Water Safety Education

James Asser Excerpts

Thursday 19th June 2025 Commons Chamber

[James Asser (West Ham and Beckton) (Lab)]

I thank my hon. Friend the Member for Southampton Itchen (Darren Paffey) for securing the debate, and for all the extremely important work that he is doing on this issue. I extend my compliments to his constituent in the Gallery, who we heard at the APPG earlier in the week. Given the circumstances, her campaign is extremely brave, and her words were very inspiring, so I wanted to put my tribute to her on the record too.

I come to this debate because of a situation that occurred within my constituency of West Ham and Beckton very recently, which received quite a lot of press publicity. I do not intend to go into the details—it is still a very fresh event—but I lost an 11-year-old constituent in the River Thames earlier in the spring. That was a huge trauma for her family, and I put on the record—I know the whole House will share in this— my deepest condolences to them. I also extend my congratulations and thanks to the emergency services, search and rescue, and actually local people who stepped in to try to help on that occasion, which obviously had a huge impact on the community too.

This debate is very pertinent for my constituency because I am surrounded by water in east London: I have the Roding to the east, the River Lea to the west and, significantly, the River Thames bordering the south of my constituency. I also have huge amounts of dockland, including the royal docks, which are a very large open space of water, built at a time when we had a lot of shipping. With that comes a lot of open wharves and causeways, many of which are still in use, which is another aspect of water safety. We have reserved industrial spaces, and education is needed on that. People often forget that lots of the Thames is still a working river. We have a lot of industry. At my end, Tate & Lyle and Tarmac use large shipping, in addition to all the other boats that go up and down the river.

Education is therefore hugely important for where I am, including education on safety and a wide range of things. We need to take advantage of the huge opportunity to work with schools, youth clubs, community groups and young people’s groups to try to get that education across. I am lucky to have active sea scouts and sea cadets in my area; those groups touch only a small number of people, but there are people out there who can deliver such education.

I am of an age that I can remember public information films made by the Central Office of Information. That disappeared in 2012 and we do not have the same sort of programming—I see some smiles around the Chamber from Members of a similar age who remember such things. I was taught to cross the road by Kevin Keegan; I remember it was Jimmy who threw his frisbee into the pylon, so I did not do that; and it was the Spirit of Dark and Lonely Water who warned us about still pools. The fact that I can remember all that 40 years down the line—if hon. Members are interested, many such films are now online and often seen as nostalgia—shows that that type of campaigning works because it sticks in the mind.

We seem to lack a national campaign on such issues. Ironically, those campaigns happened in a pre-digital age, but they lend themselves to the age we now live in, with social media, TikTok and all the rest of it. We could produce information to share with schools and youth groups, so that they could take advantage of such a campaign. I hope that we get back to being able to produce such campaigns that could be widely shared, so that children will remember and tell their children further down the line.

A second issue that I would like to touch on, which was raised by my hon. Friend the Member for Salford (Rebecca Long Bailey) but is outside the scope of the Minister for Education, is about statutory duty. At the APPG meeting this week, we were told by a fire chief that there is a lack of statutory duty, which seems like a gap in our services. There have been a number of incidents on waterways in my constituency, both accidents and, sadly, suicide attempts, where the fire brigade attended. The London Fire Brigade is always absolutely magnificent—it turns out and does an exceptional job. However, the fact that there is no statutory duty seems to be a gap to me, so that is an important change that needs to be made.

The hon. Member for Hamble Valley (Paul Holmes) talked about the weather that is currently forecast. The marine policing unit of the Metropolitan Police Service, which receives over 2,000 calls a year on water safety, highlights that the risk grows in the summer and in hot weather. Certainly, near me, at the Royal Victoria Docks, we have children jumping in all the time, so this is a pertinent debate now, and as we move into the summer, with the hot weather, the issue is pressing.

I will finish with a couple of asks for the Front Bench. Can we look at how we can put in place a comprehensive education programme, working with schools but also on a national level, perhaps taking advantage of modern technology? Can we also look at the need for a statutory duty for fire and rescue services, so that it is enshrined in law, as perhaps people expect it is not, but it is not at the moment? By doing that, hopefully we can take a couple of steps towards ensuring that no family has to go through the kind of incident and heartbreak that my constituents saw earlier this spring.