Oral Answers to Questions
Charlotte Nichols Excerpts(8 months ago)
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Charlotte Nichols (Warrington North) (Lab)
The Prime Minister (Rishi Sunak)
This morning I had meetings with ministerial colleagues and others. In addition to my duties in this House, including listening to the Chancellor’s Budget statement, I shall have further such meetings later today.
Charlotte Nichols
The UK used to be a world leader in psilocybin research but, despite the calls of the Home Affairs Committee, leading researchers, charities, veterans’ organisations and the Royal College of Psychiatrists, we have shamefully fallen behind on breakthrough treatments for conditions such as post-traumatic stress disorder and depression, causing misery to millions of people in our country. Can the Prime Minister explain why this policy remains the responsibility of a Home Office that cannot give it the attention it deserves, and why it is okay that American, Canadian and Australian patients can access treatment that British patients cannot?
The Prime Minister
I completely sympathise and understand why people suffering from distressing conditions will want to seek the best possible treatment available, and I thank the hon. Lady for raising the issue. We are committed to ensuring that the UK is a world-leading jurisdiction for pharmaceutical, clinical and other medical research, and we have asked the Advisory Council on the Misuse of Drugs to review barriers to legitimate medical research involving controlled drugs such as psilocybin. I am pleased to tell the hon. Lady that our response to the council’s recommendations will be published as soon as possible.
Budget Resolutions and Economic Situation
Charlotte Nichols Excerpts(1 year, 7 months ago)
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Charlotte Nichols (Warrington North) (Lab)
Thirteen years of Tory Government have seen a sustained fall in living standards across my constituency, accelerated by the disastrous mini-Budget and the Truss mortgage premium. My constituents in Warrington have frankly had enough of a cost of living crisis made in Whitehall. It is no longer just those on the lowest incomes who are feeling this hurt, but many who would previously have considered themselves comfortable on the kind of salary on which they could once have raised a family.
We have seen widespread industrial unrest as the pay and living standards of our junior doctors, nurses, posties, lecturers, railway workers, barristers, police and others have been squeezed, while the Government try to balance the books on their backs. The OBR reports that living standards are expected to fall by 6% this fiscal year and next, as inflation outstrips growth—the largest two-year fall since ONS records began. At my weekly surgeries and my doorstep surgeries across Warrington North, the picture is a depressing one.
This Budget does not meet the ambition that we have for our town or for the country. It commits £400 million to levelling-up partnerships in a range of key Tory marginals, but there is nothing for devolution to Warrington and Cheshire. In fact, any devolution settlement support, according to paragraph 3.118 of the Red Book, is contingent on a model with a
“mayor or directly elected leader”—
something for which there is no local appetite. Why do we need another layer of politicians and bureaucracy to make more of our own decisions about our local priorities, when our existing structures are working?
Warrington North has the second biggest nuclear workforce in the country. I welcome the news on the green taxonomy changes for the nuclear sector that the all-party parliamentary group on nuclear energy, which I co-chair, has been calling for, but constituents in the nuclear sector are already WhatsApping me memes about the small modular reactor competition. First, far from being new, it was already tried and scrapped by George Osborne in 2016. Secondly, there are concerns about the UK’s competitiveness in this sphere against, for example, GE Hitachi, which has just seen a major pre-licensing milestone in Canada, potentially putting our sovereign SMR sector at a disadvantage in such a competition. Having read through the Red Book in the time available, I cannot see any money allocated for Great British Nuclear either, for all the Chancellor’s warm words about its importance in launching it today.
I welcome the support for childcare costs. However, the issue is not just affordability but availability. The timescales for this support mean that many children will be in school before their parents see any benefit at all. Nor does the lack of anything for social care help families who are caring for parents and children or grandchildren at the same time to get back into the workforce. That is not nearly good enough, especially at a time when my local council is having to spend 70% of its budget on statutory care services—a situation that will only get worse over time with an ageing population with increasingly complex care needs.
The announcement of reforms to the medicines approval process is welcome, as it means that patients should receive access to emerging medicines, including psychedelics, sooner than they otherwise might. MDMA and psilocybin are due to receive approval from the US Food and Drug Administration in 2024 and will be approved later this year in Australia. Hopefully, UK patients will gain access simultaneously or soon afterwards. In the meantime, however, we will continue to lose, on average, 18 people a day to suicide, and our veterans and victims of crime will continue to suffer needlessly with post-traumatic stress disorder. The funds that the Chancellor committed today to the Office for Veterans’ Affairs and to the suicide prevention fund, which involves voluntary, community and social enterprise organisations, could be working much harder and going much further if we would only commit ourselves to what colleagues across parties have been calling for: a drug scheduling policy based on evidence, rather than stigma, misinformation and political expediency.
I welcome the measures to support leisure centres—I recently led an Adjournment debate on the need for them—and the differential for draught beer, which will also be greatly welcomed by the all-party parliamentary group on pubs, which I chair. However, while there are aspects that I welcome, this Budget has been lacking in big-vision ideas to get our country moving. Halving inflation does not mean prices coming down; it only means that they rise more slowly. Without a proper pay rise for the country, too many of the essentials of everyday life will still be out of reach for too many, and our local food banks and charity sector will still be stretched far beyond capacity.
There was an opportunity to reform the apprenticeship levy to make it work for businesses, for industry and for apprentices themselves, but this returnerships proposal that no one asked for is what we have instead. That was an opportunity missed. There was also a missed opportunity to improve our bus sector—buses are the most used form of transport in the country—and a missed opportunity to do more for our small businesses: the Federation of Small Businesses has described this Budget as irrelevant to the 5.5 million-strong small business community. There was a further missed opportunity to reform business rates radically to bolster our high streets. However, the biggest missed opportunity of all was the failure to make those who can most afford to pay do just that. A number of companies and sectors, including companies in the oil and gas sector, have made more profit over the last few years than they know what to do with. While my constituents face the highest tax burden in decades, little seems to have been done to tax those giants with the broadest shoulders more.
Sticking plasters are not enough. The Government could have gone much further and been much fairer. Politics is about priorities, and we can see from this Budget today that the people's priorities have been overlooked and millions will understandably be feeling short-changed as a result.
Oral Answers to Questions
Charlotte Nichols Excerpts(1 year, 8 months ago)
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The Prime Minister
I thank my hon. Friend for his support. I share the same desire to stop the boats, for all the reasons we have discussed. He should rest assured that the Home Secretary and I are working intensely and as quickly as possible to bring forward that legislation, because I want what he wants: to ensure that those people who come here illegally will simply not be allowed to stay.
Charlotte Nichols (Warrington North) (Lab)
During recess, my community in Warrington was rocked by the murder of 16-year-old schoolgirl Brianna Ghey. What support will the Prime Minister offer to our community, and to our local schools, so that they can support Brianna’s classmates and her family as we try to heal from this appalling tragedy?
The Prime Minister
I thank the hon. Lady for raising this issue, and express my sympathies to Brianna’s family and friends for what has happened. I know the hon. Lady will be playing her part in her local community in supporting them at this difficult time. I know that the Home Secretary is shortly due to visit the area, and she will be able to discuss with the hon. Lady what support can be provided for the community at this time, and she should know that she will have what she needs from the Government.
Scotland Act 1998: Section 35 Power
Charlotte Nichols Excerpts(1 year, 9 months ago)
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Mr Jack
My right hon. and learned Friend is absolutely right. Devolution is about granting powers, not giving away or ceding them. That is what the devolution Act does. Through that Act, Westminster gave powers to the Scottish Parliament but the Act was very clear, and it kept section 33 and section 35 for when there were conflicts. A conflict has arisen here in terms of adverse effects on UK-wide legislation in the two Acts that will be referred to in the statement of reasons.
Charlotte Nichols (Warrington North) (Lab)
The Secretary of State claims there is a version of the Bill that the UK Government will accept. Indeed, it has been noted by the Chair of the Women and Equalities Committee that the Bill is broadly in line with the recommendations made by the Committee following its inquiry into the Gender Recognition Act. Will the Secretary of State explain why he did not work with counterparts in Holyrood to avoid this unnecessary and unprecedented constitutional collision? Will he make a statement in this House on how the Government will reform the GRA across the UK if they are seeking to block progressive reform in Scotland?
Gender Recognition Reform (Scotland) Bill: Section 35 Power
Charlotte Nichols Excerpts(1 year, 9 months ago)
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Charlotte Nichols (Warrington North) (Lab)
The document that the Government have published is a policy statement, not a legal document—and one so thin that it is absolutely translucent, especially for such an unprecedented unilateral action in the invocation of the section 35 power. Frankly, I have been disgusted by a lot of the tone of today’s debate. I am very interested to hear a lot of people suddenly become massive defenders of equality, including the hon. Member for Don Valley (Nick Fletcher). I remember being in a Westminster Hall debate with him when he said that Dr Who being a woman was turning boys gay, among other ridiculous arguments.
Charlotte Nichols
I will not give way, actually. I think we have heard more than enough—
Madam Deputy Speaker
With regard to the point of order, which obviously the hon. Gentleman was addressing to me to say that he felt that what had been said was incorrect, my response is that if the hon. Lady at any point feels, when she goes back to look at the debate, that what she has said has unintentionally misled the House, she will correct the record. I am taking her word for it that she will do that.
Charlotte Nichols
Thank you very much, Madam Deputy Speaker. On checking Hansard, I see that the hon. Member actually said that Dr Who being a woman was turning boys towards a life of crime. Clearly, it was a matter of misogyny rather than homophobia. However, I am very sorry for having inadvertently misled the House in accusing the hon. Member, in a very legitimate comment that I made about his brand-new respect for our equality legislation, in having made a remark that was misogynist rather than, in fact, homophobic. I apologise for that omission.
Charlotte Nichols
I will not give way; we have heard more than enough from the hon. Member today.
I would like to talk about the substance of the policy statement, because it is an absolute joke. I declare an interest as an LGBT woman—as someone who is myself LGBT and exists—something that has been forgotten entirely in this debate by people who are trying to draw a false distinction between the rights of women and the rights of LGBT people, including trans people.
I am afraid I do not have the time I would like to have to go through all the clauses, which, as I have said, are so flimsy as to be ridiculous—including clause 20, which I am calling the “computer says no” clause because, as the hon. Member for Glasgow Central (Alison Thewliss) pointed out earlier, it says that the law cannot be changed because the computer system could not handle it. The computer system should be changed to abide by the law, not the other way round. These potential adverse impacts are flimsy, this piece of paper is an absolute nonsense, and, as I have said, there is no justification whatsoever for such an unprecedented action as invoking section 35.
Alan Brown (Kilmarnock and Loudoun) (SNP)
First and foremost, this is an attack on devolution. It is an attack on elected Members of the Scottish Parliament, and it is an attack made by the Scottish Secretary, who has never respected the institution of the Scottish Parliament in the first place. He has always thought that Westminster is more important, and that it has primacy over the Scottish Parliament. This is the same Scottish Secretary who tells us that we have the most powerful devolved Parliament in the world, when we do not even have the most powerful devolved Parliament in the UK. The Northern Ireland settlement gave much greater powers in relation to pensions and rights over the Union, to name but two areas.
When we listen to the arguments in the Chamber today, we hear the right-wing Tories standing up and pretending to speak for women’s rights. Right-wing Tories are part of a culture war. Right-wing Tories have the cheek to say that we have manufactured a constitutional debate. How can we have manufactured a constitutional debate when two thirds of those elected to the Scottish Parliament voted for gender recognition reform?
Alan Brown
I cannot give way; we do not have enough time.
This is absolutely grievance politics and a culture war from the Tories. And then we get the “clutching at straws” statement of reasons. Somebody tried to say that this was legal advice, but it is not. Everybody knows that if you pay a lawyer, you can get them to write what you want. That is what this is: a list of bogus reasons for the Scottish Secretary to introduce this section 35 order.
Let us look at the equal pay section, which is unbelievable. It says that transgender people are going to cause problems with equal pay because if somebody transitions and becomes a transgender woman, they might have been on higher pay before and that could affect claims. It also says that someone transitioning could affect somebody else’s equal pay claim because they cannot use that person as a benchmark. Talking about manufactured grievances, you could not make that up. That must happen just now with people who have already got a GRC, so if it does not undermine equal pay settlements just now, how can the GRR undermine equal pay settlements?
The bottom line is this: you know you are on the right side of an argument when the opposite side is that lot over there on the Government Benches. They are comparing trans people to predators, and that is an utter disgrace. You also know you are on the right side of the argument when Amnesty International, Close the Gap, Engender, the Human Rights Consortium, JustRight Scotland, NUS Scotland, One Parent Families Scotland, Rape Crisis Scotland, the Scottish Trades Union Congress, the Scottish Refugee Council, Scottish Women’s Aid, the Scottish Women’s Convention, the Scottish Women’s Rights Centre, the Young Women’s Movement and Zero Tolerance are on the same side as us.
Question put.