Making Britain the Best Place to Grow Up and Grow Old

Baroness Winterton of Doncaster Excerpts

Monday 16th May 2022 Commons Chamber

[Mary Robinson (Cheadle) (Con)]

Safety is at the heart of what so many parents think of when they send their child into these settings, and I welcome the family help. Last week a child died in a nursery in my constituency, and I send my heartfelt condolences to the family. It must be a heartbreaking time. Ten years ago two other constituents lost their child, Millie, in a nursery. Dan and Joanne Thompson set up Millie’s Trust in her name, and now Millie’s Mark accredits staff in nurseries who have paediatric first aid training. Does my right hon. Friend agree that safety in nurseries and other childcare settings is vital and that paediatric first aid is vital so that members of staff know how to deal with these emergencies? Would he join me in—

[Madam Deputy Speaker (Dame Rosie Winterton)]

Order. A lot of speakers are trying to get into this debate, so interventions need to be very brief.

[Nadhim Zahawi]

I absolutely agree with my hon. Friend on Millie’s Mark, and of course child safety in nurseries is vital and non-negotiable. I am grateful to her for bringing that accreditation to the House’s attention.

As I was saying, where families need additional help we have expanded the Supporting Families programme so that those 300,000 families with more complex needs can work with a key worker to help to resolve problems.

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[Several hon. Members rose—]

[Madam Deputy Speaker (Dame Rosie Winterton)]

Before I call the shadow Secretary of State, it will be obvious that a large number of Members wish to participate in the debate. I will not impose a time limit at the start, but I expect Members to speak for a maximum of five minutes.

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

The hon. Lady has made two points in the last few minutes about school funding for buildings and about children from private schools. May I address both? Does the hon. Lady welcome the more than £1 million given to Carre’s Grammar School in Sleaford to improve the school buildings and facilities? I went to a comprehensive school in Middlesbrough until I was 16. Just before I was 16 I was on a walk in the hills when I met somebody who went to Gordonstoun, a brilliant public school. They gave me, an ordinary working-class girl from Middlesbrough, a scholarship, for which I am eternally grateful. Were I to have applied for Oxford University, should I have been penalised for that scholarship?

[Madam Deputy Speaker (Dame Rosie Winterton)]

I emphasise that interventions should be brief.

[Bridget Phillipson]

I am afraid that I did not catch most of that intervention—it was a bit hard to hear the hon. Lady—but I repeat that the last Labour Government rebuilt schools across our country. That has not been the record of the last 12 years.

The next Labour Government will build a Britain where children come first, where we put children and growing up at the heart of how we think about the future of our country, where Britain is the best place to grow up and the best place to grow old, and where young people leave education ready for work and ready for life.

[Bridget Phillipson]

My hon. Friend is absolutely right. The last Labour Government transformed the life chances of a generation, and it will fall to the next Labour Government to do the same. Because, in a country where we think about children as both a society and an economy of the future, we build a better Britain for everyone: a Britain of children and families where the Government work to enable and empower success and, in particular, a Britain in which the Government see the soaring cost of childcare not as a statistic to be observed but a problem to be solved. That cost is crippling: families suffer financially; children suffer socially, and our country suffers economically. When the cost of childcare, not just for our two to four-year-olds, but the whole time from the end of maternity leave to the start of secondary school—from ensuring that parents can choose, and afford, to go back to work, to affordable breakfast clubs and afterschool activities so that parents do not always need to be at the school gate—is quite literally pricing people out of parenting, children and families are being failed.

That failure is not just about the individual children and families whom the Government fail, though there are millions of them and that is bad enough; our whole country is failed when we let our children down. It is not just childcare. We see it too in the Government’s failure to face up to the damage that their mishandling of the pandemic did to the education of a generation. The Secretary of State’s failure to convince the Chancellor to invest properly in children’s recovery from the pandemic; his failure at the last spending round in the autumn; his failure in the spring statement, and his failure now—that series of failures—above all he does or says now or in the future, is what he will be remembered for. The Prime Minister’s own adviser had the dignity to resign rather than accept such failure, and Labour would have been very different from the Government.

We have a plan where the Government have failure. On the very day that schools and nurseries closed to most children in March 2020, a Labour Government would have started work on three plans: an immediate plan to support children’s learning and development remotely and as fully as possible while lockdown went on; an urgent plan to reopen schools safely and quickly, and then to keep them open so children could learn together and play together; and, critically, a plan to ensure that when lockdown ended, children’s education and wellbeing did not suffer in the long run. Our children’s recovery plan put children and their futures at the heart of how we think about moving on from the pandemic because, after all, every child in Britain did more to follow the covid rules than our Prime Minister. The impact that had on their health and educational attainment needs addressing, not ignoring.

We would introduce breakfast clubs so that every child starts their day with a proper meal; afterschool activities, so that every child gets to learn and experience art, music, drama and sport; mental health support because every report that we see tells us that children’s development has fallen behind in the pandemic; continued professional development for our teachers because every child deserves teachers second to none in support of their learning; and targeted extra investment right from the early years through to further education, to support the children at risk of falling behind, because attainment gaps open up early and need tackling early.

We would go further to lock in the gains of a recovery programme for the long term, with a national excellence programme to drive up standards in schools, because every child deserves to go to a school with high expectations and high achievements. There would be thousands upon thousands of new teachers in subjects that have shortages right now, because every child deserves to be taught maths and physics by people who love their subject and to be introduced to a love of sport, music, art and drama; a skills commission, because every young person needs to leave education ready for work and ready for life; careers guidance in every school and work experience for every child, because each of us deserves to succeed at work, and Labour believes that the Government have a role to play in making that happen; and a curriculum in which we teach our children not just the past that they will inherit, but the future they will build, and in which they learn about the challenge of net zero and the climate emergency that we face.

It is precisely because we have a plan that we would enable our education system to deliver it. It is why we want an approach to how our schools are run that focuses on how children achieve and thrive, not the name on the uniform or the hours that they are there. It is why we have a determination to see childcare not as a passing, costly phase in the lives of others, but as the foundation of opportunity in the lives of every child and every parent.

As our children grow and as they interact more and more with my party’s proudest achievement to date, the national health service, it is sadly not the case that their experience of this Government’s record on public services improves. With health, as with education, there was a decade of failure even before the pandemic began. The national health service did not go into the pandemic strong, well-resourced and resilient. No, the NHS went into the pandemic with record waiting lists, 100,000 vacancies and 17,000 fewer beds than in 2010. As my hon. Friend the Member for Ilford North (Wes Streeting) has rightly said:

“It is not just that the Government did not fix the roof while the sun was shining; they dismantled the roof and removed the floorboards.”—[Official Report, 14 December 2021; Vol. 705, c. 954.]

Last autumn, the Government announced that they would raise tax to fund clearing the backlog and improving social care. The tax rise is happening during a cost of living crisis, sure enough, but it is not clear how they will manage the rest. That is why today, in our health service as in childcare, we are paying more but getting less. The Government are raising taxes on working people in the middle of a cost of living crisis, yet patients are expected to wait longer for care.

Conservative Members would do well to remember that NHS waiting lists are at a record 6 million. Ministers cannot blame the pandemic, because the figure was already at over 4 million before covid struck. Let us think of those millions of people waiting—waiting longer than ever before, often waiting in pain and discomfort, waiting while working or trying to find work, waiting while walking their children to school, waiting while trying to find somewhere affordable to live, waiting while looking after their grandchildren. They are waiting at a cost to themselves, of course, but at an astronomical cost to our country that is not just financial, but economic and social. They are waiting for their Government to give our public services the priority they deserve.

Mental health services are on the brink of collapse. In 12 years of Conservative Governments, a quarter of mental health beds have been cut, and right now 1.6 million people are waiting for mental health treatment. How on earth can any Minister defend that record? The Government’s approach to social care is up there with their failure on childcare: it is not fair, and it will not work. The less people have, the more they will take. Those with homes worth £150,000 will lose almost everything, while the wealthiest are protected.

It does not need to be this way. Labour will build an NHS fit for the future and get patients seen on time. We will provide the NHS with the staff, equipment and modern technology required so that the NHS is there for people when they need it. We will fix social care so that those in need do not go without. Our new deal for care workers will provide fair pay and secure contracts to plug the more than 100,000 vacancies in social care. We will transform training to improve standards of care. Across our public services, Labour will build a better Britain. We have done it before; we will do it again.

I remember a previous Conservative Government who cared little for the challenges that my family faced—a Government keener on judging my family than on supporting it. Then I saw, growing up and as a young woman, the difference that an incoming Labour Government made. I saw a Government who acted decisively to tackle disadvantage, cut child poverty and support families and children. A generation grew up with Sure Start and with children’s centres. A generation like me were supported after 16 with the education maintenance allowance and a level of investment in our NHS unmatched in history, with waiting lists driven down from months and years to days and weeks. I saw then, in my own community, the difference those changes made, and I still see it now in the better lives of young people who grew up with that advantage and the support it unlocked.

For 12 long years, Conservative Ministers have failed a generation of our children. Labour in power will be different, because we see Britain as its people—our children, our families, our future—and we will never swerve from making this country the best place to grow up and the best place to grow old.

[Madam Deputy Speaker (Dame Rosie Winterton)]

Nominations closed at 5 o’clock this afternoon for candidates for the post of Chair of the Backbench Business Committee. One nomination has been received. A ballot will therefore not be held. I congratulate Ian Mearns on his re-election as Chair of the Backbench Business Committee. [Hon. Members: “Hear, hear.”]

I remind hon. and right hon. Members of my stricture about sticking to five minutes, at least for the opening contributions from the Back Benches.

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[Mr Whittingdale]

No, if the hon. Gentleman will forgive me, as I am under a lot of pressure to keep this short.

The second Bill is the media Bill, which is vital for the future of public service broadcasting in this country. A lot of attention will be given to the provisions on Channel 4, which I welcome, although it is important that we debate those and discuss the model that Channel 4 should operate in future. The Bill contains other important provisions. The prominence of public service broadcasters has been argued for by ITV, Channel 4 and the BBC for many years, and it is essential if we are to protect public service broadcasters and ensure that they are visible in a world where competing channels are increasing in number almost every week.

In support of commercial public service broadcasters, I welcome the absence from the Queen’s Speech of a Bill to introduce advertising bans for HFSS—high in fat, salt or sugar—foods before 9 pm. I support the Government’s wish to reduce obesity, but I firmly believe that an advertising ban would have no effect on that and, at the same time, would massively affect commercial broadcasters.

I regret the absence from the Bill of provisions for radio prominence. This was an important part of the outcome of the digital radio and audio review. The Government accepted the recommendations from that but they seem to have dropped out of the Bill. I hope that we might try to correct that during its passage.

I look forward to the inclusion in the Bill of the repeal of section 40 of the Crime and Courts Act 2013, which is a sword of Damocles hanging over a free press allowing a future Government to impose punitive costs unless they sign up to the Government’s version of regulation. The removal of that was in the Conservative manifesto and I very much hope that we will fulfil that manifesto commitment in that Bill.

The third Bill is the digital markets and competition Bill, which, if anything, is even more important to the freedom of the press. At the moment, the press are at a disadvantage in their negotiations with the big platforms such as Facebook and Google, which take their content and decide how much, if anything, they are going to pay for it. The digital markets unit is being established to address that, but it needs to be put on a statutory basis; it needs to be underpinned by law. I therefore welcome the provision in the Queen’s Speech for a draft Bill but hope the Government will move forward to implement that legislation as soon as possible.

Finally, I turn to a Bill I again played some role in: the data Bill. One of the great opportunities from Britain taking back control of its own laws is our ability to write our own data protection laws. Of course we want to ensure that people’s privacy is protected, but at the same time the existing rules have acted as a disincentive. They are overburdensome and not properly understood by large numbers of small firms in particular. This is a real opportunity to have a modern data protection regime which others across the world will admire and follow.

On that basis, I am delighted to support the Queen’s Speech.

[Madam Deputy Speaker (Dame Rosie Winterton)]

I call SNP spokesperson Carol Monaghan.

[Carol Monaghan (Glasgow North West) (SNP)]

In this Queen’s Speech, I would have expected to see some radical interventions that are urgently needed to tackle the cost of living crisis, to tackle climate change and to properly support our elderly community, including elderly veterans, but there is a real lack of ambition in the speech, and this Government have done the absolute opposite of making Britain the best place to grow up and grow old. While they have lined the pockets of their cronies, they have limited the opportunities of young people. They have caused and then ignored the cost of living crisis, which has left many children and elderly without enough to get by, and delayed action on climate change, which arguably will have the biggest impact on our younger generations.

For us in Scotland, this is a tale of two Governments. The Scottish Government are determined to make Scotland the best place in the world to grow up and grow old, regardless of household income or social demographic, but only as an independent nation will Scotland have the levers, the decision-making powers and the full fiscal autonomy to see that ambition fully realised. [Interruption.] There is heckling from those on the Government Benches. I would have thought that the results of the elections two weeks ago would have shown them something—perhaps they would have learned some lessons. People in Scotland more and more are waking up to this.

Let us compare the two Governments. A woman in Scotland who is expecting a child is given a baby box filled with essentials for her baby—clothes, books, teething toys, blankets. The message is clear: your baby is important, your baby is valued and your baby is welcomed. At the same time as the baby box was introduced in Scotland, the UK Government introduced a two-child limit on child tax credit and universal credit. It is apparently okay to have up to two children. Beyond that if you are a low-income household your baby is neither welcomed nor valued by this Tory Government.

The British Pregnancy Advisory Service said that over half the women it surveyed who had an abortion in the coronavirus pandemic and knew of the two-child limit said that that policy was important in their decision-making around whether to continue the pregnancy. That is pretty damning evidence. It is no surprise that, since 2016—since mothers have been expecting babies who would be born after that policy came into force—there has been a sharp increase in the number of abortions. Women are choosing abortions because they cannot afford to have a baby. The best place to grow up?

In Scotland, the Scottish Government have introduced the Scottish child payment—£20 a week for every eligible child and that will be rising to £25 a week—and that is mitigating some of the worst impacts for families. Frankly, the progressive policies of the Scottish Government must be matched with similar interventions from Westminster.

Last week, we were treated to the comments of the hon. Member for Ashfield (Lee Anderson), who said that people were only using food banks because “they cannot budget” and

“cannot cook a meal from scratch.”—[Official Report, 11 May 2022; Vol. 714, c. 185.]

Today, Gareth Mason, head chef at Absolute Bar & Bistro in Westhoughton, has said that the hon. Member’s comments were “tone deaf” and “insulting”. He has set about proving this by cooking seven everyday meals, such as spaghetti Napoli, beans on toast, baked potato—

[Madam Deputy Speaker (Dame Rosie Winterton)]

Order. Can I just check that the hon. Lady has informed the hon. Gentleman that she was going to refer to him? That is perhaps just a reminder that that is what she would do.

[Carol Monaghan]

Madam Deputy Speaker, I have not. I was not making a point of order; I was referring to something that was said in a debate and has been said in the press.

The chef, Gareth Mason, said:

“I’ve come to the conclusion it’s a load of rubbish. These meals I’ve done, as soon as you put any protein or dairy into them, it’s not feasible to do it for 30p. If you eat beans on toast for every meal, it might work, but even if you did cheese on toast, the cost of cheese would be more than 30p on its own”,

and that is before considering the cooking cost of the food.

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[Wes Streeting (Ilford North) (Lab)]

This has been an excellent and wide-ranging debate. It is a pleasure to follow the hon. Member for East Kilbride, Strathaven and Lesmahagow (Dr Cameron), and I say to my hon. Friend the Member for St Helens South and Whiston (Ms Rimmer) that it was well worth the wait to hear her speech on the importance of rebalancing health and social care to help us tackle the pressures on the NHS.

We have heard some fantastic speeches, disproportion-ately from the Opposition side of the House, I might say. My hon. Friend the Member for Washington and Sunderland West (Mrs Hodgson) highlighted the increasingly poor outcomes for pupils with special educational needs and disabilities, and in particular the terrible injustice of the growing inequality between those who can pay for a diagnosis and those who cannot. My hon. Friends the Members for Birmingham, Selly Oak (Steve McCabe) and for Brentford and Isleworth (Ruth Cadbury) made wide-ranging, powerful speeches on this Government’s failure on education catch-up, school buildings, Sure Start and so many of the pillars of educational success built by the last Labour Government and now sadly eroded under the last 12 years of Conservative Government. My hon. Friend the Member for Lancaster and Fleetwood (Cat Smith) highlighted the link between mental health and educational outcome and the importance of prioritising mental health for children and young people.

My hon. Friends the Members for Bradford South (Judith Cummins), for Ellesmere Port and Neston (Justin Madders) and for Cambridge (Daniel Zeichner) all got their teeth into the crisis in dentistry; not for the first time, my hon. Friend the Member for Bradford South has sounded the alarm, but maybe the Secretary of State will listen to those alarms this time—if not to my bad puns.

My hon. Friend the Member for City of Chester (Christian Matheson) gave a tub-thumping speech rightly asking where the employment Bill is and the promised employment rights that have failed to materialise. He also made a powerful argument for a full ban on conversion therapy. If this is to be the best place in the world for children to grow up, it is absolutely right that we ban that abhorrent practice; it is not therapy in the slightest. I pay particular tribute to the hon. Members for Bishop Auckland (Dehenna Davison) and for Birmingham, Northfield (Gary Sambrook), who highlighted the importance of this being an LGBT conversion therapy ban, and applaud them for making that case from the Government Benches. As the hon. Member for Birmingham, Northfield rightly said in what was a very entertaining speech, today this country has already become that little bit better as a place to grow up, thanks to the courage of Jake Daniels in becoming the first male footballer to come out since 1990. It really should not take courage in this day and age for a footballer to say that they are gay; in fact, it really should not be relevant at all, but sadly we know that it is. He has made himself a powerful role model and, I hope, an example that others will follow.

My hon. Friend the Member for Cambridge highlighted the crisis in the NHS and the life-and-death consequences of ambulance waits. He asked “Where is the urgency?”—a very fair question that I hope the Secretary of State will answer. My hon. Friend the Member for Lewisham East (Janet Daby) spoke powerfully about the experience of young people in the criminal justice system.

Then there were speeches about levelling up. My hon. Friend the Member for Bedford (Mohammad Yasin) highlighted the gap between rhetoric and reality. My right hon. Friend the Member for Kingston upon Hull North (Dame Diana Johnson) well summarised the Government’s approach to levelling up in their planning reform: the Victor Meldrew approach, as she called it, levelling down next door’s conservatory—hardly the level of ambition that this country needs. My hon. Friend the Member for Bradford West (Naz Shah) highlighted how levelling up is a slogan without substance. There was a pretty interesting—depending on your perspective—effort from the hon. Member for Bosworth (Dr Evans), who offered a new slogan for the Government’s planning policies: “INBED with Gove”, a mental image that none of us wanted but that we have been left with none the less at this late hour.

My hon. Friend the Member for Bradford East (Imran Hussain) gave a searing account of poverty in his community. He is right: this is a matter of political choices. We heard about the consequences of those choices in the speeches of other hon. Friends. My hon. Friend the Member for Dulwich and West Norwood (Helen Hayes) highlighted the disaster of children growing up in overcrowded temporary accommodation, with huge consequences for their learning and their life chances. My hon. Friend the Member for Swansea East (Carolyn Harris) spoke about having to run summer holiday lunch clubs and Christmas hamper schemes because of the grotesque level of poverty in her constituency.

My hon. Friend the Member for Nottingham South (Lilian Greenwood) described the embarrassment and humiliation of parents who are unable to provide for their children. Children share their parents’ anxiety about how to make ends meet, so they do not even tell them when they are required to bring in some extra kit for school, such as for cooking classes, or when there is an extra ask for school trips. That is a thoroughly damning indictment of this Government.

If I may say so, as the son of a single mum, I was really moved by how my hon. Friend the Member for Makerfield (Yvonne Fovargue) described her experience. If only it were as simple as Ministers claimed on the morning round today—if only people could just put in a few extra hours or take on a better-paid job—but it is just not as simple as going out and finding more hours. Many of our constituents are already working three jobs. How many more jobs and how many more hours do the Government want them to take on?

I hope that hon. Members will forgive me, but the very best speech today was the maiden speech of my hon. Friend the Member for Birmingham, Erdington (Mrs Hamilton). We dearly, dearly miss her predecessor, our dear friend Jack Dromey, but I know that he would have been proud to see her make that speech today, as we all were.

This is a great country with a world of opportunity. I am glad that I was born in Britain, but this is also a country that is being held back by intolerable levels of inequality and by a Government who are simply unable to face up to the scale of the challenge. Half a million more children are set to be plunged into poverty, following the Chancellor’s spring statement. Two million adults are going full days without meals. Many more are relying on food banks to feed themselves and their family, as I found when I went around the country in the local election campaign. In Colchester, the food bank told me that NHS nurses were coming in and accessing it. Pensioner poverty is again on the rise, with out-of-control bills, a real-terms cut to the state pension and national insurance rises meaning that working pensioners will be more than £1,200 worse off over the next two years.

This cost of living crisis is not just a Treasury issue, but a health issue. If millions of people in this country face a choice whether to heat their homes or to eat regular meals, they will get sick or will fail to recover from sickness. Before we entered the pandemic, average life expectancy—surely the most basic measure of the progress of a country or a society—had stalled for the first time in decades. It is a mark of shame that, in 2022, in the sixth richest nation on earth, 5,000 people were admitted to hospital for malnutrition in the last six months. Cases of scurvy have doubled since 2010—scurvy! Twelve years of Conservative Government is ushering in the return of Dickensian diseases to Britain. What kind of country have we become when millions of people who work full time still cannot afford the basics?

The British people deserve a Government on their side. Instead, we have the only Government in the G7 who think that now is a good time to raise taxes on working people. We have a Government who are happy to add to working people’s tax burden but, as we know from members of the Cabinet, spend plenty of time avoiding paying their own. The Government promised 38 new pieces of legislation, but not a single one will put more money into people’s pockets. All the Government have to offer families struggling today are sneering lectures telling them to work harder, find a second or third job or book themselves in for a cookery class.

We have seen this Government’s approach when challenged on the cost of living. Blame the people. Blame the Bank of England. Blame anyone but themselves. Even when challenged about his own spring statement that plunges half a million more people into poverty, what was the Chancellor’s excuse? The computer said no. That did not stop him taking 20 quid a week off the poorest people in our country, did it? It worked then. Surely it works now.

Britain deserves better. We need a Government who understand what life is like for most people in this country. If we had such a Government, we would not have the Education Secretary talking about tipping the balance in favour of private schools. Who is he trying to kid? He is defending the 7% of people who go to private schools, who are going to have a brilliant world of opportunities available to them, but failing to stand up for the 93% who do not. Let me tell him about tipping the balance, as someone who received free school meals, went through the state education system and made it to Cambridge University. I was one of just 1% of kids on free school meals to make it to Cambridge University, and I am proud that I got there, but do not tell kids from state schools who are making it now, and who are finally being judged on their merits, that the system has been tilted in their favour. Those kids know full well from their life experience, from their childhood and from growing up under a Conservative Government that the party and his colleagues have done everything they can to tilt the balance in favour of people like him, from backgrounds like their own, at the expense of people from backgrounds like mine. That is the truth.

What the Education Secretary does not understand is that it is not talent or potential that is unevenly distributed in this country; it is opportunity. Participation in extracurricular activities is falling in state schools. Fewer children are doing sports, drama and music, and the least well-off children are three times more likely to do no extracurricular activities at all. The Conservative Government may accept this poverty of ambition for our children, but the Labour party will not. Just as we rebuilt the education system under the last Labour Government, so we will have the same level of ambition for the next one. I am very sorry to disappoint my hon. Friend the Member for Swansea East, but we will be putting her lunch clubs out of business, because the next Labour Government will work to end child poverty, not to increase it.

I turn to health. There was just one mention of health in the Queen’s Speech: the long-awaited overhaul of the Mental Health Act. The proposed changes are welcome, but this legislation alone will not solve the challenges facing people who live with severe mental illness, reverse this Government’s persistent neglect of mental health services or narrow the gaping mental health inequalities that mean that black people are over four times more likely to be detained under the existing Act.

Our mental health services simply do not meet the scale of the challenge. A quarter of beds for patients struggling with poor mental health have been cut over the last 12 years. One in every three children who seeks support from mental health services is turned away at the door, and 1.6 million people in total are waiting for treatment. They are waiting too long, and those who are offered treatment are often sent to the other end of the country because there are no local beds and services available.

People struggling with poor mental health will not get the support they need if we do not have enough frontline staff. That is why Labour’s plan would guarantee mental health treatment within a month to all who need it. That would be done by investing in an additional 8,500 staff and offering specialist mental health support in every school. Because politics is about choices, let me be clear about the choices we would make. We would pay for that mental health support for every child in the country by removing the VAT exemption from private schools and closing tax loopholes for private equity fund managers. I know that the Education Secretary is pitching himself as a defender of private school privilege ahead of the next Conservative leadership election and the Health Secretary may well have benefited from these tax loopholes himself. Let me tell Members on the Conservative Benches—there will be a Conservative leadership election a lot sooner than there will be a Labour leadership election.

I hope we can agree that mental health is one of the most urgent needs of our time, particularly after the pandemic, which was difficult for so many. I am glad that the Health Secretary is here to respond, because I would like him to account for his Government’s record. Patients are being made to wait longer than ever before as we sleepwalk towards a two-tier system that betrays the founding principles of our NHS. The self-pay healthcare market in the UK has doubled since 2010. People have been forced to go private because they will not get the treatment that they need. Billions more have been spent on private insurance and operations. Private healthcare providers are rubbing their hands together because they know that people are increasingly choosing to jump the queue while the rest are left to wait for up to two years for care.

The Health Secretary will tell us, of course—let me save him some time—that our NHS is suffering from a covid backlog and that the problems facing the health service are all the result of the pandemic. There is a backlog in the NHS, but it is a Conservative backlog. The NHS was experiencing record waiting lists going into the pandemic. It was 100,000 staff short, with another 112,000 vacancies in social care. Suspected cancer patients have been waiting longer to be seen every single year since Labour left office. Not only was there just one piece of legislation across health and social care, but, as I mentioned, the Government have dropped their long-promised employment Bill. What does the Secretary of State say to the millions of family carers in this country who were promised a week’s carer’s leave—just one week a year to have a break—but who have been let down and left waiting again and again by this Government?

The fact is that the longer we give the Conservatives in office, the longer patients will wait: longer for a GP appointment, longer for an ambulance to arrive—now two hours for thousands of heart attack and stroke victims—longer for an operation, with some patients waiting since before the pandemic began, and longer for pensioners and the disabled to wait for suitable social care. We are paying more. We are waiting longer. That is the Conservative record, and the longer we give the Conservatives in office, the longer Britain waits. Well, their time is up.

[Madam Deputy Speaker (Dame Rosie Winterton)]

Before I call the Secretary of State, I emphasise how important it is that Members get back in good time for the wind-ups. It is extremely discourteous to the Front Benchers and others who have participated in the debate if people are late and, in some cases, not here at all. It has been noted.