Wind Farms: Protected Peatland

Debate between Anna Dixon and Josh Fenton-Glynn

Tuesday 21st April 2026 Westminster Hall

[Anna Dixon (Shipley) (Lab)]

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairship again, Sir Alec. I thank the hon. Member for Keighley and Ilkley (Robbie Moore) for the invitation to join him in Westminster Hall today. It is always a pleasure for me to talk about the fantastic peatlands and moors in my wonderful constituency.

As we have heard, peatlands occupy about 12% of the UK land area, including many areas in my constituency: Baildon moor, Harden moor and parts of Rombalds moor. We have some wonderful upland landscapes. I recently walked up to Top Withens, which has been mentioned and has a precious place as the inspiration for “Wuthering Heights”. I took some American guests, who were very inspired by the cultural heritage in the Bradford district, which we all so enjoyed celebrating in 2025 when Bradford hosted the city of culture. I was excited to hear the first curlew of spring, one of the pleasures of walking in the upland moors, and see the lapwings doing their amazingly flamboyant mating dance.

As the hon. Member has rightly highlighted, peatlands are crucial in our fight against climate change. They store a whopping 3.2 billion tonnes of CO₂. They also reduce flood risk—something that particularly impacted constituents during the Boxing day floods over a decade ago—and support biodiversity. The Labour Government are acting to stop the decline in nature depletion.

However, as we have heard, both here in the UK and around the world our peatlands have been degraded and, according to the UK Centre for Ecology and Hydrology, are now estimated to be a net source of greenhouse gas emissions to the atmosphere. Stopping their degradation must be a really big priority. That is why I welcome steps that Bradford council has taken to scale up peatland restoration on the district’s moorlands. In 2023, some £200,000 of additional funding was committed to rewet areas of the moorland. If someone goes to walk there, they can see blocked drainage ditches and things called leaky dams, which slow the flow of water.

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

My hon. Friend is giving a powerful speech. She is absolutely right that the Government are committed to helping with the rewilding and restoration of our peatland. It is probably worth noting that that is done by the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, and the hon. Member for Keighley and Ilkley (Robbie Moore) was a DEFRA Minister for years, so it is somewhat of a surprise that he is a new convert to the environment.

[Anna Dixon]

These investments are critical, and it is pleasing that the Labour Government are taking nature actions so seriously. In addition to those I mentioned, there is also the planting of sphagnum moss—which is quite tricky to pronounce.

Bradford has recently published its climate action plan 2025-28, which outlines its comprehensive approach to working towards a low-carbon future. I also welcome steps taken by the Government at a national level with the environmental improvement plan, which was published just a few months ago. It says that we will—

“Restore approximately 280,000ha of peatland in England by 2050”.

NHS Backlog

Debate between Anna Dixon and Josh Fenton-Glynn

Monday 6th January 2025 Commons Chamber

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

I welcome this debate. Another winter and there are more severe backlogs—the causes are structural and predictable. The shadow of what Lord Darzi found weighs heavy on this debate, with 14,000 unnecessary deaths in A&E each year, waiting times for over-65s in emergency care having more than doubled to seven hours, and over 100,000 under-threes waiting more than six hours to be seen in 2023. Each one of those numbers is a devastated family, a patient at greater risk, or a patient enduring that long, nervous wait. This winter, my local hospital trust has seen average bed occupancy rates hit 98.5%. At one point in mid-December, only three out of 715 beds were free to use.

The crisis in our NHS that my constituents in Calder Valley face is not the result of a lack of work by our NHS staff—I hope everyone in this House can join me in paying tribute to those hard-working staff. Instead, this crisis has come about because of bad policy choices and warnings repeatedly ignored. In his report and when he came to the Health and Social Care Committee, Lord Darzi made it absolutely clear that the root cause of the problem is the Health and Social Care Act 2012, which was pushed through without precedent or preparation by the coalition Government amid repeated warnings from healthcare professionals. This disaster proves that to move forward, we have to learn from why bad health policy gets made: because of a focus on ideology over practicality, on efficiency savings over real improvements, and on treatment over prevention and later-life care.

We must also learn that to rebuild our NHS we cannot be top-down, but must build on a foundation of decent social and community care that is close to home and respects the skills of those who work throughout the system. That brings me to my next point, which is about social care. The scale of the crisis in the NHS means that it will not be fixed overnight—indeed, the Secretary of State talks about a 10-year plan—but we know that problems are solved easier and earlier if patients are treated closer to home. Yet the failure to plan health and social care together over the past 14 years means that more than one in 10 NHS hospital beds are filled by people who simply do not have the right care.

[Anna Dixon (Shipley) (Lab)]

In my constituency, Bradford council’s Home FAST—first assessment support—scheme aims to get people home from hospital more quickly and to be assessed for any onward care services when they are at home. Since its launch, there has been a large reduction in the need for intermediate care facilities after hospital care. Does my hon. Friend agree with me that such innovations need to be at the heart of the Government’s 10-year plan, ensuring that we integrate health and social care, as he was saying, but perhaps also looking to revise the better care fund so that it delivers both rapid discharge and rehabilitation, which are obviously both critical to tackling NHS backlogs?

[Josh Fenton-Glynn]

In fact, the better care fund works best in West Yorkshire when it works to hasten people’s journey out of hospital, and that sounds like a very good example.

In my own local hospital trust, the figure for people on the transfer of care list is even higher: 20% of beds are taken up by people who could be treated at home. That is almost 150 patients in hospital rather than getting social care where they need to be. Even well-run trusts are finding the wait for transfer of care too great, proving again that we cannot fix our health service without fixing 14 years of Tory mismanagement or without fixing social care.

In closing, while this Government face problems not of our own creation, we must still learn from what has gone before. In this regard, I absolutely welcome the announcement on progress in social care today, but I gently express to the Minister, as I did to the Health Secretary at his Committee appearance, that we need to see action on the ground solving our social care crisis earlier than 2028. In 2023, the National Audit Office told us that nearly four in 10 directors of adult social services were worried about meeting their statutory obligations. On top of that, we have a provider crisis because of this instability. The electorate gave this Government a term of five years to take bold steps to reverse the crisis in our NHS. They rejected the previous Government because they wasted each of their terms over 14 years of failure to enact a solution on social care, leaving people in hospital instead of being able to receive care among family and friends. I look forward to this Government acting on that mandate.