Immigration and Home Affairs

Ben Coleman Excerpts

Tuesday 23rd July 2024 Commons Chamber

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

Thank you very much for calling me, Madam Deputy Speaker. It is a great honour for me to follow my hon. Friend the Member for Birmingham Erdington (Paulette Hamilton), who spoke with passion about the NHS and her great expertise in this area, and to follow the hon. Member for Wimbledon (Mr Kohler), who talked about the joys of canvassing, which I found interesting. It has been really lovely to hear so many other fantastic maiden speeches from my hon. Friends.

I am incredibly proud to be standing here as the first ever Labour Member of Parliament for Chelsea and Fulham, and I thank all those voters who put their trust in me.

I realise, with a majority of 152, that that was not everyone, but I also realise that many people there will have voted Labour for the first time and I promise to be on the side of all my constituents.

Boundary changes mean that I follow in the illustrious steps of two people. My Conservative predecessor Greg Hands served 19 years in this House, and for 11 of them he was a Minister. He held senior roles in the Treasury, in Trade and in Business, and he was twice Minister for London. He was also the chair of the Conservative party at one point. He approached his job, as he approached all his jobs, with impressive energy, determination and loyalty to his party, and I know he will be missed by many of his constituents.

I am also delighted to pay tribute to my hon. Friend the Member for the new constituency of Hammersmith and Chiswick (Andy Slaughter), two of whose former wards I now have. I am extremely grateful for his generosity to me, both during the campaign and since. He is an absolute local legend with voters. Plenty of people said, “Well, I’m going to vote Labour, but it has to be Andy, not you.” I am going to try very hard—maybe I will fail—to live up to that local legend, and the challenge and high standards that he has set.

Chelsea and Fulham really is a wonderful place to represent. It runs along the River Thames from just by Charing Cross hospital down to Chelsea bridge. That is three bridges away from this House, if any of you want to go and visit it. A walk of less than an hour takes you from the 150-year-old market in Fulham’s North End Road to the world-famous King’s Road in Chelsea, with its iconic role in pop, art and fashion culture in the swinging ’60s and the punks and the new romantics of the ’70s and ’80s.

There are also four world-class hospitals. We are incredibly lucky to have the Royal Brompton, the Royal Marsden, the Charing Cross hospital and the Chelsea and Westminster hospital. There are too many outstanding schools across the primary and secondary sectors to name. We are also blessed with two premier league teams: Chelsea football club and Fulham, and both of them are steeped in sporting history.

Like so much of London, Chelsea and Fulham is enriched by a diverse community. We have people from African-Caribbean, Somali, Arab and European backgrounds. Indeed, the French MP for Northern Europe—yes, there is a French MP for Northern Europe—told me that two thirds of all the French in this country live in my area and the area represented by my hon. Friend the Member for Kensington and Bayswater (Joe Powell), so it is quite a French area as well.

Chelsea and Fulham is also home to hundreds of Army veterans who have sacrificed for their country, from the residents of Stoll Mansions in Fulham to the Chelsea pensioners at the Royal Hospital. I have to say that championing the Stoll military veterans as they faced losing their community recently was one of my greatest privileges, and I am grateful to the Secretary of State for Defence for visiting them with me and lending his support to the campaign. I know that many of the veterans will be delighted that he now represents veterans in Cabinet, and I hope he will visit them again when they move to their new home in Fulham.

Fulham, together with Hammersmith, has the distinction of being the only place in England where the council—a Labour council—provides social care at home for free. I was responsible for overseeing that as the council’s former cabinet member for health and adult social care, and I very much look forward to joining the debate about the funding of social care across our country.

But against all this, I am afraid there is trouble in paradise. Alongside the great wealth in Chelsea and Fulham, there is also painful poverty. I cannot tell you how grateful I am to all the local charities who provide essential support to the many people in need. Food banks have been mentioned by several hon. Members on both sides of the House during today’s debate. For me, if anything is an indictment of the past 14 years, it is that food banks have become part of the British way of life.

The food bank that serves Fulham today feeds more people in one month than it did in the whole of 2012, when it started. At the food bank that serves Chelsea, demand has gone up by 800% since it opened its doors in 2018. People who are in work are using food banks, as well as children and pensioners. The demand for them is growing, and poverty, locally and nationally, is made much worse by the persistent inequalities, both in Chelsea and Fulham and across our country, not least of race and disability. These are also issues that I feel passionate about and will be pursuing in my time here in this House.

And then we have Charing Cross hospital. I am proud that I helped to save this wonderful hospital when the previous Government tried to sell most of it off. At the time, they promised to give the hospital a floor-by-floor refurbishment. It desperately needs modernisation and rebuilding, and they promised to do so by 2030, but then they broke their promise.

Another problem facing my constituents is that Thames Water constantly dumps sewage into the Thames by Chelsea and Fulham. Last week alone, it just chucked the stuff in for nearly 24 hours. There has been no regulation and no proper controls over the last 14 years.

The wonderful houseboat community down by the river in Chelsea faces an existential threat from a predatory, secretive landlord, and I will be doing more to stick up for that community, too.

I have mentioned the King’s Road, and its residents are very worried about the huge office blocks spoiling the area. Marks & Spencer seems to have become a property developer, not just a purveyor of sausages, sandwiches and underwear.

My constituents are also worried about crime and the lack of neighbourhood policing. High prices and rents are pushing families and young people out of the area and, as it has been so incredibly difficult to build social housing over the past 14 years, thousands of my constituents are living in overcrowded conditions or are waiting years to be offered a secure, genuinely affordable home. This is all in Chelsea and Fulham.

Against that backdrop, the good news for my constituents is that we now have a Labour Government who are determined to renew the country. We have a new approach, we are focusing on growing our economy and we are, thank goodness, resetting our European relationships, which is very much welcomed by my constituents—Chelsea and Fulham is one of the most pro-European constituencies in the country.

The other good news is that my right hon. Friend the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care has already pledged to rebuild and modernise Charing Cross hospital, and the Government have already started cracking down on the water companies. They have started to develop a new child poverty strategy, and they are starting to take back our streets, which my hon. Friend the Member for Birmingham Erdington mentioned—earlier today, my right hon. Friend the Home Secretary set out so well the steps we are taking. People who rent privately will get new rights and protections from this Government, and we will build 1.5 million decent homes in which people can actually afford to live.

As the Government begin their journey of repairing and rebuilding our country, I come back to the words of a good friend of mine, Phil Storey, who runs the food bank that serves Fulham. He said to me the other day, “We want to stop people ever needing food banks. The day we can close our doors because we are no longer needed is the day I dream of.”

I make this pledge to my constituents. As the Member of Parliament for Chelsea and Fulham, working with the Labour Government, I will do all I can to strengthen our economy, to build a fairer, safer and kinder society, and to bring Phil’s dream closer to reality.