Down Syndrome Bill

Debate between Charles Walker and Ruth Jones

2nd reading
Friday 26th November 2021 Commons Chamber

[Sir Charles Walker (Broxbourne) (Con)]

Thank you, Mr Speaker, for making special provision for my guest today, who is up in the Public Gallery. Corina Gander and I met at 7.15 am in a very cold car park in Cuffley with our walking shoes. As you are aware, Mr Speaker, there are problems with transport today, so we arrived in Moorgate and then spent an hour in the rain getting here, but it is an important occasion and we both wanted to be here. Corina is the mother of Daisy. Daisy has Down’s syndrome, and she is going to be watching this with her mum later tonight on Parliament TV, as will Daisy’s four sisters and her proud grandparents.

I first met Corina nearly two years ago. She came to tell me, in no uncertain terms, that what was happening in Hertfordshire was not good enough; there was not enough support for her and her daughter. I did not know a huge amount about Down’s syndrome then—I know a lot more now—but I said to her, “So what are the problems?” My right hon. Friend the Member for North Somerset (Dr Fox) brilliantly identified them in his introductory speech.

“Fundamentally,” Corina said, “the illness is just not taken seriously. When my daughter was born, she had terrible breathing difficulties. I kept saying to the doctors, ‘My daughter is struggling with her breathing,’ and they said, ‘Well what do you expect, Corina? She has Down’s syndrome.’” Then, one day, a health visitor came who had a relationship with the family, and she said to Corina, a worried mother, “What would you do, Corina, if this was one of your four other daughters?” Corina said to the health visitor, “I’d take her to A&E.” The health visitor said, “Well you know what to do, then, don’t you? I’ll hold the baby; you get your coat. We’re going to A&E.” That child, Daisy, was on life support for a month and then spent another three months in hospital. That is the stigma that my right hon. Friend is trying to address today.

Beyond stigma, my right hon. Friend identified other areas that need to be addressed—fragmented services, for example. At the moment, services are almost always fragmented. A young child will need physiotherapy, which will be in one place. Occupational therapy will be in another place. Speech and language will be elsewhere. Community paediatricians will be in another place. Then there are opticians, audiology and so on. It can be exhausting to navigate specialist services, but particularly so when one has a child who is very demanding of one’s time and other family commitments. We need to make it easier for parents to get the support that they need and, most importantly, their children need.

[Ruth Jones]

The hon. Gentleman is making a powerful speech in support of the Bill. He highlights a very important point about the need for integrated children’s services. At Serennu children’s centre in my constituency, all the services are under one roof, including the voluntary sector, and it is a comfortable place for families to go to. Children are not scared and families are not anxious. Does he agree that that is the best way forward?

Local Clean Air Targets

Debate between Charles Walker and Ruth Jones

Tuesday 20th October 2020 Westminster Hall

[Ruth Jones (Newport West) (Lab)]

Thank you, Sir Charles. It is lovely to be back in Westminster Hall this afternoon and to serve under your chairmanship. It is also a pleasure to be able to speak for Her Majesty’s Opposition in this important debate. It is good to see the Minister in her place. I am sure that we will see a lot more of each other in the coming weeks.

I pay tribute to my hon. Friend the Member for Manchester, Withington (Jeff Smith) for securing the debate and for raising the issue of clean air on behalf of his constituents in south Manchester, the Greater Manchester region and all the people we in the House represent. I know that many other Labour Members would have liked to have been able to contribute to the debate but were in the main Chamber for the Black History Month debate.

This is a timely debate, coming in the wake of Clean Air Day on 8 October. It gives us the opportunity to highlight the importance of clean air, but more importantly to repeat the demand for sustainable, long-term and comprehensive action. Colleagues across the House will know that there are many responsibilities on the Government and on us as parliamentarians, and one of the most important, if not the most important, is our responsibility to protect our environment and preserve our world. A key element of preserving our environment is clean air. It is vital that we remember that our ecosystems are damaged by toxic air and air pollution, as are our waterways and the natural habitats of our wildlife. Of course, there is also the impact on human life, which has been ably mentioned already.

Toxic air contributes to the equivalent of 1,200 deaths a year in Greater Manchester alone, as my hon. Friend the Member for Manchester, Withington mentioned. My hon. Friend the Member for Nottingham East (Nadia Whittome) highlighted the premature deaths in her constituency, too. During oral questions last month, I raised the fact that almost 60% of people in England now live in areas where levels of toxic air pollution exceeded legal limits last year. We cannot go on as we are.

The covid-19 pandemic has devastated families, communities and, of course, our economy. The lockdown that started in March 2020 led to an improvement in air quality across the Manchester city region, like it did in other parts of the country, as a result of the reduction in road traffic and the significant increase in active travel journeys. That showed that better air quality is achievable, and that vehicle emissions are key to reducing nitrogen dioxide exposure. However, the relaxation of travel restrictions since June has led to increasing vehicle flows.

Following a number of legal challenges by ClientEarth in the High Court, the Government have to date directed 61 local authorities to bring nitrogen dioxide levels on local roads within legal limits as soon as possible. Ministers have delegated the responsibility to address nitrogen dioxide compliance to local authorities and have set out the process and timescale for doing so, with local authorities now responsible for local road networks and their own fleets. However, responsibility for the strategic road network lies with Highways England, which has not been directed to reduce nitrogen dioxide on strategic road networks under the same timescale or process. That is mixed messaging, as my hon. Friend the Member for Leeds North West (Alex Sobel) highlighted, and needs sorting, so I hope the Minister will issue a clear instruction to Highways England with regard to air pollution caused by the strategic road network.

We want action, but we want the right action in the right way, weighing up all the factors. That means taking steps to discourage drivers and to charge where necessary on the one hand, and financial support for local authorities and businesses on the other, as my hon. Friend the Member for Cardiff South and Penarth (Stephen Doughty) highlighted. That is vital, because Greater Manchester, for example, is proposing the largest clean air zone outside London, but that ambition is not being met by Tory Ministers in Whitehall. Indeed, the funding provided by Government to date has not matched the scale or ambition of these plans. When the Minister replies to the debate, I hope she will commit the necessary funding to achieve that.

Active travel has an important role to play in developing solutions to this crisis. During the lockdown, walking and cycling played an increasingly important role in essential journeys and exercise, as mentioned by my hon. Friend the Member for Leeds North West. The hon. Members for Stoke-on-Trent North (Jonathan Gullis) and for Stoke-on-Trent Central (Jo Gideon) highlighted the need to reverse the Beeching cuts, in order to increase train travel in a bid to decrease car use. I know it is a priority for my colleague Andy Burnham, the Mayor of Greater Manchester, who has been standing up for his region so well, to secure more walking and cycling as a positive legacy of lockdown and to mitigate against the bounce back to greater reliance on car travel.

The Environment Bill, which has been mentioned by my hon. Friend the Member for Manchester, Withington and which I prefer to call the “missing in action Bill”, should be used to tackle toxic air in England. Disappointingly for many in the sector and out in the country, nothing in the Bill will stop the UK falling behind the EU when it comes to the green agenda and our environment. Indeed, the Government’s air quality plans have been ruled unlawful multiple times. Green Alliance does brilliant work on these issues and I pay tribute to Ruth Chambers of Greener UK and all her colleagues for everything they do. In a recent blog, she noted that

“existing air pollution targets expire in 2030, so it is vital to seize the opportunity now to set new limits, exposure reduction targets and emissions targets for all harmful pollutants.”

In the Chamber last week, the Minister announced that there is now an end date for the Committee stage, which is great. It is good to know the end date, but we need to know the start date, and we need to know it now. The Bill has been missing in action for over 200 days and it is simply not good enough to be told it will return soon. Can the Minister give us a date, once and for all?

We all know that air pollution is a public health crisis. This summer the Asthma UK and British Lung Foundation Partnership surveyed about 14,000 people with a lung condition and found that the vast majority noticed an improvement in their symptoms, likely due to better air quality during lockdown.

Welsh Ministers in the Welsh Government recognise that we must learn from changes in behaviour and design those changes into tackling toxic air pollution levels going forward. Their plan has a big focus on tackling air pollutants from many sources, including reducing emissions from industry, agriculture and the heating of our homes. I want UK Ministers to reach out and engage with ministerial colleagues in the devolved Administrations, because we need a coherent focus across all four nations if we are going to clean our air in the way we need to. It is good to see the hon. Members for Strangford (Jim Shannon) and for Kilmarnock and Loudoun (Alan Brown) here to demonstrate that clean or dirty air knows no boundaries. It goes across the whole UK.

Before I was elected to Parliament, I spent more than 30 years working in the NHS as a physiotherapist, in common with my hon. Friend the Member for York Central (Rachael Maskell). Every day I saw the damage that toxic air can cause to the lungs, health and mobility of people of all ages and from all communities, including those whose lungs are damaged while still in the womb and those suffering from asthma, chronic obstructive pulmonary disease and other serious lung conditions. The task of making air cleaner starts with each of us.

It is important that we are all aware of the air pollution levels in the communities we live in, so we know the local challenges facing us all. That is why the Greater Manchester city region, under the leadership of Andy Burnham and my noble Friend Lady Hughes, is right to be ambitious for the area in the fight to tackle toxic air. I hope the debate, the comments we have heard and the determination of my hon. Friend the Member for Manchester, Withington shows Ministers that we need more than warm words: we need action too.

[Sir Charles Walker (in the Chair)]

Minister, if you require nearly 15 minutes, you can sit down at 3.58 pm and allow the proposer of the debate two minutes at the end. You do not have to speak for 15 minutes if you do not want to, but I thought I would say that to be generous.