For that reason, the Committee is in agreement with the Law Commission that there should be a single and comprehensive piece of statutory guidance on disabled children’s social care law, as well as an explicit duty to assess where need is identified.

The Committee also heard that the provision of support following assessment is a postcode lottery. It therefore supports the Law Commission’s recommendation to introduce national eligibility criteria to standardise support across local authorities. On top of that, the current working definition of disability in the Children Act 1989 is outdated and must be updated using the language of the Equality Act to be truly inclusive and reflective of the needs of children today.

I remember many of the conversations I had on the doorstep during my general election campaign, but one in particular will stay with me forever. I knocked on the door of a woman who took a good look at me and asked whether I knew what a kinship carer was. I have to confess that at the time I did not. I say that because I suspect that I was not alone in that, despite the fact that kinship care is the most common form of alternative care for children in the UK and across the world. Since the election, I have been incredibly humbled to speak to those delivering kinship care in Bracknell Forest, and I pay tribute to the work of charities such as Kinship that work so hard to represent them. I welcome the work the Law Commission is doing on the legal reform of kinship care, including on clarifying the legal framework. The Committee is looking forward to seeing the outcome of that work.

The children’s social care market is fundamentally broken, and across the country children are being placed in unsuitable and in some cases illegal and unregulated accommodation, lacking proper safeguards and scrutiny and away from the vital support networks of their family and friends. At the same time, the cost of residential accommodation is hitting local authorities’ already stretched budgets. I welcome the introduction of new powers in the Children’s Wellbeing and Schools Act 2026 for Ofsted to issue fines for breaches of the Care Standards Act 2000 and the introduction of regional care co-operatives to drive up standards and end profiteering. The 2026 Act will also require local authorities to allow reasonable contact between children in care and their siblings. Although that is to be welcomed, our report concluded that the Government need to follow implementation closely.

I could say much more about the complaints system and the rights of unaccompanied asylum seekers, all of which is included in the report, but I will just finish by again thanking the Minister, paying tribute to my colleagues on the Committee and thanking the young people who spoke to us during our inquiry.

[Jim Shannon (Strangford) (DUP)]

I thank the Chair of the Select Committee and other hon. Members involved for their recommendations. Some of the stories that the hon. Gentleman referred to in setting the scene are indeed harrowing and incredibly worrying, and yet transparent and physical change can be made. Things can get better.

My question to the Chair of the Select Committee is this. The protection of children is incredibly important. Will the Select Committee, and ultimately the Minister, share their findings and recommendations with us back home in the Northern Ireland Assembly, where this is a devolved matter, so that we can also implement the necessary changes?

[Peter Swallow]

The hon. Member has done me the great honour of promoting me: I am not, in fact, the Chair of the Select Committee. That is my noble Friend Lord Alton in the other place, because we are a Joint Committee of both Houses. Nevertheless, I will pass on the hon. Gentleman’s request, and I am sure that the Committee can send a copy of the report to all relevant persons in Northern Ireland. I thank him for his interest.

[Sarah Russell (Congleton) (Lab)]

I thank my hon. Friend for that introduction to the Select Committee’s work. I have a particular concern, having met with the National Association of Child Contact Centres this week, about the ability of children in social care to continue to have supervised and appropriate contact with wider family members, particularly in the context of wanting children to see more of their siblings, which everyone would absolutely welcome. My concern is that contact centres have been closing at a huge rate. Is that something that we have tracking information on? Could we look at perhaps using family hubs as locations to resolve that issue?

[Peter Swallow]

My hon. Friend makes a really good point. As I said, I welcome the amendment to the Children’s Wellbeing and Schools Act, which gives some assurance to those at risk of family separation through the care system. However, the proof of the pudding will be in the implementation. As my hon. Friend highlights, there are real practical barriers to that. I hope that the Minister has heard her point and will make sure that it is addressed as we seek to implement that law, which is now rightly on the statute book.

[Jen Craft (Thurrock) (Lab)]

I listened with great interest to my hon. Friend’s report on the Committee’s inquiry. Will he join me in urging the Minister to look more widely at the issue of looked-after children who spend the vast majority of their lives on in-patient wards in paediatric hospitals? A small number of children have spent the majority of their lives living on in-patient wards because they are ill. If they had a traditional nuclear family, they would be at home and cared for by their parents or carers, but because they are looked-after children, it is far too difficult to find suitable placements for them due to their medical needs. That represents a fundamental lack of care for some of the most vulnerable members of our society. Will my hon. Friend support my call for that to be looked at in greater depth?

[Peter Swallow]

My hon. Friend gives me the opportunity to reference another report that the Human Rights Committee undertook, as pre-legislative scrutiny of the Mental Health Act 2025. We very much looked at this issue, and particularly the issue of vulnerable young people being placed on adult mental health wards, and urged changes at that point.

It is absolutely the case that vulnerable people who are care-experienced and are also facing mental health crises face a double vulnerability, which heightens the duty of the state to those individuals even further. Some of the measures we have suggested to reform the rights of disabled children can absolutely play a part in that.

I will also highlight something that I did not get a chance to mention. There are recommendations in the report to strengthen the complaints system, including by making sure that there is no wrong door when a care-experienced young people is making a complaint and that they all have an opt-out right to a legal advocate. That would go some way to making sure that children, particularly those facing a mental health crisis, have an advocate in the way that is also envisaged in the Mental Health Act 2025. I hope that if the Government listen to some of the recommendations in the report, we can go some way to addressing the very real concerns that my hon. Friend has raised.

[Ben Coleman (Chelsea and Fulham) (Lab)]

In my constituency, the care-experienced young people who live in Fulham benefit from the fact that the council recognises care-experienced as a protected characteristic. That means that council housing teams and schools and recruitment processes inside Hammersmith and Fulham have to actively check that their decisions do not disadvantage care leavers. They have to track outcomes, and care leavers have the right to recourse. Currently, this only happens if decent councils such as Hammersmith and Fulham choose to do so. Is there an argument for pressing the Government to make care-experienced a protected characteristic in law?

[Peter Swallow]

I thank my hon. Friend for raising that point; it gives me another opportunity to place on the record again my thanks to everyone who hosted us in Leeds and York, where we saw some fantastic work being done to support care-experienced young people. I know that that is replicated in councils across the country, including, may I say, in Bracknell Forest, whose children’s social care services were recently rated outstanding by Ofsted—I got the local plug in there. I pay tribute to all those working tirelessly to support children in the social care system. The shortcomings I have highlighted today in no way take away from the many people who have dedicated their working careers to supporting the most vulnerable in our society.

My hon. Friend makes a very interesting point. Making care-experienced a protected characteristic in law is something that we explored as part of the inquiry. The responses that we received on that point were mixed. Some felt that that would be singling care-experienced children out in some way, when in reality what they were hoping and asking for was to be treated no differently from anyone else, so that as they enter adult life, they can leave behind the fact that they are care-experienced and go forward with their lives.

Others felt that the proposal would be beneficial. The evidence was mixed. If I remember correctly, I think we settled in the report on not having that as a recommendation —I will correct the record if I am wrong, but I think that was our decision. It was something we considered, though, because it is something that is raised, and it is interesting to hear that it has worked well in my hon. Friend’s local area. That shows that sometimes these solutions should be locally based.

13:47

Sitting suspended.

Backbench Business

Thursday 3rd September 2026 Westminster Hall

Vaccination Rates: England

Thursday 3rd September 2026 Westminster Hall

13:50

[Danny Beales (Uxbridge and South Ruislip) (Lab)]

I beg to move,

That this House has considered vaccination rates in England.

It is an honour to serve under your chairship today, Mrs Barker. I am pleased to co-sponsor this debate alongside colleagues from the Health and Social Care Committee who are also here today.

It is very easy, from the vantage point of the 21st century, to forget that about half of children used to die before the age of 15 from infection and disease. Thankfully, we now have vaccines and our routine vaccination schedule providing protection against 15 preventable infections across our lifetimes. For decades, our system was one of the best in the world. The childhood diseases that used to cause so much suffering—measles, polio and others—sound like things from history books. I am sure we all have memories of our early school-based vaccinations and flu jabs in the winter period, and the joy of the discovery of the covid-19 vaccine and the hope it brought of a return to normality. So why have this debate today? Because, despite a seemingly continued record of progress and innovation since 2012, our vaccination system has been sleepwalking into a crisis.

The percentage of eligible people getting the major vaccines has been falling year on year, dropping below the 95% coverage recommended by the World Health Organisation to prevent onward transmission. We have now undoubtedly hit a crisis point. Across England as a whole, the 95% target is not being met for any routine childhood vaccination programme and many adult programmes. For example, in 2024-25, only 83.7% of five-year-olds in England had both doses of the measles, mumps and rubella vaccine. In my own constituency, the figure is even lower, at 74%. We are now seeing measles outbreaks in our cities and, shockingly, we have lost our measles elimination status nationally. Tragically, three children died this year from measles—a totally preventable illness.

When questioned about these issues at the Health and Social Care Committee, officials assured us that actions were under way and the tide was turning, but the most recent vaccine stats, released at the end of August, unfortunately show a continued downward trend. The 6-in-1 vaccine dose three coverage is down, the meningitis B dose three coverage is down, and the rotavirus dose two coverage is also down.

This is also a serious equalities issue. Children who grow up unprotected are disproportionately those living in poverty and from ethnic minority communities, and the gap in vaccination status is growing across the country. How has that been allowed to happen in modern Britain? The 2023 vaccination strategy under the last Government was intended to halt the decline, but it is clearly failing, with vaccination rates continuing to fall in the three years since. The WHO target of 95% coverage for all routine vaccination programmes was removed from NHS planning guidance in 2025-26, with the Secretary of State at the time saying,

“If everything is a priority, then nothing is”,

but the choice not to explicitly prioritise vaccinations is incredibly short-sighted.

My colleagues and I on the Health and Social Care Committee held a short inquiry into vaccination rates earlier this year, and we were, to be frank, shocked by the apparent complacency of leading NHS officials. There was no understanding of when it is hoped rates will return to WHO levels, or of whether and when our elimination status will be reached again. There is no target. This debate must be a call to arms to prioritise rebuilding our vaccination system as a matter of utmost urgency and to restore vaccination rates to 95% as soon as possible. Developing an effective vaccination system is not rocket science. Much of the existing strategy is relevant and positive, but we must acknowledge that we are off track.

The debate about what is wrong tends to focus on two key issues: access versus hesitancy. The access argument focuses on systemic, practical barriers that make it harder for people to get vaccinated, such as poor appointment availability, ineffective call and recall systems, lack of data linkage and fragmented health systems. On that argument, recent coverage decline is the sign of a system under strain, rather than a loss of confidence. Most patients and parents do trust vaccines: 85% of people polled by Ipsos in 2025 said that vaccines were safe. But people are busy—moving home, switching GPs—and they do not have endless time to navigate a confusing and increasingly fragmented NHS system.

The gap between MMR 1 and MMR 2 uptake is stark evidence of this failure, with MMR 1 coverage at five years at 91% and MMR 2 coverage at only 83%. The loss of contact is a system failure. Missed appointments should be chased, and families should retain close contact with trusted health professionals to guide them through the childhood vaccination schedule.

[Jen Craft (Thurrock) (Lab)]

My hon. Friend makes an excellent point. Our mini-inquiry into vaccination rates found that when rates decline or stall, the problem is often lack of trust and inability to access either trusted health professionals or the appointments themselves. Does he agree that improving the availability of vaccinations and advice from trusted health professionals is key to reversing this worrying trend?

[Danny Beales]

I agree. Those issues are clearly intertwined and cannot be separated.

Every contact should count. Shared digital records should identify, at the next GP appointment, pharmacy check-in, health visit or hospital appointment, where vaccines are missing. The system should be enabled, encouraged and paid to act, but this is currently not the case.

The hesitancy argument focuses on the growing prevalence of misinformation around vaccines and falling trust in vaccines and health institutions more broadly. Polling shows that these are not the most important factors numerically, but for the 15% of parents who have concerns, they matter. Evidence from the University of Manchester shows that this is especially important for certain population groups.

As my hon. Friend the Member for Thurrock (Jen Craft) just said, the barriers are multifaceted: poor trust and poor access go hand in hand, because the best way to build trust is through regular contact with known, trusted professionals. To maximise vaccine coverage, we need a system that can reliably identify and locate every child or patient missing their vaccination, repeatedly invite them for appointments and make attending appointments as easy as possible, with clear lines of responsibility when targets are missed. To do that effectively, the vaccination system needs adequate resourcing, accurate data and explicit accountability for meeting targets. Currently, we have none of that.

The Government have been acting. We are piloting health visits and community pharmacy delivery, although roll-out has been slow and it is unclear when national roll-out will be possible. Parents are now given access to their child’s records through the NHS app, work is under way to improve the consent process for vaccinating children in school. More is being done, and all of that is positive, but the Select Committee is not convinced that that will be enough to restore our vaccination levels to WHO standards, and neither are officials, who are unable to say whether and when levels will be restored.

Moving forward, what do we need? We need resourcing. Data I have obtained through parliamentary questions shows that in 2023-24 NHS England spent 0.51% of its total budget, or £852 million, on vaccination, down from 0.65%, or £989 million, in 2022-23. The very year the strategy released, funding was cut. We also need to be honest about what improvement will cost. Vaccinating the last 10% or 15% of any population is not the same task as vaccinating the first 80%, because of deprivation, language barriers and housing instability. All families affected by those factors need more contact with clinicians, and GPs simply do not have the resources to do the necessary outreach.

We need to fund not just new medicines and drugs, but their roll-out. We should be using lifetime parental consent to increase uptake of school-age vaccinations, and developing efficient, convenient and ongoing catch-up opportunities in schools, shopping centres, nurseries and family hubs. The school-age immunisation service should be operating a check-and-offer approach at every contact.

For the last 15%, we should be willing to fund what actually works: explicit payments to GPs for outreach programmes for underserved communities, including funding for multiple contact attempts, data cleaning, and non-responder tracking, with incentives linked to real outcomes. We should be training healthcare professionals and community groups to have difficult conversations with confidence and making far better use of our community pharmacy network, which is rooted in local areas.

We also need clear accountability; the buck has to stop somewhere locally and nationally, with clear vaccination leads at both levels. Since the Lansley reforms in 2012 and the subsequent austerity cuts, lines of accountability have become blurred. From April 2027, integrated care boards will have greater responsibility for commissioning vaccination programmes locally, but who is overseeing the national strategy? That remains unclear. Who will require corrective action when that is deemed to be necessary? That is not clear.

The removal of national targets was clearly a step backward for the system. Health officials and clinicians tell us that it is not always clear who is responsible when vaccination rates fall at delivery level in a given neighbourhood. We need a new national action plan that sets out concrete steps that will be taken to return coverage to our WHO targets.

We do not have all the systems in place to tell us reliably who has and has not been vaccinated. Data challenges run right through the system. Vaccines given in maternity settings, community pharmacy settings or school often fail to make their way back to the child’s GP surgery because the systems do not talk to each other. How can we expect call-and-recall strategies to work if clinicians do not reliably know which children need to be called?

Lastly, on hesitancy, we need to tackle misinformation, regulate it online and hold the peddlers of harmful and potentially deadly misinformation to account. Social media companies must step up their game in bringing down anti-vax information and providing clear, evidence-based health information instead.

I know much of this is not easy, but that is why it requires genuine commitment and prioritisation. I thank the Minister for listening; will she outline whether the Government accept that the situation is unacceptable and that urgent action is needed, and whether a clear timeline for meeting the WHO targets can and should be agreed by the NHS? If we are to set a timeline, will a clear action plan be outlined to set us on the path back to 95% of all children being vaccinated, so that we can all see a welcome and vital return of our measles elimination status? We must ensure that every child is safe, that people of all ages get the vaccines they need, and that the UK is once again a global leader in vaccinations.

14:01

[Olly Glover (Didcot and Wantage) (LD)]

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairship, Mrs Barker, on the second consecutive day.

I thank the hon. Member for Uxbridge and South Ruislip (Danny Beales), who set out his case so well that I fear my contribution will add very little to his. Nevertheless, I want to add my voice in support of this very important topic. The issue of vaccination rates is critical to public health. Even small drops in uptake below the 95% World Health Organisation target can erode the collective benefit of vaccination and create the potential for more outbreaks, such as the measles outbreaks in recent years.

In Oxfordshire, where my constituency is located, we are below the target for all five of the main early years vaccination categories. For four of the five, we are in the 85% to 95% range, and for the pre-school booster for tetanus, diphtheria and polio, we are in the 90% to 95% range. The figures are too low and really need to be improved.

The hon. Member for Uxbridge and South Ruislip set out articulately the sort of coherent and integrated NHS and Government plan that we need to tackle this issue; I will focus on the challenges of misinformation and disinformation. We need a proactive NHS and Government plan, because spending on vaccination is a really good illustration of the principle that prevention is better than subsequent treatment and hospitalisation. Improving our vaccination rates is a really good way of relieving pressure on other parts of the health service, and saving money from up-front investment as well as saving lives.

Vaccination is one of many areas of health where individual decisions can cause harm to a wider community. There will be plenty of parents and people who might have concerns about vaccination, whether legitimate or because of things they have seen on social media, but as far as possible—we had a lot of debate about this during the covid pandemic—we must try to think not just of ourselves and our families, but of our neighbours, friends and work colleagues when making decisions about vaccination.

We know that misinformation and disinformation are both rising, and that has been made easier, alas, by social media. Sustained action will be needed to tackle that. We definitely need tougher regulation of social media companies. We perhaps may need to introduce a verification requirement for any social media account claiming to be that of a medical professional. I would like to see the compulsory labelling and annotation of all posts about vaccination and vaccines with verified scientific facts by the relevant public health or national body.

We need to show leadership as politicians. Perhaps the Government could consider taking the lead on a national campaign in which we all show our support for vaccinations, maybe even sometimes when we take them. As adults, we do not need them quite so often, but we might for certain types of travel—because of my love of walking in the Alps, I have occasionally chosen to have a tick-borne encephalitis vaccine to reduce my risk of infection. We can all do a lot more, be symbols of progress and practise what we preach, as many politicians do for blood donation, for example. Perhaps the new Prime Minister could make one of his famous TikTok videos videos—although, of course, he has a long list of topics to tackle. We can also engage with social media influencers, who have the credibility on social media that those of us who are hopeless at it lack. They can be ambassadors for vaccination as well.

As the hon. Member for Uxbridge and South Ruislip said, we need community outreach programmes. We need the health service to be properly supported, because this is yet another thing to add to the long list of things we expect of GPs. We need to go to the people and reach areas and communities that perhaps do not have as much access to or interaction with the health service as others. We need to build dialogue and trust. We need to create easy-to-access and visible vaccination opportunities, including at times of the day convenient for those communities, not just for health and medical organisations.

Only teamwork and determined action can avert us from our current path of falling vaccination rates. If we do not reverse the trend, we will, alas, see more illness and, ultimately, death. I hope to hear from the Minister what we can do to prevent that.

[Several hon. Members rose—]

[Paula Barker (in the Chair)]

Order. I need to impose a time limit of three minutes.

14:05

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

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairship, Mrs Barker, and I thank the Health and Social Care Committee for its work. It is a real privilege to be able to access vaccine programmes. They are the most effective public health interventions, and there are 15 vaccine-preventable infections against which we can be inoculated. Just this week, the winter flu vaccination programme started; I urge all those watching to take up the opportunity to protect themselves and their community.

In York, take-up is relatively high; however, we are not complacent. A particular challenge for us is the uptake of the second MMR vaccine. I would like to know what the Government are doing to support initiatives to improve that. York’s uptake is 86.2% against Yorkshire’s 85% and England’s average of 83.8%, but the World Health Organisation sets the ambition at 95% because that is the level for herd immunity, which will keep our communities safe. When will that target be reintroduced? It must be reintroduced, because we know that it is effective.

There are lessons we can learn about how to deliver vaccinations more effectively. If we think back to covid, many people—communities, schools and faith and community groups—were involved in getting the message out. We need to be able to communicate better to our communities, in this day of information overload, the importance of vaccines. Vaccine delivery mechanisms also need to be expanded—we have heard many examples today, such as health visitors visiting family hubs for the early years, the schools programme, and the places where people connect, including workplaces and elsewhere.

We need to ensure that we have a comprehensive system. I call on the Minister to look at the technology available to her to identify areas of low take-up. We know it is low in areas of deprivation and where ethnic minority groups, who are more hesitant to take up the vaccine, are concentrated. I ask that we have a proper, comprehensive vaccine passport that can be used by all clinicians who deliver the vaccine programme. I also ask the Minister to look at the issue of hesitancy in the round. We know that a small number of children, parents, carers and adults are hesitant about taking up vaccines. Sometimes that is about information, but sometimes it is simply a fear of needles. Can we look at different delivery mechanisms for vaccines so that people and communities are protected?

14:09

[Dr Danny Chambers (Winchester) (LD)]

It is an honour to serve under your chairship, Mrs Barker. I congratulate the hon. Member for Uxbridge and South Ruislip (Danny Beales) on securing this important debate.

It seems that every time I open my social media feed or emails, I am being sold some supplement or superfood to boost my immunity. We know that the most effective way of boosting our immunity is vaccination. Vaccines can achieve something even more extraordinary: they can actually eradicate diseases from the face of the earth. During the 20th century alone, we lost hundreds of millions of people to smallpox until it was eradicated in 1977. Rinderpest, a cattle disease, was wiped off the face of the Earth by vaccination—the second disease to be removed from our planet.

Polio is on the brink of eradication. I recently spoke at a Winchester rotary event about polio eradication, organised by two of my constituents, Gillian Russell and Professor Kordo Saeed, both of whom contracted polio when they were children and have lifelong disabilities as a result. It is important to remind everyone that this is about preventing not just deaths, but disability and ill health that can last a lifetime.

We saw the power of vaccination during the covid-19 pandemic. A century earlier, during the 1918 influenza outbreak, which killed 50 million people, there were no flu vaccines or antiviral treatments. There were not even antibiotics to treat the secondary infections. During covid, we initially had only the same blunt tools—isolation and restriction on gatherings—to try to control the disease, but then the vaccine came out. It saved a huge number of lives and gave us a route out of lockdown. We got back to seeing our families, socialising, going back to work, running our businesses and just living our lives.

But there is a danger that vaccines can become a victim of their own success. We have become so unfamiliar with some diseases that we have forgotten how serious they really are. That is why falling childhood vaccination rates should particularly concern us. When politicians like Donald Trump and parties such as Reform platform anti-vaxxers, parents rightly become worried. They all want to do the best for their children, but when dangerous, provocative and downright false information is platformed, the truth is pushed further and further away from those looking for answers.

Centuries ago, hospitals were filled with iron lungs for children with polio, and graveyards were filled with children under five years old who died from entirely preventable diseases. Vaccines have saved more lives than any other medical intervention in history. They are the closest thing that we have to a safety blanket from disease, and we must not allow dangerous and divisive figures online or in politics to drive people away from science and evidence-led healthcare. Science produces solutions, answers and evidence, but politicians and politics can determine whether they are trusted.

14:12

[Ben Coleman (Chelsea and Fulham) (Lab)]

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairship, Mrs Barker. I thank my hon. Friend the Member for Uxbridge and South Ruislip (Danny Beales) and colleagues on the Health and Social Care Committee for securing this important debate.

I am particularly concerned about the fall in childhood vaccination rates and what that means for diseases such as measles, which we had all but eliminated. Before I entered Parliament, I served as a councillor on the North West London integrated care board. Because our figures were so poor, I pushed for North West London NHS to deliver MMR vaccinations through community pharmacies. All families go to pharmacies, so it seemed an obvious thing to do, but I was told that it was simply too complicated. I pushed a bit, and I got two pharmacies into a sort of project. It was a start, but it was nowhere near enough.

When I became a member of the Health and Social Care Committee, then, I was delighted to have the opportunity to pursue the matter. As has been mentioned, when NHS England and UK Health Security Agency officials came before the Committee in February, warning signs were already flashing red. The UK had lost its measles elimination status, London had the lowest childhood vaccination coverage in the country, and children were being hospitalised by a disease that is entirely preventable. It was extraordinary: I was strongly struck by the feeling they gave off of a complete lack of urgency in how they saw the problem. I asked whether anyone had assessed the cost to the NHS of under-vaccination; the answer was no. I asked why a pharmacy MMR pilot across 43 sites in the north-west had not continued; I was told that it had worked as a campaign, but making it routine was “a different question”. I asked whether that question was even being assessed, and it clearly was not.

Sadly, since the Committee’s inquiry the situation has got worse, not better. As my hon. Friend the Member for Uxbridge and South Ruislip touched on, UKHSA data shows that, as of 17 August, England had recorded 970 laboratory-confirmed measles cases this year alone. Of those, 650 patients were children aged 14 or under, and more than half of all cases were in London.

I am not saying that pharmacies are silver bullets—the Committee also heard arguments about strengthening school-age immunisation services—but it should not be either/or. It should be schools, GPs and pharmacies. We should use every available route to help our children and their families.

Officials told the Committee that they do not want to use pharmacies for childhood vaccination because they still do not know whether the evidence supports it. Surely, Minister, the obvious answer is to get the evidence. What are the Government doing to get the evidence? Will they get it by commissioning a proper evaluation of the use of pharmacies for routine MMR vaccination, with a clear deadline? In short, will the Minister ensure that the NHS stops prevaricating and acts before more children pay the price?

14:15

[Jim Shannon (Strangford) (DUP)]

As always, it is a pleasure to serve under your chairship, Mrs Barker—you are certainly earning your money, because you were here yesterday and are back again today. I congratulate the hon. Member for Uxbridge and South Ruislip (Danny Beales) on introducing this debate, and I thank him for setting the scene incredibly well. As the Democratic Unionist party’s spokesperson on health, I am particularly interested in this topic and how it affects those in Northern Ireland. It is good to see the Minister in her place again, and I wish her well in her role. I know that her answers will encourage us—no pressure!

Vaccines have saved millions of lives, protecting our children from serious illnesses and life-changing complications. However, over the last decade, vaccination uptake has declined across the United Kingdom. In 2021, data showed that none of the routine childhood vaccinations had reached the World Health Organisation’s recommended 95% coverage target. That trend reveals a significant risk to public health, which we have already seen with localised outbreaks of measles and whooping cough in areas across the United Kingdom. Research published in August also showed further falls in UK-wide uptake among 12-month-old children of vaccines including pneumococcal conjugate, rotavirus and MenB. If vaccines are not done, it can lead to serious illnesses including pneumonia, meningitis and other life-threatening infections.

I will briefly comment on Northern Ireland, and then I have some asks of the Minister. In Northern Ireland, for children aged 24 months, coverage was above 84% for all reported vaccines. In 2024, the Department of Health warned that a measles outbreak was likely unless urgent action was taken to increase MMR vaccine uptake in Northern Ireland.

New parents must have access to clear, accurate and reassuring information that addresses uncertainty and maintains confidence in the safety of these vaccines. However, my biggest concern is related to practical barriers, which I want to ask about. Research from the Royal College of Paediatrics and Child Health has emphasised that vaccine confidence remains generally high across the UK, while practical issues in accessing vaccination services are far more likely to contribute to declining uptake. Practical barriers are largely faced by those living in deprived areas, for example, or those living in rural areas who do not have access to transport.

Can the Minister comment on those who are prevented from accessing vaccines by lack of transport? Will she have discussions with the relevant Minister in the Northern Ireland Executive on vaccination uptake in Northern Ireland? We must get the correct messaging across social media and into schools with a non-condescending approach. Vaccination is in all of our best interests, but an educational approach must be the way forward. With great respect, this should not be a stick with which to beat parents who believe they are doing the best for their children.

14:18

[Dr Peter Prinsley (Bury St Edmunds and Stowmarket) (Lab)]

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairship, Mrs Barker. I thank the members of the Health and Social Care Committee for securing this debate.

Doctors like me do not need any convincing about vaccination, but some of our political opponents do not agree. It is incredible to think that a platform was given at last year’s Reform conference to someone claiming that vaccinations had caused cancer in the royal family, and that the head of the United States Health Department is a vaccine sceptic. That is quite pernicious and wrong—very, very wrong. Doctors like me do not need convincing. Nor do wives like mine who are Rhesus-negative and whose mothers had multiple miscarriages before the discovery of anti-D injections to prevent baby loss, which was first tested in the famous Sing Sing prison experiments.

When I was young, every county had a school for the deaf, but they had all closed by the time I was a senior ENT surgeon. Why was that? Maternal rubella, or German measles, in pregnancy had been abolished by simply vaccinating all girls at puberty, just like that—brilliant. There was no longer a need for so many schools for the deaf. A landmark 2026 Lancet study reported no cervical cancer deaths among women aged 20 to 24 between 2020 and 2024: a dramatic drop from the previous five-year period directly credited to the national human papillomavirus vaccination programme. We will see the same fall in the number of deaths from oropharyngeal throat cancer in boys as a result of HPV vaccination.

We all know that the national response to the pandemic was not a glorious one. There were costly errors in personal protective equipment and test and trace, but the one thing we did get right was vaccination, which saved countless lives. I recall myself vaccinating the first very elderly patients in Great Yarmouth.

Just lately we have seen reports of increased life expectancy in patients with malignant melanoma due to personalised cancer vaccines—brilliant. Doctors like me, unlike some politicians, need no convincing of the crucial importance of vaccination, but there must be a warning here, for we are short of clinical academics who lead medical education and research. We need to incubate the next generation of scientists who will lead these discoveries, for this is the country of Jenner, who discovered vaccination; of Lister, who discovered antisepsis; and of Fleming, who discovered penicillin. We have a great legacy, and we must secure a great future.

14:21

[Lizzi Collinge (Morecambe and Lunesdale) (Lab)]

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairship, Mrs Barker. I thank my hon. Friend the Member for Uxbridge and South Ruislip (Danny Beales) for securing this important debate.

Over the last 15 years, childhood vaccination rates have fallen across Britain. The uptake of vaccinations for those aged under five is well below the World Health Organisation’s 95% target. The paradox of vaccination is that it has become a victim of its own success. It has protected us so effectively for so long that we can forget what it has saved us from. My grandma’s friend died from diphtheria at the age of 12. When I worked in public health, I met a lady whose mum had rubella during pregnancy, as a result of which that lady had serious impairments.

Online misinformation is often put forward as the root driver of our falling vaccination rates. It is certainly true that false claims are dangerously contagious, but any explanation that focuses only on anti-vaxxers and the often-monetised pedlars of misinformation and disinformation risks mistaking the loudest part of the problem for the largest part of the problem. Most parents who miss vaccinations are simply exhausted, overstretched or unable to get an appointment that fits around their lives. Anyone who has experienced the first few months of a baby’s life knows exactly what it is like, but at any time of life, when clinics require long journeys on public transport or time off work, missed vaccination is more often due to practical barriers than to any ideological opposition. Although vaccination in this country might be free, accessing it is not always without cost.

How do we fix it? First, we need to rebuild health visiting and early years services, as well as rebuilding the links between families and GPs, because vaccination rates are highest when people have access to trusted professionals who they see regularly. I certainly know that health visiting is in a much worse place than when I had my first child. The investment that this Labour Government are putting into our health services should address that, but I was interested to hear my hon. Friend the Member for Uxbridge and South Ruislip talk about the fragmented and confusing pathways, which I think are still there, and about his concrete suggested actions. I would like to hear the Minister’s response.

Finally, I do not want us to forget how poverty and deprivation affect vaccination uptake rates. When someone is worried about making the rent, topping up the electric meter or putting food on the table, routine health admin can fall down the list. All the action we are taking through the child poverty strategy, lifting the two-child benefit limit and free breakfast clubs will have a good impact.

I will use my final seconds to pay tribute to an absolute vaccine legend. Dolly Parton gave $1 million to the development of the Moderna vaccine. Not only that, she did so much to encourage the uptake of the covid vaccine. I think we will all miss her.

14:24

[Josh Newbury (Cannock Chase) (Lab)]

It is a pleasure to serve under you in the Chair, Mrs Barker. I thank my hon. Friend the Member for Uxbridge and South Ruislip (Danny Beales) for securing the debate. I am the parent of two children who had plenty of vaccinations. One of them took it in her stride and the other made the biggest drama in the history of medicine, so I can appreciate why so many parents approach this topic with trepidation.

Before this debate, my team and I spoke to staff working in the Cannock North primary care network, which covers seven practices in the most deprived part of my constituency, about their efforts to improve lagging vaccination rates. They told me that rates are quite good for young babies, but they start to fall off as children get older, so they are looking at how they can step in earlier. They have produced plain and simple leaflets that explain the symptoms that a child might experience if they are not vaccinated. Staff will still hear parents say, “Well, I wasn’t vaccinated against it,” or “I’ve never even heard of polio,” so they are tackling the false assumption that choosing not to vaccinate is safe. They are also looking at a simple sticker system for the red book as a quick visual reminder of the schedule.

Relationships with health practitioners can also be vital, as we have heard. The PCN suggested that trained health visitors could provide early immunisation, which I know is being trialled in other parts of England. The more hurdles we can remove, the better.

That brings me to neighbourhood health centres, where services could be joined up and accessible. I agree with the Staffordshire and Stoke-on-Trent ICB and NHS Property Services that Cannock and Rugeley would both be prime spots for centres. We know that vaccination programmes delivered strictly through GP practices see up to 27% lower uptake in deprived areas, whereas accessible pharmacy, community and neighbourhood programmes narrow that gap to as little as 7%. The lesson I took from speaking to the Cannock North PCN team is that improving vaccination rates does not necessarily require one huge intervention.

Finally, I would like to finish by raising a funding issue with the Minister. Since funding for childhood immunisations moved to the quality and outcomes framework, practices receive the funding only if they meet the 96% target. In a deprived area with a significant Traveller community, like Chadsmoor, that can be incredibly difficult. Practices can spend significant time and money contacting families but still find themselves falling well short. For example, a practice could move from 70% to 80% after a huge effort but still receive no funding. I ask the Minister whether QOF could recognise progress in closing health inequalities, rather than just rewarding in-built advantage.

Clearly, the route to achieving high vaccination rates will look a bit different in every community. The practices I have spoken to are doing brilliant work despite funding disadvantages, and I wonder whether we could see outstanding outcomes in Cannock Chase and right across the country if we put rocket boosters under the innovation that we already see right across primary care.

14:26

[Sarah Russell (Congleton) (Lab)]

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairship, Mrs Barker. I thank my hon. Friends the Members for Uxbridge and South Ruislip (Danny Beales) and for Worthing West (Dr Cooper) and the hon. Member for Oxford West and Abingdon (Layla Moran) for securing this debate on such an important issue. I will attempt to talk about three different vaccinations in less than three minutes, but before I do that, I would like to say a huge thank you to Congleton Rotary, which recently raised over £1,000 towards polio vaccination. That is such an important topic.

First, it is completely unacceptable that the UK lost its measles-free status this year. We know that it can be a devastating disease for anyone who is unvaccinated, but it is especially dangerous for babies, young people, pregnant women and anyone with a weakened immune system. We have relied on herd immunity for a very long time, and we no longer have the percentage required to have that.

During the last major outbreak in central and eastern Cheshire, nearly a quarter of the cases were in the under-ones. Our babies depend on the rest of us having vaccinations, because otherwise they are profoundly vulnerable. We must work to get that rate back up again. Only 90% of children in Cheshire East had received both doses of the MMR vaccine by their fifth birthday. We must work harder on that, and I would welcome any progress that the Government can bring, including by addressing the legacy of missed appointments during the covid pandemic.

The second vaccination that I want to talk about is cervical cancer. Every year, 3,300 women are still being diagnosed despite the take-up of the HPV vaccine among younger women, and around 685 women a year are losing their lives to the disease. The recent study mentioned by my hon. Friend the Member for Bury St Edmunds and Stowmarket (Dr Prinsley) shows that the risk of cervical cancer death before the age of 30 has effectively reduced to zero—the HPV vaccine is amazing.

Our goal as a Government is to eliminate cervical cancer by 2040, which would be fantastic, and we have a 90% target vaccination rate for girls. In Cheshire East, the vaccination rate at the moment is 77.4% of girls but only 72% of boys. For some reason, we do not have a target for boys, but boys are also vulnerable to the equivalent cancers, and they absolutely need and deserve the same protection as girls. Why are we not making sure that they also have these targets?

Lady Garden Foundation research found that over 45% of eligible girls who missed their school HPV vaccination did so because a consent form was not returned. Active parental refusal apparently accounts for just 12% of the failure rate. As a parent, I do not want vaccination to be forced on anybody, of course, but lifetime consent would make life so much easier. Why am I being asked every single time? Unless a child’s health status has changed, there is really no reason to withdraw vaccination consent. I believe we could make that much easier.

Lastly, Cheshire has so many people in hospital with flu each year, so I remind everybody of the importance of vaccinating children against flu, to protect both them and their elderly relatives over Christmas. I thank the Minister and the Health and Social Care Committee, and I hope we can move this forward.

14:29

[Alex Mayer (Dunstable and Leighton Buzzard) (Lab)]

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairship, Mrs Barker.

Over the summer, I had the pleasure of visiting Kingsbury Court surgery to find out about its big push on childhood vaccination. I met Dr Abdullah Khan, who told me that, like others, he was really worried about the return of measles, which he thought created an urgent need for action. He saw the outbreak in Enfield as a real warning shot and talked about the UK losing its WHO measles elimination status.

Dr Khan told me his surgery had decided it needed a new approach—it is fairly similar to what we have heard today—built around confidence and convenience. I was introduced to the senior nurse, Elena Costache, who showed me a display she had made to rebut some of the myths that parents are seeing online. She also explained how staff go online to dispel those myths in the comments made on the surgery’s own webpage, doing so respectfully but directly, and always in plain English.

Everything the surgery staff told me was useful and informative, although I have to say that one bit made me feel rather ancient: they said that one issue was that many parents seemed to think that measles, mumps and things like that were from long, long ago. I still have a childhood book called “Alex’s mumps book”, with lots of fun activities to do while I was a bit under the weather.

Those at the surgery also talked about convenience—staff going into nurseries, children’s centres and crèches—about the active outreach they do and about the crucial point of following up again and again on missed appointments. All this is working. They are doing about 140 vaccinations a month and, importantly, over the last year they got their childhood vaccination rate up by 9%, which is fantastic, although they still plan to go further.

One specific issue staff raised with me was keeping up with vaccinations in an area with an awful lot of new build housing. Can the Minister comment on specific measures the Government are taking to ensure that people can stay up to date with their vaccinations during the upheaval of a house move? I also hope she can join me in congratulating Kingsbury Court GP surgery on what I think is a jab well done.

14:29

[Sojan Joseph (Ashford) (Lab)]

This is an incredibly important and timely debate. The latest UK Health Security Agency data, published on Tuesday, underlined how vaccine rates have continued to decline. It also showed that uptake of the meningitis B booster for children aged two fell slightly last year. I find that especially alarming, given the meningitis outbreak in Kent earlier this year. There were 21 confirmed cases, tragically including the deaths of two young people. A number of schools across east Kent also recorded confirmed cases, including one in my constituency. I am grateful for the co-ordinated action led by the various agencies. Their swift response helped to ensure that clear public health advice was communicated and that vaccination programmes could be rapidly rolled out.

Although I warmly welcome that action, at the time of the outbreak I joined colleagues from across the House in calling for more to be done. I was therefore pleased that, during the summer, the UKHSA and NHS England introduced a one-off national meningitis B vaccination programme to protect young people at the highest risk before the start of the new academic year, when meningitis B cases typically rise. The Joint Committee on Vaccination and Immunisation also published a number of recommendations on a routine meningitis B programme for adolescents. Before the summer recess, the Government were considering those recommendations. Will the Minister provide an update on those considerations?

The meningitis outbreak in Kent should serve as a warning of the serious consequences when vaccine-preventable diseases regain ground. As the chair of the all-party parliamentary group for global tuberculosis, I also point to rising rates of TB in the UK. TB meningitis is one of the most severe forms of TB, particularly in young children. The BCG vaccine protects against TB, particularly serious forms of the infection such as TB meningitis. However, the latest data for the UK shows that, in the first quarter of the year, almost one in five children eligible for the BCG vaccine did not receive it.

Vaccinations remain an important part of preventing severe childhood TB, alongside early diagnosis and treatment. However, the BCG vaccine is more than 100 years old and does not provide reliable protection against pulmonary TB in adults. I therefore stress the need for continued investment in research and development on new, more effective TB vaccines. That is particularly important, given the country’s role in global tuberculosis research and development.

My hon. Friend the Member for Bury St Edmunds and Stowmarket (Dr Prinsley) talked about Reform using its conference stage to talk about an anti-vaccination programme. We have a duty to base our discussions about vaccinations on facts and evidence. As politicians, we have a particular responsibility to promote clear, evidence-based information and to avoid contributing to uncertainty and mistrust.

14:36

[Josh Fenton-Glynn (Calder Valley) (Lab)]

It is an honour to serve under your chairship, Mrs Barker. I thank my Health and Social Care Committee colleagues for bringing forward this debate.

One thing we learned during the pandemic was just how much we all rely on each other. Vaccines were a huge part of helping us get back to seeing our families and taking part in our communities. We got through that period because we recognised that looking after each other meant looking after ourselves.

At the same time, we saw a growth of misinformation online. Many of us spent more time online during the pandemic and, too often, social media algorithms pushed people towards content that reinforces fear rather than answers questions. There is a fundamental problem with misinformation, which is that science is evolving and lives in the grey area; it is much easier to be wrong with certainty.

Diseases that once killed and disabled huge swathes of our population have been brought under control because of generations of vaccines. That is something we should never take for granted. Vaccines do not cause autism; they cause healthy children. Yet we are seeing a worrying decline in the uptake of vaccines, which is the reason for this debate.

In England, less than 84% of children have received both doses of the MMR vaccine, well below the 95% target that gives us the best protection. The consequences are not theoretical—we are experiencing them now. The growth of misinformation and the anti-vax movement puts children’s lives at risk.

The majority of measles cases since the start of this year—61%—have been in children under 10. Most of those children were unvaccinated. Tragically, two children have died—of a preventable disease for which there is a safe and effective vaccine. That is two families suffering an unimaginable loss.

The irony with vaccines is that the lives saved never make the headlines—the children who do not get sick, the hospital admissions we do not have. The families who never experience that terrible loss will never know that it was vaccines that spared them from it.

At the core of this debate are trust and responsibility. The Government have a responsibility to champion the benefits of vaccines and to set out a clear path to 95%. We have a responsibility to take up those vaccines, but the Government must act. If social media companies do not stop the harmful content we have talked about, we must act to make sure they do.

I once again thank my fellow Health and Social Care Committee members for bringing forward this debate. We need to make sure we have a clear plan and clear action so that we can solve this problem.

14:39

[Alison Bennett (Mid Sussex) (LD)]

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairship this afternoon, Mrs Barker. I commend the hon. Member for Uxbridge and South Ruislip (Danny Beales) on setting out the work that the Health and Social Care Committee has done, and all its members on looking into this vital issue.

Not so long ago, hospitals in this country were filled with rows of iron lungs ventilating children paralysed by polio, and schools were forced to close their doors as measles swept through entire classrooms, leaving some children permanently disabled, and some parents burying their children. We do not see those scenes today, and that is because of one the single greatest achievements in the history of medicine: vaccination. In 2026, it is easy to forget that and to take for granted a world in which parents do not fear that a common childhood illness might kill their child.

However, we are at risk of forgetting the lessons our grandparents learned the hard way, and the numbers prove it. In England, just 81% of five-year-olds have received their 4-in-1 jab against diseases such as polio and tetanus, down from 89% a decade ago, and only 84% have had both their MMR jabs, down from 88%. No childhood vaccine in this country now meets the 95% coverage threshold the World Health Organisation tells us we need in order to keep these diseases from spreading—and they are spreading. Over 800 cases of measles have already been confirmed this year, closing in on the total for the whole of last year.

Vaccine take-up is not evenly spread across our country either. In London, MMR coverage is just 72%, but in the south-west it is 83%—an 11 point gap mapped on to deprivation, inequalities and communities that already find it hardest to access the healthcare they need. It is not just children: only 70% of over-65s and 42% of pregnant women received a flu vaccine this past season, both figures well short of where they need to be. Last year gave us one of the worst flu seasons in memory.

As the hon. Member for Ashford (Sojan Joseph) noted, the tragedy we saw with the Kent meningitis outbreak earlier this year led to a change in policy on vaccination for meningitis, and we saw that there was the capacity for authorities to do more and to take action. As a mum to a teen who has been called for a meningitis vaccination this summer, I am hugely grateful for that change in policy. That action tells us something important: that when we make vaccination easier to access, uptake follows, and that this is not a lost cause but a policy failure, and policy failures can be fixed.

There is also a darker force at work, and we must be honest about it. Online medical disinformation is a genuine threat to public health, and it is increasingly being given a platform by people who should know better. Reform has refused to condemn Donald Trump’s conspiracy theories linking vaccines to autism. As was noted by the hon. Member for Bury St Edmunds and Stowmarket (Dr Prinsley), at Reform UK’s conference last year a keynote speaker blamed vaccines for cancer in the royal family.

We have seen in the United States exactly where this leads: trusted scientific institutions hollowed out, and the health of a nation put at risk. Doctors and nurses in our own GP surgeries and walk-in centres are now telling us that they are hearing these same conspiracy theories in this country today. We must listen to scientists, not conspiracy theorists, and politicians who lend credibility to dangerous medical falsehoods must be held to account for the harm they cause.

What can we do about it? First, we can invest properly, and for the long term, in our vaccination programmes. This cannot keep being treated as a cost-neutral afterthought. NHS England’s strategy exists on paper, but everyone—from clinicians to campaigners—agrees that it lacks the funding and senior leadership to actually turn things around.

Secondly, we can take vaccination to where people already are. Community spaces and the places people trust should be central to how we deliver an ambitious new push for record vaccination rates. That is particularly true among the communities that we too often write off as hard to reach.

Thirdly, we need a serious, funded strategy to fight medical disinformation head on—not one or two well-meaning social media videos, but a real strategy. That means supporting doctors and nurses with the tools and training to engage constructively with vaccine-sceptical patients; investing in public health messaging that works with trusted local voices and online influencers, not against them; targeted outreach to the communities where scepticism runs deepest; criminal liability for online influencers and politicians alike who profit from spreading dangerous medical disinformation; and a new verification system so that no one can falsely claim to be a medical professional online.

None of that is about shaming families who have been misled. It is about meeting them where they are, with facts, compassion and a system that makes doing the right thing the easy thing. We owe it to every family who lived through the era of iron lungs and empty classrooms not to let their hard-won progress slip away on our watch. Let us fund vaccination properly, let us take it into every community and let us have the courage to say clearly and without apology that we follow the science, not the conspiracy theories.

14:45

[Dr Caroline Johnson (Sleaford and North Hykeham) (Con)]

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship this afternoon, Mrs Barker. I congratulate the hon. Member for Uxbridge and South Ruislip (Danny Beales) on securing this important debate.

Why do we vaccinate? As we have heard today, we vaccinate because it prevents illness, it reduces the severity of illnesses that do occur, and it reduces complications. I should declare an interest as a consultant paediatrician in the NHS, as a parent of three children between 11 and 19 and as someone who was a volunteer vaccinator for many months at the local vaccine centre during the covid-19 pandemic.

Vaccines were first identified, or discovered, by Edward Jenner in 1796. He discovered the smallpox vaccine, which eliminated smallpox completely between 1958 and 1977. We have seen that happen with so many diseases. I have a list, but it is so long that I am not sure I have time to read it all out: diphtheria, tetanus, polio, haemophilus influenzae, pertussis, rotavirus, hepatitis B, tuberculosis, flu, respiratory syncytial virus, shingles, human papillomavirus, various strains of meningitis, rubella, mumps, coronavirus—I could go on. There are so many different things to which we now have vaccines that we did not have previously and that have reduced the incidence of death and serious illness in so many people. It is almost impossible to quantify how many lives have been saved.

I want to focus on measles, which several hon. Members have mentioned. My great-uncle Leonard died of measles at the age of 15 months. Pre-vaccine, it was a common condition that killed many people. Thankfully, now it is not—and why? Because of vaccines. Vaccination rates have fallen, however, and we have lost our measles-free status. We need to make sure, as far as possible, that everyone gets the vaccine. The concept of herd immunity means that if some children cannot be vaccinated because of a personal health condition, they will be protected to an extent by the fact of a large proportion of the population having been vaccinated, and by the reduction of that disease within the community in some conditions. If vaccination rates fall, there is a risk to those people, as well as to those who have just decided not to have the vaccine. I would be interested to know how the Minister will focus on measles in particular.

When we were in office, the Conservatives modernised the routine vaccination programme. In 2015, the UK became the first country to offer the Bexsero vaccine against meningitis B, which was given to babies aged eight to 16 weeks, followed by a booster around their first birthday. In 2017, we also switched to the hexavalent six-in-one routine vaccine programme so that babies could be protected against hepatitis B for the first time. Conservative Ministers expanded the HPV vaccination to boys, bringing the UK in line with other developed countries and preventing approximately 30,000 cases of cancer in males. The vaccine taskforce secured seven vaccines for the UK during the coronavirus pandemic, invested over £400 million in scaling up domestic manufacturing and mobilised more than 100,000 volunteers with sites right across the country. We also backed the Oxford-AstraZeneca vaccine with public funding and agreed a 10-year partnership with Moderna to invest in mRNA research and development. The previous Government supported vaccination in a number of ways; I look forward to hearing from the Minister what her Government will do to support it.

I also want to talk about meningitis B, which is a horrible, rapid disease that affects patients very quickly. It is one of the diseases that is quite frightening to see as a paediatrician because of the speed at which a child goes from being well to being critically ill. We have all heard about putting the glass across the rash to see whether it disappears, but I have watched that rash appear on children with lightning speed. The disease kills, and it leaves many children with severe, lifelong disabilities.

In 2015, the UK was first in the world to bring in a vaccine against meningitis for small children, but last year we saw meningitis B infections in groups of older children and young adults in Kent, Dorset and Reading. There were 21 cases in Kent and two deaths. The Government quickly brought in a local vaccine programme to treat people who might have been at risk, but there was also a stampede for private provision; Boots, Superdrug and other commercial ventures ran out of the vaccine within a few hours.

The Government have decided to bring in a system under which people born between 1 September 2007 and 31 August 2008, and those who are starting university or further education colleges for the first time this year, will be able to get the vaccine. However, the JCVI has suggested that children who have been vaccinated with one dose should be given a booster at age 15. That means those who were born after 1 May 2015, so the Minister has a little while to manage that, but the JCVI has also recommended two doses for adolescents who did not get the first dose. The Government do not seem to have taken up that recommendation yet. Will they do so? When?

A meningitis vaccine has also been brought in for men who have sex with men because, interestingly, it also has a 42% protective rate for gonococcal conditions. There was a record high of 85,000 cases in 2023. The vaccine has helped with those cases, but it would be beneficial to know when the Government will ensure that all our young children have the protection that they need against this frightening disease.

Other things are slipping, too. The flu vaccination is highly effective at reducing seasonal hospital admissions. The WHO recognises that it is the most effective way to prevent infection and severe outcomes from flu, but coverage among the elderly and at-risk groups has declined in England. I would be interested to hear why the Minister thinks that is, what her research shows and what she is going to do about it.

Respiratory syncytial virus affects not just children, but the elderly. The vaccine is incredibly effective in the elderly; last year, the JCVI recommended its extension to the over-80s. At the time, I asked Ministers whether the vaccine, having been recommended by the JCVI in the early summer, would be ready for last winter. My understanding, from what was said, was that they were going to work at pace. They reassured me that it would happen, but it did not. I believe that the vaccine will be available to older people this winter, but what is the Minister doing to make sure that they are aware of that so that they take it up? It will help to reduce admissions to hospital over the winter and reduce the pressure on A&Es and ambulance services, and it will mean that people are less unwell, which is obviously a good thing.

Many hon. Members have talked about vaccine hesitancy. Polling by Ipsos found that more than two thirds of adults believed that it was

“difficult for the public to spot misleading health information.”

It also found that those in the most deprived areas were more likely to be affected. According to a UK Health Security Agency survey, last year 47% of parents who reported seeing concerning information about vaccines said that they had seen it on social media. As hon. Members have said, those sorts of message, such as the suggestion that cancer in the royal family was caused by vaccines, were platformed by a political party at a conference.

It is important that we give responsible information about vaccines that we know to be true. We do not pretend that there are no risks. There is always a small risk to anything: we take a risk when we get up in the morning and come to work, and we take a risk every time we cross the road. Every aspect of our life contains risk, but we need to be honest with people and explain that the risks of vaccines are tiny and the risks of the disease are potentially much greater. That will mean that people can make informed decisions.

When patients who have not been vaccinated come to clinic—we check with all children whether they have been vaccinated when they come for their first clinical appointment—they have very often refused once and not been asked again. The reason why has not been discussed. No one has asked them why they are worried about the vaccine; it has just been accepted at face value. Very often, when we talk to parents about it, they will then have their children vaccinated. We need to make sure that when unvaccinated children do present to medical services, we take the opportunity to try to get them vaccinated.

I welcome the addition to the relationships, sex and health education curriculum of facts about vaccination and immunisation, but what is happening to provide public information to parents and other adults? It is said that vaccine uptake among ethnic minority groups is markedly lower. Does the Minister understand why? What is she doing to improve it? The Prime Minister has previously attested that Healthwatch is a key factor in engaging marginalised communities, but this Labour Government have placed it on the chopping block in the Health Bill, which is due back in the House next week. How does the Minister foresee that role being taken up by the patient experience body with which the Government intend to replace it?

From April next year, integrated care boards instead of NHS England will be responsible for vaccinations. I understand that that is part of the Minister’s strategic commissioning vision, but will that additional responsibility be met with additional resources? How will the Government ensure that it does not cause further slippage in vaccinations?

Finally, I want to mention the life sciences industry, which is struggling under this Government’s tax burden. Now that the Department for Science, Innovation and Technology has been abolished, what will the Minister do to ensure that the industry is given the support that it needs?

Occasionally during my career, a parent of a critically ill child has looked me in the eye, often as the child is being put in an ambulance to an intensive care unit, and said, “If I’d given my child the vaccine, they wouldn’t be this ill, would they, Doctor?” There is trauma and grief for those parents, and a regret that is completely unnecessary and can be prevented. It is in the hands of the Minister and of this Government to do what they can to prevent it. I look forward to hearing what the Minister plans to do.

14:56

[The Minister for Public Health and Patient Safety (Dame Diana Johnson)]

It is a pleasure to serve under you today, Mrs Barker. I am grateful to the Chair of the Health and Social Care Committee, the hon. Member for Oxford West and Abingdon (Layla Moran), and its members for securing this important debate and am grateful to all hon. Members who have spoken this afternoon. I commend my hon. Friend the Member for Uxbridge and South Ruislip (Danny Beales) for his passionate opening statement. I also welcome the shadow Minister, the hon. Member for Sleaford and North Hykeham (Dr Johnson), back to her place after the reshuffle; I congratulate her on surviving for so long.

I know that Members across the House are very concerned about this issue. I have been struck by the knowledge and expertise around the Chamber this afternoon. Many questions have been posed. If I do not get to every question that Members have asked, I will write to them with an answer.

After clean water, vaccination is the most effective public health intervention for saving lives and promoting good health. It protects individuals, protects families and protects communities. One vaccination can change the whole course of a life for the better or, if it is missed, for the worse. I am very conscious of that as a Hull MP, because in October 1961 we were the first city to mass-vaccinate with the new oral vaccine. When we faced a polio outbreak that threatened the city, over 350,000 people were vaccinated in two weeks. That led to the national roll-out soon afterwards, helping to virtually eliminate the disease nationwide.

Over generations, vaccinations have made diseases that once killed or disabled thousands of children rare and have eradicated smallpox worldwide. Vaccination is central to this Government’s wider shift from sickness to prevention. In terms of the diseases we protect against, we deliver at the moment what I still believe is a world-class vaccination programme, backed by expert advice from the independent Joint Committee on Vaccination and Immunisation. But the benefits depend on high uptake, and childhood vaccination rates have moved in the wrong direction.

Falling vaccination rates are a very serious challenge. Despite our programme achieving more than 90% coverage for babies’ first doses against diseases such as polio and measles, we are not hitting our targets. There is no single cause and there is no quick fix. We know that some families struggle to get an appointment that works for them or have not received clear, trusted information in a way that works for them. Services also vary across the country. The pandemic put further pressures on the health system and misinformation can add to these problems.

[Sir Desmond Swayne in the Chair]

We are therefore acting on four fronts: clearer NHS organisation, more flexible services, better public information and joined-up digital records. I will deal with each in turn, but first I will address targets, as well as funding and delegation to ICBs. Let us be clear: the Government have not dropped vaccination targets. To summarise, our targets are 95% for routine pre-school immunisations and 90% for routine school-age immunisations. Our targets remain in force and are based on standards set by the World Health Organisation. We have simplified the NHS planning guidance to avoid duplication, but we did not lower our ambition. We are also backing targets with better accountability. Coverage of MMR vaccinations for young children will form part of how the performance of NHS ICBs will be assessed as they take on responsibility for vaccination services from April next year.

We have not cut funding for vaccination services. We have confirmed funding for the next three years, giving the NHS certainty as responsibility moves from the NHS regions to ICBs in April 2027. Excluding covid-19 vaccinations, that is a real-terms increase and will help ICBs and vaccination service providers to plan service improvements further ahead.

On delegation, ICBs are best placed to improve vaccination coverage because they understand the needs of their local communities. That matters because the reasons for low coverage vary from place to place. ICBs can shape these services around local needs and barriers, whether that means more convenient appointments or clearer information from trusted sources. This is devolution in action.

I reassure hon. Members that national bodies will continue to set standards, monitor performance and hold the system to account.

[Dr Chambers]

Will the Minister give way?

[Dame Diana Johnson]

I will carry on because I have very limited time, but I am happy to write to the hon. Gentleman or talk to him afterwards. I know there are concerns about the cuts that have been made to ICB running costs. These are planned reductions that relate just to administration, not the funding that will be used to provide frontline vaccination services.

Turning to pre-school access, flexible services are critical. Vaccination rates are lowest in the most deprived communities, so improving uptake means making services easier to use. Pre-school children will continue to receive their vaccinations through their GPs. We have increased the payment to GPs for each routine childhood vaccination from £10.06 to £12.06 and changed the GP incentives to reward improvements where uptake is lowest.

However, we recognise that GP services will not reach every family and are therefore testing vaccinations through health visiting teams, including through 12 pilots across England, four of which are in London. Health visitors have brought vaccines to family homes to ensure that the most vulnerable families are offered these lifesaving interventions. We have also been expanding the use of community pharmacies and are evaluating that. We are looking at supporting targeted local outreach as well. The aim is simple: to reach those who might otherwise miss out.

School-age vaccinations are also a priority. The joint school-aged vaccination programme of work with my Department and the Department for Education is now overseeing actions to improve coverage in schools by resolving local delivery problems. The NHS is also rolling-out new digital technology to make it easier for busy parents to provide consent. It has published revised guidance for schools and the NHS and there are regional support forums to tackle any problems that are present.

We also have the Mavis—manage vaccinations in schools—scheme. That is a new digital system that allows parents to give consent online and helps NHS teams to keep records up to date. By September 2026, it will be used by 72% of school vaccination teams, covering more than 13,800 schools, with further expansion planned for April ’27.

Turning next to awareness, most parents want to do the right thing for their children. Our job is to ensure that they can easily find the clear and trustworthy information that they need. That means stronger public campaigns and confident healthcare professionals giving that advice. We think that it could also be provided by schools and better start hubs, as well as trusted local organisations.

We all agree that false claims online can cause huge concern and worry. As a number of hon. Members have said, the actions of politicians have consequences. We all share the responsibility to base our comments on science and evidence. We have seen the damage that misinformation can cause. The entirely discredited and morally repugnant claims linking MMR and autism in the 1990s led to a substantial fall in coverage, so experts now monitor emerging misinformation and respond with accurate information. I hear the calls today for stronger action against social media companies, but we do not want to mistake misinformation for the whole problem. To improve coverage, many families simply need vaccinations to be easier to understand and to access.

I will conclude with the issue of digital and data. We are improving vaccination records. At the moment, information is held in different NHS systems and does not always follow a patient between services. Through new digital systems, we are joining those records together. That will help healthcare professionals to see which vaccinations someone has had, allow the NHS to identify communities where uptake is low and give families clearer records, reminders and information about where to get vaccinated. Over time, families will also be able to access more of this through the NHS app.

Vaccinations have protected generations from serious disease, and all of us have a vested interest in ensuring that they continue to do so. That means clear accountability, easier access, trusted information and better record keeping. As I have set out, we are acting on each of those fronts. Rebuilding coverage will take sustained effort, but we will monitor progress closely and take further action wherever it is needed.

I note that the House of Lords Childhood Vaccinations Committee is due to report shortly. As the new Minister in this post, I will be looking very closely at the recommendations that come out of that report. I have had the chance to look at the letters that the Health and Social Care Committee wrote to one of my predecessors, and I can assure all hon. Members in the room today that I will go back to the Department and redouble my efforts to ensure that we see the increase that we all want in the number of vaccinations, particularly for children. I thank all hon. Members for their contributions this afternoon.

15:08

[Danny Beales]

Thank you, Sir Desmond, for chairing the end of the debate, if not the beginning. I thank the Minister for her response. I and the rest of the Committee welcome her commitment to get back to us and to work with us. I just politely point out that the very good measures that she has outlined are measures that the Government and the strategy have been undertaking for many years, and we have still seen the decline continue. I encourage her to go back to her officials and press them for a timeline to regain elimination status and reach the WHO targets. If they are unwilling to put a target on that, I would suggest that perhaps they are not confident in the measures that they have so far been taking to achieve them, but I thank the Minister for her commitment to work with us.

Question put and agreed to.

Resolved,

That this House has considered vaccination rates in England.

Global Biodiversity and Ecosystems: National Security

Thursday 3rd September 2026 Westminster Hall

15:10

[Adrian Ramsay (Waveney Valley) (Green)]

I beg to move,

That this House has considered the nature security assessment on global biodiversity loss, ecosystem collapse and national security, published in January 2026.

It is fantastic to see how many Members from across the House are here for this fundamental debate. Climate breakdown and nature security are the most immediate and severe national security threats of our age. The fundamentals of human existence—food, water, health—all depend on healthy, stable ecosystems.

If anyone still thinks that environmental breakdown is a distant concern, this year should dispel that notion. We have experienced the hottest year on record so far, with prolonged drought, extreme temperatures and wildfires, and we are likely to have the highest number of heat-related deaths ever, forcing Ministers to evaluate where our national resilience is falling short. As the National Heat Risk Commission report published today shows, the country’s leadership have failed to implement measures to protect lives from temperature rises that have been expected for more than a decade. The Climate Change Committee has estimated that temperatures will increase further in the near term. Extremes are projected to become the new normal, and annual heat-related deaths may reach 10,000.

This year’s super El Niño will cause further chaos to seasonal weather systems. The breakdown not only is an immediate risk to life, but is rapidly destabilising our natural systems. We talk about tipping points, and there could be no clearer demonstration than the glacial collapse in the Himalayas last month, which unleashed a catastrophic torrent into the river system. Thousands were tragically killed or remain missing. Since then, glaciers vulnerable to collapse are being mapped out, with millions potentially impacted by violent shifts in landscape and the disastrous loss of vital fresh water supplies.

Today, we are debating a crucial national security assessment report that warns of the rapid depletion of global biodiversity, the collapse of critical ecosystems and the dismantling of major global food systems. The origins of the report are unclear. Indeed, the only document made public is a redacted summary of the assessment, published after a freedom of information request from Green Alliance. What we do know is that the Joint Intelligence Committee co-ordinated that landmark work to measure the impact of global biodiversity loss and ecosystem collapse on our national security. That Committee is the authority on profiling risks to the country and our society—a group not of environmental campaigners, but of top-ranking specialists and experts from across the intelligence community, responsible for monitoring and providing early warning of threats to Britain.

Not only have the Government refused to publish the full version of the report, despite requests from Members of Parliament across parties and from the Environmental Audit Committee—of which, I declare, I am a member—but expert witnesses giving testimony before the Committee, including Lieutenant General Richard Nugee and Tony Juniper, the chair of Natural England, have noted that the report has not had the official Government response that one would expect for any seminal piece of work, let alone such a stark warning from our intelligence authorities.

However, we do have a redacted version of the document, and that is stark enough. The assessment conclusively states that global ecosystem collapse and the loss of biodiversity threaten national security, human life and economic prosperity. The assessment presents a world where cascading risks from climate breakdown lead to crop failures, water scarcity, floods and novel diseases. That would mean billions of people facing likely food shortages, inflation, public health risks, supply chain disruption, loss of livelihoods, mass displacement and conflict.

[Ian Roome (North Devon) (LD)]

A record hot summer has spread bluetongue disease among animals across my constituency at record rates, doing enormous damage to farming across the west country. Does the hon. Gentleman agree that one of the most alarming findings in the report is just how exposed the UK is to food insecurity?

[Adrian Ramsay]

I absolutely agree with the hon. Member. I will talk about food security later in my speech, but he is absolutely right to draw that point to our attention.

On the scale of the risks that we face, if this is not one of the gravest prevailing national security risks of our time, I do not know what is. Without systemic change at national and international level, we are on a pathway to the total collapse of globally critical ecosystems. The trajectory of the collapse means that it will come as soon as 2030 for some and 2050 for others.

[Dr Rupa Huq (Ealing Central and Acton) (Lab)]

Biodiversity loss in my own constituency has happened with Thames Water dumping sewage into the River Brent. I am glad that the clean water Bill will bring an end to that, but does the hon. Member agree that we need greater assurance that vital ecosystems that have been ravaged will be built back?

[Adrian Ramsay]

I absolutely agree that the impact is seen at a local level in all of our communities and that nature restoration is fundamental. We have to step up the pace of that, as I will go on to set out further.

The Joint Intelligence Committee has identified several degrading ecosystems, the destruction of which could be so severe that our own national security and prosperity will be in peril. Those include the tropical rainforests of the Amazon and the Congo Basin, the major river systems of the Himalayas, the richly productive and abundant south-east Asian coral reefs, the aquatic nurseries of the mangrove habitats and the stabilising force of the Arctic boreal forests.

That is why our national security cannot only be understood within our own borders. We cannot build a secure island in an insecure world. We must keep to our international obligations, such as the actions detailed in the global biodiversity framework to be reviewed next month at COP17. We can also no longer obfuscate on contributing to the Tropical Forest Forever Facility investment fund that the UK so proudly helped to set up.

[Several hon. Members rose—]

[Adrian Ramsay]

I give way to the hon. Member for Stirling and Strathallan (Chris Kane).

[Chris Kane (Stirling and Strathallan) (Lab)]

I thank the hon. Member. As a former journalist, I am acutely aware of the need to communicate the risks clearly, as do the many hundreds of my constituents who got in touch with me about this. As a member of the Public Accounts Committee, I highlight that the need to share knowledge and best practice within the devolved nations of the United Kingdom is incredibly important. Although we need to look at this as a worldwide endeavour, does the hon. Member agree that the way in which the devolved nations also share best practice and knowledge is important? If we do not get it right as the UK as a whole, we are already getting off on the wrong foot for getting it right across the world.

[Adrian Ramsay]

I agree that on nature, as on climate, leadership starts at home. The UK has a huge leadership role to play. That, of course, has to apply to devolved Government, regional government and local government. We need to make sure that governments at all levels are properly resourced, both for nature recovery and for climate resilience plans. The data that I have recently commissioned work on, and will be releasing soon, shows that we do not have the level of local resilience plans that are needed on this issue.

I think the hon. Member for Mid Derbyshire (Jonathan Davies) also wished to come in on the issue of the Tropical Forest Forever Facility.

[Jonathan Davies (Mid Derbyshire) (Lab)]

I thank the hon. Member for taking the intervention. Is he aware that the Government have announced this morning a £400 million loan to the Tropical Forest Forever Facility, and will he join me in welcoming that investment?

[Adrian Ramsay]

Absolutely. I welcome positive action wherever it happens. I have no problem at all in welcoming positive steps from the Government. I want to see more of them. I welcome the Minister, who is my constituency neighbour, to her place and look forward to her response to this debate. I want to be a constructive voice in this debate, and I very much welcome that news.

To some extent, countries with more resources like the UK can insulate citizens from the worst effects. Countries that are least able and most exposed to risks may not be able to do so, or to protect their communities from the full force of the impacts, which range from mass displacements to famine. For some of the most vulnerable countries, especially in the global south, water scarcity means famine, an impact on energy supplies and is likely to lead to the displacement and deaths of millions of people. Such instability is intensified further by competition for scarce resources and worsens cascading external risks to our own domestic national security.

[Catherine Fookes (Monmouthshire) (Lab)]

I thank the hon. Member for raising the big importance of the Joint Intelligence Committee report and shedding light on it. Does he agree that citizens must be brought up to speed on what they are facing with climate change? Does he agree that we must have a televised national emergency briefing across the UK?

[Adrian Ramsay]

I am grateful to the hon. Lady for making that point, and I completely agree. Like many Members in this Chamber, I signed the early-day motion calling for a national screening of the people’s emergency briefing. I know that a lot of Members will have hosted or attended screenings in their constituencies, as I have done. I have more coming up in my constituency in the coming weeks. It is incredibly powerful, even more powerful than the showing in November, because we can see how people are responding to that evidence. Of course, we need to look at the solutions as well as the problems, but I absolutely echo that call. I am interested in the Minister’s comments on the call for a national screening, so that we can be really clear on the scale of this challenge, which sadly does not get the same national profile as it did a few years ago. We need to increase that profile again.

[Anna Dixon (Shipley) (Lab)]

I was with the hon. Gentleman at the national emergency briefing, and like him I have many constituents to whom I am grateful for organising local screenings. Does he agree that climate change is not only an emergency, but a public health emergency? That is clear not only from the heat deaths in the UK, but the global impact on public health of water scarcity and the spread of malaria to new regions. Does he also agree that we should continue to support the likes of the World Health Organisation in efforts to tackle what is both a climate and public health emergency?

[Adrian Ramsay]

The hon. Lady is absolutely right: this is a public health issue. Organisations such as the World Health Organisation are clear on that, and it is clear from Natural England’s oral evidence to the Environmental Audit Committee yesterday. It is clear not only that there will be risks to public health if action is not taken but that nature as national security infrastructure can help with positive health outcomes, and we really need to embrace that as a country.

Nature is a foundational element of national security, and nature depletion, biodiversity loss, ecosystem collapse and climate breakdown are not merely environmental problems. Collectively, they will lead to the ruin of critical systems on which lives and livelihoods depend. We are no longer confronted by individual isolated incidents, events or extinctions. What lies ahead is whole-system collapse. As nature provides essential services that protect people, food, water and the economy, it is infrastructure—our most critical infrastructure—and should be treated as such.

[James Naish (Rushcliffe) (Lab)]

The Labour rural research group has just done a report on the future of the rural economy. One chapter looked at nature markets, which are going to be really important for rural economies because of how we should think about and value nature. Does the hon. Gentleman agree that for nature markets to work and evolve as quickly as is required, we need the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs and the Government to put in place a clearer framework so that people know how they can invest in nature and biodiversity in the UK?

[Adrian Ramsay]

Like the hon. Gentleman, I represent a rural constituency, Waveney Valley in East Anglia, where I have done a lot to support and promote local solutions, including natural flood management landscape-scale projects to re-naturalise rivers, which brings significant environmental benefits. I know that the wildlife trusts and others are looking at things such as nature markets as part of the answer to that. I do not think that market forces are going to be anything like the majority of the solution to this problem. We would be kidding ourselves if we thought that was the case, but they could be part of the answer, as long as we are clear that the Government are setting out the direction and scale of ambition that is needed and the public funding goes in to make that possible. Crucially, companies must not be allowed to get away with trashing crucial ancient environments in one area by funding them in another. We need to be very careful about how we use those mechanisms in the right way. They could potentially be used as part of a wider mix.

[Manuela Perteghella (Stratford-on-Avon) (LD)]

Does the hon. Gentleman agree that if we are serious about tackling global biodiversity loss, we must ensure that commodities such as soya and palm oil entering the UK supply chain are not linked to deforestation and that UK trade and finance are not contributing to ecosystem destruction overseas?

[Adrian Ramsay]

I thank the hon. Lady for making that point. She is absolutely right that to protect crucial ecosystems internationally, our trade has to be fair and sustainable and that has to be embedded into farming policy. I am sure the Minister will pick up on that point as well.

Landscapes where ecosystems are compromised are more prone to natural disasters, such as drought, wildfires and flash floods. I say natural disasters, but those are often the results of decades of destructive policies and practices. Natural systems that reduce exposure to climate hazards are therefore part of our national resilience. We need to invest in adaptation now. Sustainable land management, for example, or harvesting and conserving water supplies, has become absolutely essential. The Climate Change Committee’s 2026 assessment makes the wider point clearly:

“Although climate risks are intensifying, the resulting damages are not inevitable. Proven and cost-effective adaptation measures are available for immediate deployment…Their implementation will be critical to protecting lives, infrastructure, and economic prosperity”.

[Charlie Maynard (Witney) (LD)]

I thank the hon. Member for his speech. Around Witney, 200 farmers are implementing a landscape recovery scheme. Only three such schemes have been implemented in the country. That one is on the Evenlode. Would it be helpful if the Minister said when the Government are going to bring forward the third round of landscape recovery schemes? We urgently need to be moving faster.

[Adrian Ramsay]

I absolutely agree. That is a strong example of one of the main points I want to make. The Minister will point to a number of welcome measures, but the question is whether the scale and pace of those measures are commensurate with the challenge. At the moment, they are a long way from being so. The funding that needs to be put in place for landscape recovery and the sustainable farming incentive is crucial. Farmers say to me all the time that they will get behind this as long as they can see a long-term funding framework for them to do so. One farmer in Suffolk said to me that he built a pond, which was crucial for natural flood management, in spite of the fact that it actually reduced his farm’s income. Most farmers are not going to be in a position to do that. That has to change.

[Mr Jonathan Brash (Hartlepool) (Lab)]

One of the other recommendations in the report was ensuring that at least 60% of food consumed in the UK is produced in the UK. Does the hon. Gentleman agree that the only way we will ensure that is by protecting our farmers from the changes we are seeing in our climate?

[Adrian Ramsay]

Yes, that is crucial. With all the shocks that farmers are facing, we have seen that more protection and support are needed. The ambition needs to be a lot higher than 60% if we are to be resilient to the scale of geopolitical and environmental challenges that the world will be facing.

We should begin to plan and fund natural infrastructure with the same seriousness as engineered infrastructure. The assessment makes it clear that there is still a chance for major interventions to slow the trend, protect communities and restore national security, but only if we act now—in this Parliament—and at the scale that the crisis demands.

[Edward Morello (West Dorset) (LD)]

The hon. Gentleman is being extremely generous with his time. The Brit Valley Project in West Dorset is bringing together 43 landowners and will improve biodiversity over 4,000 acres. Every time I speak to community groups—I am sure other Members have examples of this—they want to see faster action. Does he share my frustration that politicians nationally and internationally are using the climate crisis and ignoring the science for their own political ends?

[Adrian Ramsay]

Yes, of course I share that frustration. I am pleased to see many Members, from lots of parties, in the Chamber for this debate. We need to increase those numbers and rebuild the national consensus we had on climate. I hope we can have such a consensus on nature restoration and climate adaptation. We all need to tackle the myths and make this debate less fractious and more about bringing people together than driving culture-war wedges. We can do that with how we put forward the solutions that are needed.

Nowhere in this debate are the threats clearer than with regard to food security. This year, water scarcity and drought threaten food production. As all of us representing rural constituencies will be aware, the UK’s agricultural sector has suffered three of the five worst harvests in the past decade, and this year will almost certainly add to that record.

[Blake Stephenson (Mid Bedfordshire) (Con)]

Will the hon. Gentleman give way?

[Adrian Ramsay]

I will. I am being generous with interventions, which will mean we wait longer before we get to more speeches, but I trust that those intervening are conscious of that.

[Blake Stephenson]

The hon. Gentleman is being extremely generous, and I thank him for that. On food security, like many hon. Members with rural constituencies, I met farmers over the summer. Many told me that they want to build their own reservoirs and extract water dynamically from rivers so they can use that water when it is needed. Does he agree that that is a very simple regulatory change that the Government could make, which would support our farmers in adapting to climate change challenges?

[Adrian Ramsay]

I agree with the hon. Member; that is something that farmers in my constituency have raised with me frequently. There must be solutions to the growing problem of far too little water at some times of the year and far too much water at other times. The solution he outlines is part of how we seriously step up our water management work.

The UK imports around 40% of its food from overseas. Our over-reliance on global markets for food and fertiliser exposes the UK to supply shocks that could make the cost of living crisis much worse. Food security is not simply about producing more food; it is about the resilience of the entire system of agricultural production, including soils, water, fertiliser, feeds, distribution, international markets and the natural systems upon which they all depend. We also depend on international food markets, global supply chains and a stable international system, so protecting critical systems abroad is not simply an act of environmental justice; it is an investment in our own food security. [Interruption.] I hear you, Sir Desmond, but I have been very generous in the number of interventions I have taken. Had I not been so, there would be a much longer list of speeches for later, so I will persist for now.

There is still hope. The Joint Intelligence Committee assessment does not simply describe the threat; it identifies remedies, as it recognises that nature recovery strengthens resilience. Nature restoration and reducing human pressures on nature are both essential. We need to approach nature not as an environmental policy sitting outside national security policy, but as delivering national security benefits and integrated into all areas of policy.

The Government have levers to begin this wide-scale transformation, including fully funding the national tree plan; expanding the sustainable farming incentive; investing in natural flood management schemes such as river renaturalisation and wetland restoration; regenerating soil health to boost resilience for food production; restoring rivers and wetlands to rehabilitate freshwater habitat, flood protection and drought resilience; restoring peatlands for carbon storage and natural flood management; establishing more broadleaf woodland to enhance habitat for biodiversity and landscape-scale resilience; and converting to nature-friendly and climate-resilient farming. All those measures will contribute to maintaining the ecological functions on which we depend.

We need a stronger institutional approach to treating critical natural systems as national infrastructure and to establishing mechanisms to strengthen resilience and adaptation. That means recognising that healthy, natural systems are themselves a form of critical infrastructure.

On the question of transparency, Parliament should have full, unredacted access to the national security assessment as a matter of urgency, to scrutinise the evidence and ensure that our response as a nation is commensurate with the threats. If the Government want the public to become more resilient, the public must be trusted with the facts.

Historians will write about our decisions and future generations will judge us for them. They will recount how we knowingly gambled with global stability, the health of the natural world and the safety of human life and called it a growth agenda. As nature decline is a top-tier threat against the economy, weakening statutory protections and falling short of international obligations directly harms our economy and risks future prosperity. There is a temptation in politics to address environmental policy as an optional extra. The Government no longer have the luxury of time, and it would be a dereliction of duty by everyone in the House to disregard these warnings.

We need a Minister responsible for co-ordinating resilience to move from a managed decline approach to proactively investing in safeguarding for the future, because this is a cross-Government issue that needs to be addressed at scale. The Prime Minister has created a No. 10 for the north, but we need a No. 10 for the future, in the form of a dedicated climate protection unit in the Cabinet Office to drive the scale and pace of work required to restore nature and protect the public. Nature security is national security, and protecting the natural foundations of our country and our planet is ultimately protecting the security of life itself.

[Sir Desmond Swayne (in the Chair)]

There will be a formal two-minute time limit on speeches.

15:33

[Jeremy Corbyn (Islington North) (Your Party)]

In two minutes, I will do my best, Sir Desmond.

I am proud to represent a very small urban area of Britain in which, over the years, we have managed to increase the number of parks and open spaces. Our council takes an assertive approach in encouraging school gardens and promoting an understanding among children of the need for biodiversity. If we are to win the debate about biodiversity, it will be by convincing people who live in urban areas, who often sadly have very little interaction with the natural world, and where children are brought up without any understanding of the natural world, gardens or growing anything.

A couple of weeks ago, I was talking to some children about hearing the cuckoo. Very sadly, none of them knew what a cuckoo was or had ever heard of one. I grew up in a country area where we had a competition over who heard the first cuckoo in spring. It is that sort of change in understanding that we have to bring about if we are to win this debate on biodiversity and sustainability on our planet.

The Government are pledged to the 30by30 target for the oceans. That is fine, and I absolutely agree with it, but the problem with delineating figures like that is that it does not tackle the problem of river pollution going into the seas and the dangerous chemicals that go with it, which do not disappear but instead remain forever. Designating part of an ocean as a marine protection zone does not protect the entirety of the ocean; all it does is designate that area. We have to address the wider issue, which is the pollution emanating from our towns, cities and industries into our rivers and the water companies that do not deal with it.

I have 13 seconds left, so I will simply say this: it is great that the House has come back to this issue and that so many Members want to speak today. We are beginning to reverse the downward trend in the environment debate in favour of a debate on real sustainability.

15:35

[Mr Toby Perkins (Chesterfield) (Lab)]

It is a great pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Sir Desmond. I congratulate the hon. Member for Waveney Valley (Adrian Ramsay) on securing this debate. Today is an incredibly important opportunity to highlight the national security assessment on global biodiversity loss, ecosystem collapse and national security, in which Government intelligence authorities spell out a clear warning: environmental degradation is an existential threat to the UK’s national security.

I entirely support the Government’s commitment to ensuring that every penny of international aid is well directed, but in the context of General Nugee’s assessment that global biodiversity loss creates a national security risk here, we have to question whether the cuts to international climate finance and international aid can be justified any more. The report spells out the link between degradation overseas and the impact here. The assessment lays out the consequences: food insecurity, economic insecurity, increased migration and refugees, increased interstate competition, conflict and geopolitical instability, all of which will threaten us here at home. Experts told the Environmental Audit Committee that this means we must intervene internationally to halt and reverse environmental degradation.

I will conclude by saying three things to the minister. First, what specific actions have the Government taken since this assessment was completed? Secondly, I welcome the fact that the Government have joined other countries in investing in the Tropical Forest Forever Facility; it is absolutely fundamental to protecting us here at home. Thirdly, will the Minister consider bringing forward the fourth national adaptation programme? NAP3, published by the previous Government in 2023, was deemed ineffective by the Climate Change Committee. NAP4 is not due until 2028, but can we afford to wait two more years before we have an adequate plan?

15:37

[Dr Ellie Chowns (North Herefordshire) (Green)]

We have seen just recently what ecosystem collapse looks like: collapsing glaciers in the Himalayas and horrific loss of life on Nepal-Tibet border. We see what it looks like in the UK: the hottest ever summer and the worst ever arable harvest. Things are only going to get worse. This is clearly an issue of national security, and the security services themselves are raising the alarm, not just the environmentalists. We have to change course. Farmers in my constituency of North Herefordshire see this on a daily basis. We have to change the conversation about national security and recognise that it is not just about investment in weaponry and conflict, but about acknowledging the true, existential risk posed by climate change and ecosystem collapse, both in UK and across the world, as highlighted in this report.

It is disappointing that this short report had to be dragged out of the Government, kicking and screaming, and published only after a huge amount of pressure. Where is the evidence base underlying it? What are the Government afraid to share with us? Will the Government publish the full report and the evidence base that underlies it? If they will not, why not? Will they recognise that ecosystems are critical national infrastructure and have to be addressed as such?  To echo a point made by the hon. Member for Chesterfield (Mr Perkins), will the Government recognise that we cannot wait another few years for the national adaptation plan, given today’s announcement from the World Meteorological Organisation that climate change is supercharging natural phenomena such as El Niño, which will lead to even worse effects in the UK and globally than we saw this summer? Nature security is national security.

15:40

[Samantha Dixon (Chester North and Neston) (Lab)]

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Sir Desmond. I congratulate the hon. Member for Waveney Valley (Adrian Ramsay) on securing this important debate.

Among G7 nations, the UK has the lowest remaining levels of biodiversity, which reduces our environment’s ability to support our society. However, it is possible to combat biodiversity loss and ecosystem collapse. The UK is privileged to be home to many world-leading zoos and conservation organisations—including, in my constituency, the wonderful and world-renowned Chester zoo—which have the expertise and experience in species conservation and habitat restoration to propel large-scale ecological recovery projects. I was pleased to learn of Chester zoo’s programme to reintroduce more than 100,000 critically endangered greater Bermuda land snails to the wild, saving the species from extinction, after a small surviving population was discovered in an air conditioning unit.

The efforts of such conservationists are essential to enriching ecosystems across the UK and the world, and we must strive to support them. Does the Minister agree that supporting our world-leading conservation sector is vital to ensure the UK’s long-term security and climate resilience?

15:41

[Dr Danny Chambers (Winchester) (LD)]

It has been well pointed out that biodiversity is not just a nice thing to have. As sad as it is to see species go extinct and to live in a less rich natural world, biodiversity is vital to our food security. In particular, pollinators can affect crop failure, and it is well documented that the number of insects and pollinators has been declining in the UK and around the world over the last few years.

In my limited time, I will highlight one reason for that, which I would like the Government to work with us on: the availability of pet flea and tick treatments over the counter in supermarkets. Some of those products, including fipronil and imidacloprid, are banned from agricultural use because they are considered to be too dangerous to the environment, yet they are available without a prescription or a check of the need for them. They are often used without any clinical need, so people regularly treat animals that do not need treatment with an inappropriate product. These products are being detected in waterways and chalk streams. They damage the entire ecosystem, especially insects and the salmon that live in chalk streams.

I have pressed the Government on this matter before, and the Veterinary Medicines Directorate is looking at it. This debate is about biodiversity. Allowing people to purchase in a supermarket products that are banned from agricultural use seems completely irresponsible and needs to be stopped.

15:43

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

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairship, Sir Desmond. The national emergency, coupled with the national security assessment, makes it absolutely clear that the political landscape has to change locally, nationally and internationally. We need to change the geopolitical processes and fora through which these issues are discussed and acted on. Their insufficiency in the face of the emergency of our time dictates that we do that. Every conversation, policy and action must be oriented towards saving our planet.

The scale and pace of collapse mean that we have no choice, but we do have an opportunity if we can pull our country and our communities together and focus on our consumption—we consume the equivalent of 1.6 planets. We must also pull the nations together. We all live on this fragile planet, which is disintegrating before our eyes. This is an opportunity to reset the clock and get global and environmental stability. All nations much work together to save planet Earth. We are already seeing how intolerable it is, not least in the global south. It is coming our way too, so we cannot prevaricate, as we have over decades in the political space. We must now convene and act to stop the multifaceted risks we are seeing before our eyes, ensure that we stick to the Paris climate commitments and move faster. The disintegration and collapse of this planet is getting out of control. Will the Minister convene her colleagues for a new opportunity for geopolitical stability and, hopefully, save our planet?

15:45

[Dr Roz Savage (South Cotswolds) (LD)]

The threat is real. The assessment makes three judgments with high confidence: that global ecosystem collapse threatens UK national security and prosperity, that every critical ecosystem on earth is on a pathway to collapse and that those ecosystems include those that underpin global food production. Yet the accountability is non-existent. The assessment does not live within the climate change risk assessment, so no Minister has a legal duty to do anything about it. Under the previous national risk assessment, the Government named an owner for each of the 61 identified risks, but this one has none. Instead, everything the Government have offered in response to the national security assessment is discretionary.

The gaping hole in ownership is matched by one in funding. The Government’s own assessment places the annual value of ecosystem services to the UK at £87 billion, yet for every £100 of annual value that nature provides to us, public biodiversity spending is barely £1.20. We would not fund railways, hospitals or defence in this way. The choice is not between spending money on nature or saving money by ignoring the assessment, but between investing in resilience for our grandchildren or passing the considerable cost down to them when the consequences manifest. Yet it feels as if ignoring it is precisely what the Government intend to do. The report was published on the final day of a freedom of information internal review, after an initial refusal. It was pulled from a launch event. We still do not have the unredacted version.

I have three asks of the Minister. Who in Government owns this risk? When will the Government publish a cross-Government action plan in response to it? Will Ministers reconsider publication of the full assessment?

15:47

[Matt Western (Warwick and Leamington) (Lab)]

I congratulate the hon. Member for Waveney Valley (Adrian Ramsay) on securing the debate.

Nature is screaming at us. I spoke to farmers last week who told me just how alarmed they are at the situation. We have seen the wildfires, the droughts, the suffering of disease and the rupturing of glaciers, but as a society we are guilty of ignoring the environmental degradation around us. We live in the belief that the environment can somehow absorb these changes. I think it was 60 years ago that James Lovelock and Lynn Margulis came up with the Gaia theory. Most of us realise that the fact that we are losing species is contributing to the breakdown of our ecosystems. If it was an economic supply chain, we would be acting immediately.

Locally, about the equivalent of an Olympic-sized swimming pool of construction waste is dumped into Whitnash Brook every day. We cannot allow this kind of degradation to continue. As Chair of the Joint Committee on the National Security Strategy, I know that raising the matter of general resilience is crucial, and I look forward to the report from the National Resilience Committee in the Lords later this year.

The report produced by the Joint Intelligence Committee is significant. I believe it is as significant as the Stern report 20 years ago—it is a stand-out piece of work. It is critical that we listen and act for our environment, our economy, our food security and our health. Environmental resilience guarantees human resilience, and we must ensure that we restore and preserve our planet.

15:49

[Brian Mathew (Melksham and Devizes) (LD)]

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairship, Sir Desmond. I thank the hon. Member for Waveney Valley (Adrian Ramsay) for proposing this important debate.

This year, in the midst of unnatural heatwaves and wildfires, I have so far attended five screenings across my constituency of the film on the national emergency briefing. It was heartening—but, at the same time, concerning—to see so many people of all ages coming together to agree on one thing: that something needs to be done about the environment and the impending disaster we are staring down. Those honest and open conversations are partly why I am so concerned that the Government have so far refused to publish in full the national security assessment. The public and Parliament deserve to see the full picture, especially on an issue with such significant implications for national security.

Over the summer I camped on the south coast, in Dorset, and it certainly felt and looked more like a scene out of Africa than the damp summer holidays I remember from my youth, but that is not something to celebrate. As the national emergency briefing makes clear, a halt to the gulf stream could lead to perishingly cold winters, as well as stifling summers. Elsewhere in the world, life itself may become intolerable, leading to many more climate refugees seeking to come to our shores.

The recent tragic events in Nepal resulting from climate-driven glacial collapse emphasise the consequences of inaction. We in the north, who invented the industrial revolution, which directly led to CO₂ increases in the atmosphere, have a duty to find and implement solutions for the future of human—and, indeed, all—life on this beautiful planet Earth. Those solutions should not be seen as costs, but instead as the best investments that we and the whole world can profit from.

15:51

[Barry Gardiner (Brent West) (Lab)]

Sir Desmond, imagine that the top brains in the country’s security and intelligence community produced a report that told you how to save the world. You would want to see it, right? Well, the report we are discussing is not about how to save the world; it is about what happens if we do not. It is a sober assessment of the risks that global biodiversity loss and the consequent ecosystem collapse pose to our human security.

That is why we were never meant to see the report: the previous Administration considered that it was just too alarming. Economic insecurity will become more likely. Migration will rise as development gains reverse. Serious organised crime will look to exploit and gain control over scarce resources. Pandemic risks will increase. Conflict and military escalation will become more likely. The nuclear threat will rise as clashes between nuclear powers become more frequent. Those are the cold assessments of the Joint Intelligence Committee.

The Government were right to think that those assessments might scare people—they scare me—but they were wrong to think that they could hide them from the public. They were even more wrong to fail to make the case by setting out to the public the incredibly good news about how we can avoid those risks and create a world that looks much better than the one we currently inhabit. The convention on biological diversity COP coming up in Yerevan will look at the 23 targets of the global biodiversity framework, which set out the pattern for what we can do to change all this. What happens if we actually achieve them? Our air is cleaner, our water is purer, our energy is cheaper, our health is better, our economy is richer and our world is safer. What’s not to like?

15:53

[Martin Wrigley (Newton Abbot) (LD)]

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairship, Sir Desmond. Like many Members, I have been inundated by constituents writing to me about this issue and explaining at great length their concerns about climate change and their fears for the future. The existential risk of ecosystem collapse and biodiversity loss at home and abroad is a common feature of those concerns.

Wildfires across Devon, as well as in Stourbridge, have caused a catastrophic loss of biodiversity. It is therefore no surprise that my constituents have told me that reading this biodiversity report has made them worry for the future. They fear what will happen to the world as a whole, and to our national security, if what is set out in the report is allowed to come true.

I have been consulting people across my constituency for many months to hear their concerns face to face, including by attending as many screenings as possible of the “People’s Emergency Briefing”, which I encourage the Minister to see. I also held a local climate assembly with my constituents, which was an important step in hearing how I can work with them to share their concerns, and how we can work together on long-term and sustainable solutions to biodiversity and ecosystem collapse, albeit only locally.

The report makes for very worrying reading. One constituent told me that the briefing went “far beyond” anything she had “feared for the future”, and that she was frightened by the real and imminent global risks that we face from climate change and biodiversity loss. Although the report is a worst-case scenario, about what could happen without action, the very suggestion that this is a possibility should worry us all.

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

We both live near the University of Exeter, and Professor Neil Adger has talked about the risks and limits of a securitisation framing of nature and biodiversity, and the idea that this is a global problem of our biosphere but not a national security problem. What does my hon. Friend think? Does he see this as a people’s emergency or a national emergency?

[Martin Wrigley]

I think that this is an emergency on every level: it is a local, regional, national, international and global emergency, which is happening in the climate and in biodiversity at the same time. That is why we need action now.

The report mentions making radical change to farmland usage, but farmers need Government support for that. I recently discussed the issue with a constituent who has great knowledge of sustainable farming initiatives. He proposed a joined-up approach, with farmers working together on a 1000-acre challenge to research and develop sustainable farmland programmes. That is the kind of initiative that we must be developing now, before it is too late, and I urge the Minister to work on it.

I hope the Minister will listen to the concerns that I and many other colleagues have raised today and take urgent action to protect our ecosystems and promote sustainability globally for years to come.

15:56

[Kerry McCarthy (Bristol East) (Lab)]

Following the heatwaves and wildfires across Europe this summer and the destruction caused by the glacier collapse and catastrophic flooding in Nepal and Tibet, the message is becoming impossible to ignore: the consequences of climate change and environmental degradation are real, not some distant future threat.

As the national security risk assessment says, climate change, biodiversity loss and ecosystem disruption pose risks not just for the environment but for our economy, security and way of life. Climate and nature shocks are arriving faster, harder and more systematically than many of our economic systems were designed to handle.

We see that in four main ways: physical risks, including floods, wildfires, droughts and storms; transition risks as economies move away from high-carbon industries; nature-related risks affecting food production and natural resources; and systemic risks, where shocks spread rapidly across sectors and markets.

For many years, conversations about green finance primarily focused on corporate social responsibility. Today, they are equally about resilience and risk management. The UK is well placed to lead on that, but I fear that we are not doing as much as we could be.

I am vice-chair of the all-party parliamentary group on Tibet. What is happening in the Himalayas and the Tibetan plateau is one of the clearest examples of climate risk unfolding today. The glaciers of the third pole function as Asia’s water tower, feeding major river systems that support nearly 2 billion people. When rising temperatures accelerate glacial melt, the consequences extend far beyond the mountains. This is not simply an environmental catastrophe; it is about infrastructure resilience, water and energy security, as well as economic stability across the entire region. It is entirely the kind of systemic risk that modern resilience finance should help countries to anticipate and manage.

I conclude by asking the Minister this: who will be attending COP17, and will we make sure we show leadership on global resilience there?

15:58

[Jim Shannon (Strangford) (DUP)]

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairship, Sir Desmond. I thank the hon. Member for Waveney Valley (Adrian Ramsay) for setting the scene.

We must not overlook the fact that nature security is national security. As a person of faith—as you are, Sir Desmond—I am guided by the profound principle of stewardship. We have a God-given responsibility to tend this Earth, protect creation and hand it down to our children—and, in my case, to my grandchildren.

The global statistics are eye-opening. We have seen a decline in monitored wildlife populations over the last 50 years. This is not just an issue for conservationists, but an existential threat to global stability that is unravelling the complex biological safety net that regulates our climate, purifies our water and pollinates our crops. Biodiversity loss accelerates climate breakdown, destroys agricultural land and creates resource scarcity. When water runs dry, crops fail in vulnerable regions and conflict inevitably follows.

In my constituency of Strangford, the hard-working farmers, fishing sector and conservationists support our rich biodiversity, which supports local economies and resilience. Right across Strangford we are seeing superb frontline stewardship work being done on the ground. We are adopting nature-friendly farming practices, and local conservation projects are working tirelessly to protect native species and restore vital peatlands, which act as crucial carbon sinks. We cannot allow environmental protections to become an unaffordable luxury or an undue tax burden on the very people keeping our communities afloat. 

I have one question for the Minister, who I wish well, by the way—she has quite an endurance test today. I urge her to outline how the Government are integrating nature risk into our strategic defence frameworks. We need a comprehensive national nature security assessment that backs the brilliant stewardship we see in Strangford while strictly safeguarding the financial resilience of our hard-pressed farmers.

16:00

[Sarah Dyke (Glastonbury and Somerton) (LD)]

It is an honour to serve with you in the Chair, Sir Desmond. I congratulate the hon. Member for Waveney Valley (Adrian Ramsay) on securing this important debate.

Disappointingly, this heavily abridged report did not reach the Chamber in Government time, and when it was finally released, the timing coincided with Davos, which dominated the headlines. That raises questions about how seriously this Government take the warning from their own report that nature is a foundation of national security and can no longer be treated in isolation from it.

[Olly Glover (Didcot and Wantage) (LD)]

My hon. Friend makes a very good point about the seriousness of this issue. Does she agree that a great way for the Government to show they understand that seriousness would be to publish the report in full and agree to a national broadcast and a national emergency briefing?

[Sarah Dyke]

I wholeheartedly agree. The report describes a collapse of interconnected natural systems reaching a point of no return—the loss of climate regulation destroying harvests in the world’s breadbasket regions, triggering famine, disease and mass migration, driving up food prices and poverty here in the UK. With 77% of land in England and Wales farmed or managed by farmers, and more than 800 farms in my constituency of Glastonbury and Somerton alone, we already know who would be best placed to lead our investment in long-term biodiversity resilience.

[Dr Scott Arthur (Edinburgh South West) (Lab)]

The hon. Lady makes a really good point. When I speak to farmers in Edinburgh South West, they often feel that they are the problem when it comes to protecting biodiversity; in fact, they are the solution. We should be doing all we can to support the Government to support farmers to help protect our environment.

[Sarah Dyke]

I absolutely agree, which brings me to my next point. As Martin Lines of the Nature Friendly Farming Network puts it, healthy soils and water functioning as good systems should be treated as critical national infrastructure. He argues for more spongy landscapes, healthier soils, wetlands, ponds and trees that hold water, buffering both drought and flooding, while still supporting food production.

With DEFRA budget cuts slashing the farming budget by more than £100 million and uncertainty over future support systems, many are disincentivised from the environmental role that their own survival depends on. We know that nature-friendly farming can bring real ecological improvement.

The Lang Partnership in Curry Rivel has proudly championed regenerative and nature-friendly farming methods for more than 30 years, showing what is possible when farmers are committed to working with nature rather than against it, but this needs widespread adaption and adoption to work.

The environmental land management scheme should be a vital road map to a resilient farming sector, but there has been a lack of investment in higher-tier schemes that will deliver the best outcomes for nature. That is why the Liberal Democrats would invest an additional £1 billion—a cash injection—into the farming budget, properly phased to target where it helps nature the most and to help farmers to boost food security, rather than allowing them to fall through the gaps.

[Terry Jermy (South West Norfolk) (Lab)]

There are a number of rare and unique landscapes across the country, such as the Brecks in my own constituency. Does the hon. Lady support calls for increased funding for specific landscapes impacted by climate change and biodiversity loss?

[Sarah Dyke]

I agree with my hon. Friend—I call him that as he sits on the Environment, Food and Rural Affairs Committee with me.

This summer’s drought has put farmers under severe financial pressure. A potato farmer in my constituency, James Pullen of Perrins Hill Farm in Tintinhull, told me that he expects to be £200,000 down on his potato sales this year. In a good year, his crop averages around 25 tonnes to the acre, but this year it will be closer to 20 tonnes, with potatoes badly bruised or simply failing to grow.

I am grateful for the recently announced drought support for farmers, but we need real action that prevents ecosystem collapse and the heightened risk that that poses for our food security. We also need investment to hold water on farm reservoirs and fire ponds—nature-based solutions to water scarcity that will irrigate the land during prolonged drought and help communities to battle wildfires. However, farm reservoirs are not being built quickly enough to meet demand, as they are being held back by abstraction licences, planning permission, cost implications, uncertain grants and limited contractor availability.

[Jessica Toale (Bournemouth West) (Lab)]

Will the hon. Lady give way?

[Sarah Dyke]

I will not, if the hon. Lady does not mind, because I have quite a lot to get through.

I recently visited Wessex Water’s constructed wetland at Shapwick Heath in the constituency of my hon. Friend the Member for Wells and Mendip Hills (Tessa Munt). At 21 hectares, it is the largest water treatment wetland of its kind in the UK, filtering forever chemicals, phosphates and microplastics from our water, while boosting flood resilience and supporting Somerset’s biodiversity. Wessex Water is currently upgrading its sewage treatment plant, which will remove 170 tonnes of phosphates over the next 10 years. To put that into context, the 18,000 homes across Somerset that are currently stuck in a planning moratorium due to the nutrient neutrality regulations would produce only 3 tonnes of phosphate. That clearly demonstrates what nature-based solutions can bring to the future of water management and nutrient neutrality.

Somerset is increasingly exposed to devastating flooding that impacts farmers and homeowners alike. I was really happy to secure £50 million of flood defence funding for Somerset earlier this year, and I welcome Somerset council agreeing to ringfence some of those funds to target nature-based solutions that work in conjunction with hard engineering river maintenance across high-risk catchments, restoring natural hydrology upstream while protecting communities and infrastructure downstream. I am also pleased that a major element of the programme will be the council’s “My Community” programme, empowering local communities with bespoke, bureaucracy-cutting support and creating shared action on the ground.

Peatlands like those in the Somerset levels and moors provide vital species habitats, flood alleviation and water filtration, yet across the UK over 80% of peatlands are damaged. Somerset is one of only two counties still extracting peat, with licences to 2042 despite the levels and moors storing an estimated 11 million tonnes of carbon, which is equivalent to 10 years of the county’s emission. My Horticultural Peat (Prohibition of Sale) Bill sought to end the sale of peat, building on local efforts that are already under way, with companies such as Durstons near Street and RocketGro growing peat-free compost ranges. I congratulate the Minister on her new role, but I would be grateful for clarity on peat issues. Will there be a dedicated funding scheme for peatland restoration once the nature for climate peatland grant scheme ends next year? Will she go further and provide a timeline on when the Government will seek to end the sale of horticultural peat?

Habitat destruction also impacts insect life. For example, the shrill carder bee, which is one of the UK’s rarest bumblebees, has retreated from its historic stronghold on the Somerset levels and moors to a depleting population around Somerton, Castle Cary and Ham Hill. Its numbers have collapsed from around 140 in 2015 to just seven in 2022. Only five of 22 biodiversity indicators show long-term improvement, and 13 are still deteriorating. Does the Minister accept that the Government’s current approach is failing to meet their own Environment Act targets? What new action will change that trajectory?

Central to this failure to protect habitats is planning policy. The Government must adopt a strategic spatial approach to planning that protects the UK’s most important places for nature, which would support, not undermine, environmental regulation and champion nature-friendly design in house building and infrastructure from the outset. That is why the Liberal Democrats opposed and voted against Labour’s Planning and Infrastructure Act 2025.

If the Government are expecting 75,000 of their 1.5 million homes target to be delivered in Somerset, they must be fit for the future. I visited Bradfords Building Supplies in Glastonbury recently to discuss exactly this: how we make homes resilient to a changing climate, and how we prepare for extreme heat in summer and flooding in winter, including by making sustainable drainage systems mandatory in new developments. We cannot keep building homes for yesterday’s climate; Government planning policy needs to catch up.

[Julia Buckley (Shrewsbury) (Lab)]

Will the hon. Lady give way?

[Sarah Dyke]

I will not, just because of time.

We are also calling for the loopholes in the biodiversity net gain system to be closed, for the extension of how long a net gain habitat must be maintained from 30 years to 120 years, and for raising the requirement for major developments on larger greenfield sites from 10% to 100%. The case could not be starker. The Green Finance Institute puts the potential economic hit from nature degradation at the equivalent of 12% of GDP. That is more than twice the impact of the 2008 financial crash.

To conclude, this report was published in January. Half a year on, we have already seen the devastation that this year’s climate crisis has brought to the UK. Will the Minister confirm whether DEFRA and the Joint Intelligence Committee will reclassify the food security risk as high, publish the full assessment as originally intended, and act with the urgency it deserves, including through an annual climate and nature statement to Parliament?

16:10

[Dr Neil Hudson (Epping Forest) (Con)]

It is a great pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Sir Desmond. I congratulate the hon. Member for Waveney Valley (Adrian Ramsay) on bringing forward this important debate, and I welcome the Minister to her place. I would normally go through some of the powerful contributions we have had today, but it would take all my allocated time to namecheck everyone’s constituencies. Basically, the take-home message has been the importance of protecting our precious planet from the existential threats that we face from climate change.

Protecting biodiversity and ecosystems is very close to our hearts and the hearts of our constituents, and it is crucial to national security. As the MP for Epping Forest, I am privileged to see and experience the many benefits of biodiversity in our ancient woodland and beyond. As the heart and lungs of north-east London and our part of Essex, Epping Forest hosts 55,000 ancient and veteran trees and is home to 10 bat species, nine native reptile and amphibian species, over 15,000 fungal species and 28 butterfly species. I want the flora and fauna of Epping Forest and more widely to flourish and thrive, yet water security, air quality and climate change—to name just three risks—threaten biodiversity and ecosystems domestically and globally. That is why the report we are debating today is an important wake-up call.

The last Conservative Government’s Environment Act 2021 established legally binding targets, including to increase species abundance, so that by 2042 it is greater than 2022 and at least 10% greater than 2032, and to restore or create more than 500,000 hectares of wildlife-rich habitats outside protected sites by 2050. Our Conservative environment improvement plan built on that Act, committing to protect 30% of our land and our sea by 2030. Supporting the COP15 global target, we agreed to protect 30% of global land and global ocean.

The security assessment we are debating, published by the current Government in January this year, outlined the immense risk that biodiversity loss and ecological degradation is having and will continue to have unless we take action. It was disappointing that it took an FOI request from the Green Alliance for the Government to publish the report in this abridged form. It is clearly something that the Government do not want us to see in full. Will the Minister say what the Government’s plans are for letting us see it in full?

Turning to what was published, the report looks at global factors, such as food supply chains, but it is important that the Government’s approach to supporting biodiversity and ecosystems is not siloed between action abroad and action domestically, but is instead a joint approach. International action to address biodiversity must not solely sit within the Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office, but must be co-ordinated with DEFRA and tie into the UK’s domestic agenda to boost supply chains and ecosystems here.

The report identified biodiversity loss and ecosystem collapse as a national security threat. We must all keep that at the forefront of our minds. This debate considers national security and keeping the UK—our families, homes and livelihoods—safe. National security should always be the first and foremost duty of any Government. One of the reasons the threats identified in the report are different from some other national security threats is the unpredictable behaviour of some natural events, such as the extreme weather events we are seeing both in the UK and globally—we have heard that point powerfully articulated today.

In the UK this summer, we have experienced one of the worst droughts in history. Over two-thirds of England —approximately 71%—was in drought following the driest July since 1836. In my constituency, the extreme heat facing the rest of the country was made worse by thousands of my constituents being left without running water this summer for about a week due to unacceptable Thames Water outages for several days. They faced hours of long queues for bottled water or waited anxiously for priority service delivery, with little certainty that they would receive any at all. With warmer summers expected as the norm, I would appreciate it if the Minister assured mine and everyone’s constituents that the Government are taking steps to ensure that they are integrating planning for warm weather into the very heart of our water industry’s operations, so that our constituents are not left exposed in such a vulnerable position in future.

The Government should also be supporting farmers to adapt to the impact of climate change, biodiversity loss and increasing market volatility. Sadly, the Government have voted for the family farm tax and the fertiliser tax. That is very pertinent to today’s debate, with the report touching on UK fertiliser resilience. There is also the double-cab pick-up tax and increased national insurance contributions for employers. All those actions have not only caused serious economic and cash-flow problems for farmers; they have also damaged job opportunities for young people coming into agriculture.

Why is this so important? Our fantastic farmers are custodians of approximately 70% of the UK’s land. Failing to support farmers is failing to support nature and biodiversity in the UK, which is both unforgivable and incredibly short-sighted. Farmers are pivotal to UK food security. The report says:

“Without significant increases in UK food system and supply chain resilience, it is unlikely the UK would be able to maintain food security if ecosystem collapse drives geopolitical competition for food.”

Therefore, once again, and in a sadly recurring theme, when this current Government should be supporting our family farms to help feed the nation and bolster our food security, there has been a record number of farm closures.

Sadly, when it comes to biosecurity, which is intrinsically linked to our food security, yet again the current Government have been slow throughout their tenure. I needed to ask 17 times in Parliament before they provided anything close to the money needed to complete the rebuild of the Animal and Plant Health Agency’s headquarters. They also continue to preside over an illegal meat import crisis at our borders.

In the last couple of years, Europe has seen foot and mouth disease, and African swine fever is also advancing up the continent. As we have heard in this debate and this morning’s statement, bluetongue virus is surging in the UK and poses a specific threat in the context of climate change. The virus is rapidly multiplying in the midge vector, the range of which is advancing northwards. Leaving us exposed to those threats is reckless.

The report we are debating is a much-needed wake-up call to the Government, who sadly seem to be asleep at the wheel. A report of this kind should have prompted an immediate response, yet we have seen in DEFRA that this Government do not seem to move with speed. That must change.

I look forward to hearing the Minister’s response to the points made today. However, more than anything, I would like a guarantee that there will be co-ordination across Government to bolster ecosystems internationally and in the UK. DEFRA must play a leading role in this work. I really hope that the Prime Minister was misspeaking in his comment yesterday about how he rates DEFRA among Government Departments. DEFRA should be at the heart of Government in protecting and feeding our country and looking after our precious environment. I would appreciate it if the Minister could confirm that.

Co-ordinated policy also needs us to be using every tool at our disposal. I urge the Government to recognise the important role that zoos play in conservation, as we also heard from the hon. Member for Chester North and Neston (Samantha Dixon). Zoos such as Chester and London, through species reintroduction and habitat restoration, do so much to help fight species decline. They need to be used to our full advantage to meet biodiversity targets.

In conclusion, when ecosystem degradation is occurring across all regions of the globe and, as the report states, the world could be on a path towards

“geopolitical instability, economic insecurity, conflict, migration and increased inter-state competition for resources”

the Government must not stand and sit idle. I ask them to act.

16:18

[The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Jenny Riddell-Carpenter)]

I congratulate my constituency neighbour, the hon. Member for Waveney Valley (Adrian Ramsay) on securing this incredibly important debate. I also thank hon. Members for their powerful and thoughtful contributions. I am very aware that many did not get the time to make the contributions that they would have liked to make. In the interests of time, I will not be taking interventions, but I am more than happy for Members to write to me after the debate and I will get back to them in writing.

I will start by addressing the point made by the hon. Member for Waveney Valley about the status of the assessment and the material behind it, and I know that issue has been raised by a number of Members from across the House. As my predecessor, my hon. Friend the Member for Coventry East (Mary Creagh), outlined in some detail to the hon. Member for Waveney Valley in a session of the Environmental Audit Committee in July, it is standard and given practice that the Government do not comment on speculation about different drafts or versions. That position has not changed as I stand here today, nor will it likely change tomorrow. With that in mind, it is far more important that I focus my response on the critical themes raised in the debate.

Publishing the assessment was clearly vital, so that Parliament, the public and our international partners can see its core findings. Those findings are clear: biodiversity loss and ecosystem degradation pose a real risk to security, resilience and prosperity. We cannot, and this Government will not, shy away from the real challenges that creates. Climate change is one of the biggest challenges of our time, and this Government are the first to lead this country with both a Climate Minister and a Nature Minister. That reflects how seriously this Government take climate change and nature security.

I have long said that net zero and nature are two sides of the same coin when it comes to tackling climate change. The assessment highlights the critical role that nature plays in our ability to tackle the climate crisis. Of course, we cannot fight this greatest challenge alone, and many hon. Members raised that point. Climate change and nature do not abide by rules or borders. Working to implement the advice raised through the assessment requires leadership at home and abroad, working with our international partners to strengthen food security, biosecurity, global supply chain resilience and international co-operation.

As many hon. Members highlighted, the findings of the assessment are stark. Global ecosystem degradation and collapse threaten UK national security and prosperity. That is not an environmental issue alone; it is a systemic risk to the UK’s resilience and long-term security, as many hon. Members articulated. The UK’s food security and economic resilience depend on healthy ecosystems at home and overseas. Nearly 40% of our food is imported, and for as long as we continue to enjoy bananas, rice, kiwis and avocados, we will never realistically be able to rely on domestic food production alone. That means we are at heightened risk of environmental pressures overseas disrupting our supply chains, increasing prices and reducing resilience in the UK.

That is not an isolated finding. The World Economic Forum’s “Global Risks Report 2026” identified extreme weather as the most severe global risk over the next decade, with environmental risks accounting for five of the 10 highest-ranked long-term risks. The nature security assessment suggests that domestic nature-related risk could reduce UK GDP by around 6% by the 2030s, with a further 6% reduction arising from international risks transmitted through global supply chains in some scenarios. The conclusion of our assessment is extraordinarily clear and should leave no one in any doubt: nature security is national security, and nature stability is global stability.

Responsible Governments identify emerging risks early, strengthen preparedness and build resilience before shocks occur. This Government are determined to rise to that responsibility. Other political parties may tell people simply to sit back and enjoy a rapidly changing climate, as we heard over the summer from Reform. However, we will not give up on tackling these threats head-on or put our head in the sand, as others in Opposition sadly seem determined to do.

It is important to stress that the assessment is neither a forecast nor a prediction. It is a forward-looking assessment designed to help the Government to plan for potential shocks, such as disruption to food systems, supply chains and economic stability, that are credible enough to warrant preparation. Its purpose is to help us to anticipate those risks, test our resilience and take appropriate action. That is exactly what the assessment does: it looks around corners rather than relying on the rear-view mirror. It is worth stressing that, via the assessment, the UK is doing something important that other countries are not. By creating, publishing and debating the assessment, we are a global frontrunner in discussing nature security.

Our assessment is the first published national security assessment of its kind in the world. After we published it, the UK’s presentations at the OECD resulted in several global partners using our approach to understand and consider how ecosystem-related risks affect their own resilience and national security. Later this month, the Foreign Secretary will bring Foreign Ministers together at the United Nations to discuss how to respond to climate and nature security threats. The assessment will provide an important evidence base for those conversations.

I recognise that this is a critical juncture for nature. We will continue to use upcoming international opportunities to make the case that protecting nature and tackling climate change must go hand in hand, because healthy ecosystems underpin resilience, security and prosperity.

Turning to this Government’s response, we have launched the first ever taskforce on the national security and resilience risks of a changing climate and nature loss, bringing together leading security, military and academic experts to help us to identify and prioritise risks, strengthen cross-Government co-ordination and turn evidence into practical action. The taskforce, launched in June this year, provides independent challenge and recommendations to ensure that climate and nature risks are considered more systemically across national security and resilience planning.

Separately, we have commissioned a three-year nature security research and development programme to improve indicators, early warning capability and analytical tools. That will help the Government to identify emerging risks earlier, stress-test resilience and take preventive action before disruption escalates.

A number of hon. Members on both sides of the House spoke about the importance of the food sector to national security and the functioning of the UK, which the Government have recognised by designating it as critical national infrastructure. DEFRA works closely with the Cabinet Office and other Government Departments to strengthen preparedness and resilience across the food system and supply chains. We are also investing more than £2.7 billion a year in farming and nature recovery, supporting resilient domestic food production, healthier soils, pollinators and nature-friendly farming.

The nature security assessment makes it clear that severe ecosystem degradation can contribute to the emergence of novel zoonotic diseases. We are acting to bring down the risks that that poses, strengthening resilience to those risks through the UK biological security strategy, enhanced disease surveillance and a one-health approach that recognises the links between environmental, animal and human health. That improves our ability to identify, assess and respond to emerging biological threats.

This Government are also addressing nature-related risks at source through the international climate finance programme. Climate markets and green finance were mentioned by several hon. Members during the debate. The UK’s international climate finance strategy places nature at its core, investing in the protection and restoration of forests, oceans, freshwater and other critical ecosystems that support global stability.

It was mentioned right at the beginning, but I am delighted to confirm that today the Government have announced that they intend to invest £400 million in the Tropical Forest Forever facility. The TFFF represents a critical evolution in forest finance, providing long-term support for tropical forest protection. I am sure hon. Members recognise that investing in forests is one of the most effective ways to tackle the climate and nature crisis and to support UK growth and security.

As hon. Members across the House have acknowledged, the nature security assessment has made it clear that nature loss can impact food security, water security, economic resilience and national security. We are taking those findings seriously. There is no single Department that can address them alone, and that is why we are working across Government to ensure a co-ordinated response. These are global challenges, but they are being felt close to home. The recent wildfire at Dunwich Heath in Suffolk was in my constituency, and it was a stark reminder to me that the environmental risks are no longer distant or abstract, and that we must build resilience here in the UK as well as overseas.

We have restored nearly 23,000 hectares of peatland since 2020 to store carbon. I was delighted to visit my hon. Friend the Member for Derbyshire Dales (John Whitby) recently to look at the work that the UK is doing to restore and invest in our peatlands. That work plays a vital role not just in managing and restoring nature but in helping to tackle the threat of wildfires. Such work, which is in addition to supporting farmers through nature-friendly farming schemes and delivering our environmental improvement plans, means we are taking practical action at home alongside our international efforts abroad.

I again thank the hon. Member for Waveney Valley for securing this important debate and the continued interest of the House in this agenda.

Question put and agreed to. 

Resolved,

That this House has considered the nature security assessment on global biodiversity loss, ecosystem collapse and national security, published in January 2026.

16:29

Sitting adjourned.