Black History Month

Jenny Riddell-Carpenter Excerpts

Thursday 24th October 2024 Commons Chamber

[Jenny Riddell-Carpenter (Suffolk Coastal) (Lab)]

It is an honour to deliver my maiden speech in this debate. May I start by congratulating my hon. Friend the Member for Burton and Uttoxeter (Jacob Collier), or Burton and Utch, for providing such great insight and a touching story of the constituency.

It is an honour and an incredible privilege to stand here today as the Member of Parliament for Suffolk Coastal, a seat that for the first time in its history now has a Labour MP. My journey to this place is, in no small part, down to the dedication and hard work of the incredible local Labour party, an army of dedicated volunteer campaigners who believed it possible when few else did. They worked tirelessly, with a dedication that has inspired and moved me beyond words. I put on the record my gratitude and thanks to each of them for their work, not just in Suffolk Coastal but beyond Suffolk.

I took over the seat from the right honourable Dame Thérèse Coffey, who had represented it since 2010. I would like to thank her for her service to Suffolk Coastal. I know that the election came at a particularly challenging time for Dame Thérèse and her family, and I know that it cannot have been an easy campaign to fight. I send her and her family the warmest of well wishes.

I pay tribute to Dame Thérèse’s predecessor, the right honourable Lord Deben, who is well known to this House as John Gummer. Despite our political differences, Lord Deben is someone I look up to as a role model for what a dedicated and committed constituency MP looks like. In fact, as Suffolk Coastal was the seat I grew up in, I have many memories of Lord Deben from when I was a child. At schools, at fêtes and at many events, it always seemed impossible to meet someone who did not know or had not met the right honourable John Gummer. He remains to this day a dedicated champion for my constituency, and he has been a forthright and vocal advocate for the environment for many decades, since long before it became fashionable. I look forward to taking that work forward myself in Suffolk Coastal. I give a similar commitment to protecting the environment and making sure that we improve nature, increase bio- diversity and do more to clean up our rivers and seas.

When I say that it is a privilege to represent that incredible place, Suffolk Coastal, it is a statement that I do not make lightly. For me, it is a deeply personal responsibility, because I am not just a new MP. I am also a local MP: Suffolk Coastal is where I was brought up. I was raised in Martlesham Heath, just outside Woodbridge. It is the place that shaped me, and I could not be more honoured to represent the community that my family call home.

You may know of Suffolk Coastal, Madam Deputy Speaker, because it is home to some of the most beautiful seaside market towns and villages in our country. Beautiful Southwold, Saxmundham, Aldeburgh, Walberswick and Orford—these are just some of the places in my constituency that bring thousands of people to Suffolk each year and were backdrops of my own childhood. In fact, it is such a special corner of the country that many Members of both Houses, and on both sides, seem to have retired there. My current tally is that eight retired peers are constituents of mine. If the trend continues, we may find that at the next boundary review Suffolk Coastal is renamed Westminster-by-Sea.

I know why each of them is drawn to this special place. It is for the same reason that I freely and frequently boast about the beauty and rich history of Suffolk Coastal. For a small corner of the UK, we have played a huge part in British history across arts, music and culture, as well as defence, agriculture, trade and technology. Southwold, which is now a magnet for tourists, was home to George Orwell in his youth. He took his name from the River Orwell, which marks the southernmost point in my constituency. We are also home to the most important Anglo-Saxon site in the UK, Sutton Hoo. The story of its discovery has been retold on Netflix’s “The Dig”. I recently visited the Sutton Hoo Ship’s Company in Woodbridge and was amazed to see the work of hundreds of volunteers to build a full-size reconstruction of the Sutton Hoo burial ship—a pioneering task to recreate an important piece of our local history.

While my neighbour the hon. Member for Central Suffolk and North Ipswich (Patrick Spencer) can boast of his constituency being home to Ed Sheeran, Suffolk Coastal flies the flag for Benjamin Britten and his partner, the opera singer Peter Pears. If Benjamin Britten and Peter Pears were alive today, they would be celebrating Black History Month and using the arts and music to tell the stories that matter locally and globally. Archives held in the Red House—their former home in Aldeburgh, which is open to the public—show that Benjamin Britten stood in solidarity with the African National Congress during the pivotal trials of 1963.

Suffolk Coastal’s contributions to the UK are evident today. We are proud to be the engine of growth for the region. We are home to the port of Felixstowe, the United Kingdom’s largest container port, and we boast of being home to BT’s Adastral Park, a national centre of digital innovation with more than 150 businesses in the tech cluster. Although we are proud to host big businesses, we also have a unique entrepreneurialism that is deep-rooted in each of our communities. Across Felixstowe, Leiston, Saxmundham, Woodbridge and beyond, we have a strong community of business owners and entrepreneurs. In fact, across the Suffolk coast last year, we saw 54% growth in microbusinesses, more than 10 times the national average.

For all its charm and beauty, however, there is much that lies beneath, hiding in plain sight in our beautiful seaside towns and charming villages. We have a special educational needs and disabilities crisis that is no less severe in Suffolk Coastal than it is across the rest of Suffolk and the east of England. We have real deprivation in some of our rural towns. This rural poverty cuts across all age groups: we have young families struggling with the cost of living, we have people struggling to access and stay in work, and we have an older population who are often isolated in rural communities, with few or no bus services to connect them to the amenities and health services that they need most.

Next week will be my mum’s 80th birthday, but she does not know that we will be celebrating her. She does not know that I am giving this speech today or indeed that her daughter is the MP for the place that she called home for so long. She has no idea that I am advocating for greater support for the disease that has taken her from us. In Suffolk Coastal, we have one of the highest rates of dementia in our country. I have no choice but to advocate for the fight against that disease, because I have seen at first hand, up close and personal, how terrible it is.

Two years ago, I had to make the heartbreaking decision to move my mum into care—to pack her bags and drive her to her first care home. I thought and perhaps hoped that that day would be a low point—that it would be my own rock bottom in my journey to supporting mum—but it was just the beginning of a year-long struggle to get mum into the right care. She was kicked out of three care homes and ended up in hospital for six weeks, taking up a bed in a ward while the system tried to find her a suitable home. She lasted three months at the next care home before I started a one-woman campaign to try to get her sectioned. I would not wish that experience on anyone. Trying to get someone sectioned is—heartbreakingly—an act of love, because you know it is the last-ditch, desperate attempt to get the help and medical support that your loved one needs.

Luckily, today that is all behind us, and mum is now safe and well, cared for in a care home, but the crisis for other families is still very much alive. Since I have been elected to this place, I have lost count of the number of times that desperate families have reached out to me with an all too familiar tale. It is these things that fuel my determination to make every day in this place count and ensure that I speak up for those who have been forgotten and left behind or do not have a voice to speak up for themselves. I look forward to playing my part in Parliament.