Sir David Amess Adjournment Debate

Debate between Caroline Nokes and Kevin McKenna

Thursday 12th September 2024 Commons Chamber

[Kevin McKenna (Sittingbourne and Sheppey) (Lab)]

Thank you, Madam Deputy Speaker, for calling me to address the House for my first speech, and for making time available for so many of us to make our first speech today. I particularly congratulate the hon. Member for Epsom and Ewell (Helen Maguire): the story about her child in intensive care touched me very deeply, as an intensive care practitioner. I can see that she is going to be a fantastic advocate for our armed forces and for the things they need to serve the country well.

In passing, I must mention Lord Darzi’s report, which my right hon. Friend the Health Secretary presented to the House today—not because of the content of the report, but because in 2015 I was honoured to become a Darzi fellow. Lord Darzi set up his fellowship programme to bring clinicians like me, a nurse, into clinical leadership, to ensure that the NHS and the health system are led by clinicians. I am not sure that the plan was to get us all into the Houses of Parliament, but I am the first Darzi fellow here and I think there will be quite a few more.

I am honoured to speak in this debate in memory of Sir David Amess, whose constituency of Southend West can be seen from mine of Sittingbourne and Sheppey—we see the beautiful vista of Southend, which is now a city, across the Thames. Over the past few months, during the campaign and afterwards, there have been several times when I have looked over at Southend and taken a moment to reflect on the manner and the tragedy of Sir David’s death and what it means for all of us serving here in the House.

It is a great blessing of my constituency that, amid our busy, traffic-laden towns, we have these beautiful vistas down the Thames and the Medway estuary. We have broad, flat salt marshes meeting big skies—places that you can escape to and properly reflect on everything that matters in life. During the election campaign, I asked my constituents what they valued most in the constituency, and it was that proximity to nature that kept coming up. They mentioned the wide-open estuary waters of the Thames and Medway—several of my Medway colleagues are in their places today—the many sites of special scientific interest and the nature reserve at Elmley. Now that Members are spending time in London, they might want to pop down for a hot yoga weekend—it’s a whole thing.

However—so many Members have said something similar when describing their seat—that is only half the story. The other half is the still proudly industrial town of Sittingbourne. Its character and location challenge many people’s preconceptions of Kent. Sittingbourne’s twin on the Isle of Sheppey, Sheerness-on-Sea, has busy docks—docks that, hopefully, will become only busier as the opportunities for growth, construction and new green industries are realised by this Government. Sittingbourne and Sheppey is perfectly located to take advantage of all that development.

My job is not only to argue for our place in the rebuilding of Britain, but to ensure that my constituents see real social, economic, health and wellbeing benefits from the opportunities. The factors that led to the foundations of our towns being laid centuries ago fit the way that technological, industrial and transport strategies are all pointing now. Sittingbourne straddles the main road from Dover to London and is connected directly by water, road and rail to Sheerness docks on Sheppey. This is what made the Saxon kings of Kent grab the land and claim it as their terra regis. This is something that the residents of Milton Regis are very proud to remind me of—that it is a royal town in the middle of Sittingbourne.

It was those same routes that allowed the town of Queenborough to develop as a major port. Tucked behind Sheppey is the safe waterway—and major trading route—from London through to the continent and the rest of the world. Those routes are also what enabled Sittingbourne to develop a major brick-building industry in the 19th century. It produced more bricks and had more people working in it than the potteries in Staffordshire. Those bricks were largely used to build London. Many town houses in the 19th century, Buckingham Palace and many of the buildings on this parliamentary estate will have been built with the clay and bricks from Sittingbourne. Our water and transport gives us the opportunity to produce green energy and bring about greener ways of travelling. That will benefit Sittingbourne and Sheerness in the future. Peel Ports at Sheerness is a major importer of construction materials for the south of England. With investment to restore our rail freight links and an ambition to once again use our water routes, we can be at the heart of a green revolution.

But there is more to a place than land and water. A place is made by people. What will ensure that the people of my constituency get the benefits that they are crying out for as a result of growth and rebuilding is the strength of our local communities and the collective action that comes from grassroots organisations. As we move more services out of hospitals to the community and try to mend the broken sense of cohesion in our society, these community actors will be key. There are great organisations, including Seashells nursery in Sheerness, which holds true to the course taken by Sure Start centres, with their now proven benefits, although they are sadly under threat of closure, and Wiggles children’s nursery, which has partnered with Sheppey’s Range Rovers football club to create a multi-generational facility that will massively boost the health of the neighbourhood.

There are also people coming together, on the island and the mainland, to form progressive men’s mental health peer support groups, including Men-Talk.UK in Sheppey and Sittingbourne. A team of volunteers resurrected the Sittingbourne carnival this year after several years’ gap to ensure that its tradition of more than 130 years does not die, but instead will go from strength to strength. There is Swale food bank, and underpinning so many of the voluntary organisations in my constituency is Swale Community and Voluntary Services, which fosters lots of organisations, helping them to get started, get organising and help their communities.

Part of the reason for that depth of community co-operation is that my constituency faces the challenge of having some of the most deprived parts of Kent and the south-east. Unfortunately, a big driver for that is the very geography that otherwise brings in so many benefits and opportunities. As Sheppey is an island, with only one point in the west that connects to the rest of England, there are pockets of isolation, and when the two bridges go down, as sadly they have all too often of late, people cannot get off Sheppey to go to work or school, or on to Sheppey to deliver services in Sheppey’s hospitals, schools, docks and three prisons. All that impacts not just Sheppey but Sittingbourne and the surrounding villages.

Both my predecessors worked to overcome those entrenched challenges. I pay tribute to my immediate predecessor, Gordon Henderson, who many here know well, for his work persuading his party when they were in power to invest in technical skills training on the island and expand Sheppey College. My Labour predecessor, Derek Wyatt, secured the funding for a permanent fixed bridge to the island, the Sheppey crossing, to overcome the problems of the old Kingsferry bridge, which is only a few metres away and has to be raised several times a day to let ships through, to link the paper mills and the docks. Both of them believed in the enormous potential of the area, but there is a lot more to do.

It is a professional habit of intensive care nurses that we are inveterate fiddlers and fixers. We like to help people, and we like to keep busy doing so. Now that I have swapped adjusting ventilator settings and syringe drivers for work in public policy, however, I need to find new ways to keep busy. I will keep working with people in Sittingbourne and Sheppey to bring them together, and will work collaboratively at trying to fix things for the better, but there is one thing in the constituency that I assure you, Madam Deputy Speaker, I will not be fiddling with: the SS Richard Montgomery, a wrecked world war two cargo ship sunk just off Sheerness, which is packed with something like 1,400 tonnes of high explosives. Most experts feel that as long as the ship is not disturbed, the seawater will gradually inactivate those explosives, so if they are ever disturbed enough to trigger, any fireworks would be minor. However, there is a minority view that if something triggered all the explosives to go off at once, the resulting explosion would not just inundate the whole of Sittingbourne and Sheppey but send a 5-metre tsunami back up the Thames, all the way to central London, swamping the Palace of Westminster—giving us all very wet feet, and most of the MPs in the south-east and London an awful lot of extra casework.

Finally, I thank my constituents again for putting their faith in me; the campaigners and activists who helped me to get elected; my parents and siblings, who have always shown how proud they are of me; and most of all, my husband Lee, who I could not have got this far in life without, and who is a true partner to me in everything that we do.

[Madam Deputy Speaker (Caroline Nokes)]

I call Manuela Perteghella to make her maiden speech.