Proxy Voting and Presence of Babies in the Chamber and Westminster Hall

Debate between Aaron Bell and Karen Bradley

Thursday 30th June 2022 Commons Chamber

[Karen Bradley]

I thank my friend, the Vice-Chair of the Committee, for his comments. He is right: we did want to decouple the requirement not to be in the Chamber from the proxy vote. We heard significant evidence about keep-in-touch days for new parents.

We also heard from my hon. Friend the Member for Chatham and Aylesford (Tracey Crouch), who said that when she was recovering following her breast cancer diagnosis, she was able to avail herself of the proxy vote because we still had pandemic proxies, but that she was also able to come into this place and make contributions. For her, that was good for getting her back into working practices and good for her recovery, but it would have been very detrimental to her recovery had she had to stay to vote later in the day.

We reflected that in the report. We wanted to make sure that there was a decoupling of the requirement not to attend the Chamber from the proxy vote, because it would give Members the opportunity to do that kind of keep-in-touch day.

[Aaron Bell (Newcastle-under-Lyme) (Con)]

May I praise both my right hon. Friend for her chairmanship of the Committee and the Clerks for their hard work on this report?

As a member of the Committee, I support all the recommendations; it was a unanimous report. I also support what my right hon. Friend and the shadow Leader of the House called for: a chance for the House to have a say on this—ultimately, it is for the House to decide how we proceed. I am sure the Leader of the House will be addressing that in due course.

May I invite my right hon. Friend to praise all our colleagues who gave evidence, particularly oral evidence, to our Committee? Seven Back Benchers gave evidence on the proxy vote part, many of whom, such as the hon. Member for East Dunbartonshire (Amy Callaghan) and my hon. Friend the Member for Chatham and Aylesford (Tracey Crouch), shared very personal stories of illness.

We had two oral evidence sessions on the issue of babies in the Chamber: one with my hon. Friend the Member for Rutland and Melton (Alicia Kearns), who is in her place, and one with the hon. Member for Walthamstow (Stella Creasy). The environment was quite toxic, because there was a lot of misogyny around the issue on social media. Giving evidence to us from both sides of the argument showed courage, and I wondered whether my right hon. Friend could reflect that.

[Karen Bradley]

My hon. Friend is right: the Clerks of the Committee have been, and always are, absolutely exemplary, and we could not do the work that we do without them. He is also right that the atmosphere around some of the evidence was toxic. We need to be able to have this debate in a reasonable fashion. We need to discuss the issues and reflect the views of the House overall. That is why it is important that we do now have time for that debate and a vote, so that the House can make its decision as to how it wants to proceed.

North Staffordshire Potteries Towns: Levelling Up

Debate between Aaron Bell and Karen Bradley

Tuesday 1st December 2020 Westminster Hall

[Aaron Bell (Newcastle-under-Lyme) (Con)]

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mr Dowd. As my colleagues have done, I congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for Stoke-on-Trent South (Jack Brereton) on securing this important debate. I begin, as he did, by praising everybody across north Staffordshire and in my constituency for their role in helping us to combat this pandemic. I praise the health and care workers, the leadership in the various hospitals and all the key workers helping us get through this period. I particularly want to praise the scientists for the scientific progress that we have made. The news about the vaccine is fantastic.

The Prime Minister visited a vaccine manufacturer in Wrexham yesterday. I am afraid I beat him to it, because I visited Cobra Biologics at Keele science park on 30 April, where I saw the first of the batch of the Oxford-AstraZeneca vaccine being generated before it had even got into the bioreactor—a really small reactor with some of the first of that viral vector vaccine.

That example from Keele shows what we can do to help levelling up. The science and innovation park there and the investment that we are putting into Keele University are making a huge difference to my constituency. That is not spread across all of my constituency yet, and I will talk about that as I move through this speech, but I would just like to praise the work that all the scientists have done in getting us to the point at which we really have some hope. I think the fact that we now have hope should inform our votes later today in the House about how we combat the next few months. I think that it makes the case for continuing with restrictions, but I will speak more about that later.

I also echo what my right hon. Friend the Member for Staffordshire Moorlands (Karen Bradley) said about the need for more support. I will make that case to my right hon. Friend the Minister here and I know that he will speak to his Treasury colleagues and others about that.

The market town of Newcastle-under-Lyme, as I said in my maiden speech, is also full of mining villages, and it is only because of those mining villages and the quality of the coal that they produced that these pottery towns are where they are at all. That is why they sprang up—because of the quality of the coal that was mined from the North Staffordshire coalfield. We do not actually have potteries ourselves; we do not have pottery kilns in Newcastle-under-Lyme, but we very much feel part of the wider north Staffordshire area.

We have a strong sense of identity and community across the area. I work incredibly well with all four of my colleagues in this debate. I will also point out that there is a friendly rivalry between Newcastle-under-Lyme and Stoke-on-Trent in particular, and there is a desire to maintain our own identities in the way that my right hon. Friend described. We want to work together. We have worked together. We are working together on covid; the directors of public health speak together about that. But we are very firm about our own identities.

We are the loyal and ancient borough of Newcastle-under-Lyme. We have been sending people to this place for far longer than Stoke-on-Trent has done, and long may that continue—but I do not wish to spend the debate winding up my colleagues, because my hon. Friend the Member for Stoke-on-Trent North (Jonathan Gullis) is speaking next and I fear that he may get his own back.

If I may, I will reminisce for a minute, with apologies to the shadow Minister, the hon. Member for Bradford West (Naz Shah). A year ago, we were out on the doorsteps in the election campaign, and I do not know about my colleagues in the other seats that we gained, but it was around that time that people were firmly coming over to us. In the early part of the election campaign, people were waiting and seeing, but as we moved to the last couple of weeks, people were making up their minds, and there were reasons why people voted for us in north Staffordshire last year. There were obviously the reasons around Brexit and the reasons around the right hon. Member for Islington North (Jeremy Corbyn), but the third thing that I heard on the doorstep a lot was that people really bought into what we were saying about the need to revitalise market towns, mining villages and places that had felt left behind.

Newcastle is incredibly proud of its market, and people would repeatedly say, “The town is not what it was.” Covid has exacerbated the retail issues in the town centre, and that is why I am so grateful that we were included in the Future High Streets programme. There are certain key elements of the bid that is currently with the Minister or with the Ministry. I am really keen that we hear back soon, because the last I heard was that it would be the last week of November and my watch informs me that today is 1 December. We need to find out how we are getting on with that Future High Streets bid, but the redevelopment of the long-vacant Ryecroft site in the centre of town will be a huge step forward for us. At the moment, that is being used as a testing centre, which is actually a particularly innovative use of the space, but it has otherwise been for too long an eyesore in the centre of Newcastle-under-Lyme. It will be used for a mix of employment and residential uses. There will be a new multi-storey car park, so we can knock down the Midway one, which is not fit for purpose. There will be more public space. There will be more direct pedestrian and cycle connections to residential areas north of the town centre. We will have linked plazas, we will have public spaces and there will be ways to complement the improving offer from the street market by creating a community events space in the heart of the town that speaks to the cultural aspect.

Newcastle-under-Lyme Borough Council has worked hard to develop the bid. It is ambitious and forward thinking, and it will help us to create the vibrant town centre that my constituents are desperate to see. This funding bid is a real opportunity for Newcastle. I really hope that we secure it, and that we hear very soon from the Ministry about where that is going.

I also look forward to the submission of our town deal bid. I should draw Members’ attention to my entry in the Register of Members’ Financial Interests, as I am a member of the town deal board for Newcastle-under-Lyme. We have another meeting on Thursday. That is another reason why we would like to know about the Future High Streets submission—so that we can build on that in our town deal submission. I have been contributing to the development of that bid. It has been very ably chaired by Trevor McMillan, vice-chancellor of Keele University. It will also bring real change to the town centre—areas that were not covered by the Future High Streets bid. There will be a new skills and enterprise centre in Lancaster Buildings, the iconic buildings in the centre, where Ironmarket meets High Street in Newcastle. For too long they have been empty because of, frankly, overly high business rates. The reason why I could not put my office—my shop—there, where I wanted to, was because the business rates were too high, so I had to go a little bit further afield where the small business rate relief applied in full. We need to look at small business rate relief when we look at high streets.

There is going to be a repurposing of the former Zanzibar nightclub, which pre-dates my time in nightclubs, I am afraid. It is going to be used for mixed use and social housing. There is going to be more connectivity with a town-centre wi-fi and there is also going to be a focus on disadvantaged former mining villages, especially Knutton. We need to put the heart back into Knutton, and Chesterton, and that is what we are proposing to do. That is what levelling up from the public sector is about.

This is not just about the public sector, however. I am struck by how hard the town centre has been hit by covid. First, in the retail element, covid has probably accelerated things that were already there. In recent months, we have lost lots of shops and restaurants, including Laura Ashley, Dorothy Perkins, Edinburgh Woollen Mill and Pizza Hut. Some of them were probably in a bad way before covid, and that has been accelerated. We need to look at repurposing, and I know the Ministry is making it easier to turn former shops into residential or commercial use.

This is also about the hospitality sector. In Newcastle-under-Lyme we have purple flag status, which recognises the quality of our early evening and night-time economy: the pubs, clubs, restaurants and cafés. We have many entrepreneurs investing in our town and bringing jobs to our area, and they are struggling. Levelling up is not just a public-sector activity. I was on a call yesterday with Mr Leon Burton, the chief executive of the Staffordshire and Cheshire Leisure Group. He runs a place called the Milehouse, which is up in Cross Heath—again, an area that really needs levelling up. His business invested £700,000 in making the Milehouse a desirable location, in a spot that used not to be so desirable. He feels that we have not gone far enough in our support for hospitality, and I have to say that I agree. I welcome what the Prime Minister said today about giving wet pubs £1,000. The Milehouse is getting £2,000 a month in grants, but it is spending £1,620 on national insurance contributions and pension contributions, so Mr Burton is getting a net £380 a month to cover everything, including his rent. He makes the reasonable point that he is not clear how much longer he can survive like that. He has £100,000 of VAT debt, and I assume—I make this plea now—that we will roll over the deferrals on that. However, we need to find a way to make sure that people from the private sector who have invested and are helping to level up are not left behind.

[Karen Bradley]

My hon. Friend will appreciate that the VAT cut on hospitality does not apply to alcohol, so businesses that are able to open are struggling. If they are open, their fixed costs are the same whether single households or multiple households are allowed to visit, and when they are closed, they have fixed costs that they have to cover. We need to make sure they are there when we get through this, and they need support.

[Aaron Bell]

As usual, my right hon. Friend is right. We need to find a proportionate measure. There are lots and lots of hard choices; the pandemic has meant choosing between one bad option and another throughout. I do not envy the Prime Minister and the Health Secretary the choices they have had to make, and I will be supporting the Government today. I will not get to give my speech in the main Chamber, because I am No. 105 on the call list and I think they have reached about No. 30, so I will make that point now.

I recognise that the Chancellor of the Exchequer also has hard choices to make. It is not as simple as saying that we should give everybody a turnover and make them whole, because that is taxpayers’ money, too, and we need to be realistic about how we use it. However, the support has to be proportionate to the damage that those places are suffering.

I will briefly talk about a couple of other areas in which we could level up. I want to hear more from the Minister, when he sums up, about what the new £4 billion levelling-up fund will do. I welcome that, and I would like it to be extended to local areas. I do not know what “local areas” means in the guidance. Does it go down as low as parish or town councils? I spoke to Audley Rotary Club last week. Audley is a mining village and it is not included in the Future High Streets fund because it is not part of the town centre, but the mining villages further out, such as Audley and Bignall End, need levelling up, too.

My hon. Friend the Member for Stoke-on-Trent Central (Jo Gideon) mentioned the potential 5G pilot, and I want to put a word in for that. All 12 Staffordshire MPs wrote to the Chancellor, the Secretary of State for Housing, Communities and Local Government and the Secretary of State for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport about that. Most of all, I echo the point made by my hon. Friend the Member for Stoke-on-Trent South about public transport. Newcastle-under-Lyme is one of the largest towns in the country without a railway station of its own. We would like a lot more to be done about buses, as we said in this place at the start of this year in my first ever Westminster Hall debate.

In the longer term, we would love to put a metro proposition together, and we would like some help with that from either the Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government or the Department for Transport. Too many local authorities that need levelling up do not have the experience necessary to put the bids together, because they have not had this funding for years. We need help so that we can put the best-quality bids together and get the levelling up that our communities deserve.

I want to briefly mention culture. Newcastle-under-Lyme is proud of its culture and history. We are the birthplace of Philip Astley, the founder of the modern circus, and hopefully our town deal will do some work around that. The New Vic, which my hon. Friend the Member for Stoke-on-Trent Central was kind enough to mention, had a fantastic restoration during covid, which turned out to be exceptionally well timed. I went along to the relaunch event, “Ghostlight”, which was socially distanced and very good, although I have so much sympathy for the theatre, which cannot put on its Christmas performance this year.

I had better wrap up, otherwise I will be talking my hon. Friend the Member for Stoke-on-Trent North out of this debate altogether. Thank you very much, Mr Dowd, for letting me make these points about the importance of levelling up for north Staffordshire and all our communities.

Virtual Participation in Debate

Debate between Aaron Bell and Karen Bradley

Tuesday 24th November 2020 Commons Chamber

[Karen Bradley]

I, too, want my right hon. Friend the Member for Chesham and Amersham (Dame Cheryl Gillan) and many other clinically extremely vulnerable colleagues to be able to take part in debates, but the amendment does not preclude their doing so. It allows them and others to take part in those debates. I want to see my hon. Friend the Member for Basildon and Billericay (Mr Baron), who secured an urgent question last week, taking part in debates as well. I want as many Members as possible to take part in debates. This has been going on for far too long. About a quarter of Members are currently availing themselves of the ability to participate virtually in scrutiny proceedings: questions, UQs and statements. Not all of them are clinically extremely vulnerable, but they need to be allowed to take part in debates. We will have been going for 12 months by the end of March, and not to have heard from my hon. Friend the Member for Basildon and Billericay in a debate in that time I consider inappropriate and not fair on him. He is working incredibly hard, and he needs to be able to participate.

I should also like to raise the case of our hon. Friend the Member for Lichfield (Michael Fabricant), who has been texting me during the debate and has asked me to mention him. If he were here he would be speaking, but he cannot be here. He would love to take part in this debate down the line. He would love to take part virtually, but he cannot do so—he is not allowed.

[Aaron Bell (Newcastle-under-Lyme) (Con)]

I thank the Chair of the Procedure Committee, on which I serve, for giving way. She has mentioned Members who cannot be here. May I put on record the case of my hon. Friend the Member for Rutland and Melton (Alicia Kearns), who is heavily pregnant and would like to know whether the relevant words, “or equivalent”, in the motion extend to ladies in the third stage of their pregnancy?

[Karen Bradley]

I thank my hon. Friend, who has just joined the Procedure Committee. I was going to make exactly the same point, because my hon. Friend the Member for Rutland and Melton (Alicia Kearns) has texted me as well. In the third trimester of pregnancy, women are asked to shield, but they are not clinically extremely vulnerable. I know that my right hon. Friend the Leader of the House is sympathetic to that, and is trying to do all that he can to assist, but if he accepts the amendment, we do not have to have a debate about whether someone in their third trimester is clinically extremely vulnerable—we will just feel able to let them take part.

The capacity of digital services is much improved. We have seen what has happened in the other place. I do not think that my right hon. Friend should worry about allowing our hon. and right hon. Friends to take part in debates down the line, because this is not going to stifle debate—it will enhance and add to it.

Public Transport: North Staffordshire

Debate between Aaron Bell and Karen Bradley

Thursday 23rd January 2020 Westminster Hall

[Karen Bradley (Staffordshire Moorlands) (Con)]

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship today, Sir Christopher. I congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for Stoke-on-Trent South (Jack Brereton) on securing this important and timely debate. It is wonderful to be able to have this debate with all Members from north Staffordshire on this side of the Chamber. It has to be said that that is a first.

My constituents in Staffordshire Moorlands face similar issues to those that have already been described, but we have some additional issues that are down to the rurality of the constituency. It is one of the most beautiful constituencies in the country. A third of the seat by geography is in the Peak District national park. The constituency includes the highest village in the country, Flash, where the local pub, the New Inn, is 1,518 feet above sea level. There are many villages and hamlets in the constituency and only two towns, Leek and Biddulph.

Connectivity between those villages and towns is hampered by the topography of the area. As the name suggests, Staffordshire Moorlands is quite hilly. We do not have the kind of infrastructure that many of my colleagues have. There is no dual carriageway anywhere in the constituency. There is no train station; there is no main line that runs through the constituency. We have a heritage line, but we have no main train line in the constituency. Access to our towns and villages is very important and is a matter that is often raised by my constituents.

As I mentioned, a third of my seat is within the boundaries of the Peak District national park, and tourism is one of our major economic generators. We are home to Alton Towers, which is the most visited tourist attraction outside London. Everybody who goes to Alton Towers arrives by some form of road transport—a few by bus from Stoke-on-Trent station, but the vast majority by private car. The congestion on the roads at opening and closing time is a challenge for people living in the villages of Alton and Farley. I am sure many people in this room have been to Alton Towers and have wondered what exactly is happening, as they come off the dual carriageway of the A50 and go up a nice road past JCB World headquarters at Rocester, and then suddenly find themselves on tiny little windy roads going through villages. That is because Alton Towers is located in the beautiful village of Alton. It is the former home of the Earls of Shrewsbury, and it was designed by Pugin, so it is very reminiscent of where we are today. It is now a major tourist attraction that happens to be located in a very beautiful part of the country, and we therefore have some really specific concerns.

My hon. Friend the Member for Newcastle-under-Lyme (Aaron Bell) touched on the A53. Between Leek and Buxton, it is one of the most dangerous roads in the country. It is frequently in the top 10 or 20 roads in the country for fatalities and road traffic accidents.

I have described the situation with rail. Our bus network is woeful. My hon. Friend the Member for Stoke-on-Trent South talked about the new number 18 bus. It is a great thing to have a wi-fi enabled bus with USB points and everything else—a lovely green bus—but it runs only once an hour. It is not exactly frequent, and we have very few other buses in the constituency. As my hon. Friend the Member for Stafford (Theo Clarke) pointed out, we have the Moorlands Connect service. It is very good to have that dial-a-ride service, but the fact is that these villages and hamlets are not served by public transport, and that is contributing to rural loneliness and social isolation. It is contributing to people not being able to go and enjoy days out at our fantastic market in Leek and our monthly artisan market in Biddulph. People simply cannot get to these places, because there are no bus routes. A frequency of one bus every 10 minutes would be a dream come true; we are lucky if we have a bus twice a day sometimes.

Bus routes are being cancelled far too often, and there is a point at which somebody has to take responsibility. I have met the bus companies and they explain to me perfectly rationally why they cannot continue running the bus services—there simply is not the money to do it. I sit down with the county council and the city council and they explain to me perfectly rationally that the money is simply not there and they have to prioritise those services that are best value for money. The problem with those two rational bits of behaviour is that they have led to an irrational situation in which we simply do not have buses. Then we have buses, for example, that serve the village of Alton, but they are full of people going to Alton Towers, so nobody in the village of Alton can get on the bus to go where they want to get to, because it is full of tourists visiting Alton Towers.

Will the Minister ensure that some rationality is applied on bus routes overall and that we start looking at the strategy for buses in a holistic way across the whole of north Staffordshire, reflecting the fact that we have these incredibly rural areas that desperately need a way for people to get to the post office and the local market, to see their friends and live the kinds of lives that people in London would just think absolutely normal? They would think anything else unacceptable.

Reference was made to proposals for bus routes to Biddulph. I welcome those proposals, but while they are welcome, somebody needs to look at the road layout in Biddulph, because the redevelopment of the town centre when the new Sainsbury’s supermarket came to town just under 10 years ago means that getting buses round corners is not proving to be all that easy. We have speed humps and other things on the high street that make it very uncomfortable for people, and I hope the Government will examine that.

I will make a final point on buses before I move on to discuss trains. It is about school transport. The Minister will know that I have had meetings with our right hon. Friend the Secretary of State and Baroness Vere on disability-compliant buses in school transport provision. The problem is that a court case last year found that if any child travelling on the buses was a paying passenger, the buses had to be disability compliant; otherwise, they were no longer insured. These are the public service vehicle accessibility regulations, or PSVAR. The issue has been resolved with a temporary fix to exempt buses on which no more than 20% of children are paying passengers. As I have described, a lot of people have to travel a significant distance to get to school, and they do not all qualify for free school transport, for a variety of reasons. On the buses on which the free school transport is run, children who do not qualify for free transport are charged.

The exemption is very welcome. We have had to get a further exemption for buses for faith schools, because the rules around faith schools and free school transport are more complicated, which meant that more of the children on the buses were paying. We have a further exemption for that, and I visited Boydons Coaches in my constituency last week to discuss this issue, but we need a long-term fix. Small operators such as Boydons simply cannot afford to buy a brand new disability-compliant bus. It does not fit with their business model; they need to buy second-hand coaches. They have very smart and nice coaches, but there are no second-hand disability-compliant coaches on the market at the moment. The large coach firms simply did not invest in them at the time they needed to, and I would be very happy to sit down with the Minister and explain the detail of it. It is complicated, but we need a long-term fix so that bus operators can continue in business.

I have said that we do not have a main railway line running through Staffordshire Moorlands, but we do have a line. It was closed during the Beeching era, but it still exists, and many attempts have been made to try to reopen the line. There are a few problems with it. The station in Leek is now a supermarket, so there would need to be investment in a new station. The line unfortunately ends at Longton and does not go on to the main station at Stoke. This is one of the issues facing a city made up of six towns: sometimes the connectivity between those six towns has not been all that good. The line that was closed in the ’60s did not require, at that point, connectivity to the west coast main line, but reinstating a line that did not have connectivity to the west coast main line would be nonsensical. Investment, and probably another platform at Stoke station, would be needed to get a connection and allow the line to work. The line continues from Leek into the countryside and goes as far as Alton, so it could service Alton Towers if it were reinstated.

I want to express a new idea. Instead of thinking, “Well, we have a line. Let’s put some trains on it,” why do we not think about a different form of rail—maybe light rail, or even a tram service? If we could get a quieter electric tram service that operated perhaps as far as Alton Towers, but definitely between Leek and Stoke-on-Trent, it would benefit many of my colleagues’ constituencies. My constituency borders Stoke-on-Trent North, Stoke-on-Trent South and Stoke-on-Trent Central, all of which would benefit from a tram line. I wonder whether we north Staffordshire MPs could put on our thinking caps and work out what a light rail service might look like. We have all seen what a difference the Metrolink has made to Manchester.

[Aaron Bell]

My right hon. Friend mentioned that her constituency borders all three Stoke-on-Trent constituencies, as does Newcastle-under-Lyme. The tram line could run to Keele University on the same line that was axed in the Beeching era, and then we would have connectivity all the way through from her constituency to mine.

[Karen Bradley]

My hon. Friend is absolutely right. With vision, we could make something really exciting happen for the whole of Stoke-on-Trent and north Staffordshire: we could see connectivity. My hon. Friend the Member for Stone (Sir William Cash) is another constituency neighbour of mine and was unable to attend the debate, but he is also very keen for work to be done to address the bus routes. I am sure we could benefit his constituency, too, with some form of electric tram that is clean and quiet and delivers the connectivity that my constituents would greatly value.

I will finish with two more points on transport that are more general to the area. The first is about HS2, which is not really an issue in my constituency because, as I have said, the name “Moorlands” suggests it is hilly. It also means that people do not tend to want to build railway lines through it. However, we need to ensure that connectivity to the west coast main line, Stoke-on-Trent and Macclesfield station is maintained. We benefit from having two trains an hour from Stoke to London Euston, and one train an hour from Macclesfield. Those are really important services that we need to ensure we keep. It takes an hour and 24 minutes from Stoke-on-Trent station to London Euston, although it may take my constituents another 40 or 50 minutes to get home from Stoke-on-Trent station, because there is no bus service that runs from Stoke-on-Trent station to anywhere other than Hanley bus station, and then they have to change—that is another story. In any work that is done on HS2, I hope we can ensure that connectivity to Stoke-on-Trent is maintained.

My final point is on the M6, which is our nearest motorway, and on the pinch points at junction 15 that my hon. Friend the Member for Newcastle-under-Lyme (Aaron Bell) spoke about. The stretch between junctions 15 and 16 is an issue that needs to be examined. If anybody listens to any travel report at any time of the day, they will almost certainly hear that there are problems on the M6 in Staffordshire around junctions 15 and 16. We cannot widen the motorway at that point, because there are issues with the topography of the area. We cannot make it a smart motorway, because the hard shoulder is not wide enough. When we have smart motorways south from junction 15 and potentially north from junction 16, the stretch between 15 and 16 will just be worse. I ask the Minister to look carefully at what could be done to alleviate the problems, which would benefit all of us in north Staffordshire.