Business of the House

Justin Madders Excerpts

Thursday 12th January 2023 Commons Chamber

[Penny Mordaunt]

I encourage the hon. Lady to raise the matter with the Department on 17 January. In advance of BEIS questions, I will certainly ensure that the Secretary of State has heard what the hon. Lady has said.

[Justin Madders (Ellesmere Port and Neston) (Lab)]

When we had that extremely cold weather just before Christmas, I was inundated with messages from constituents. They were contacting me because they could not speak to a human being at the organisations responsible for dealing with their emergencies. It was not just one sector; it was housing, water and energy. My constituents were often confronted with phone lines that no one was answering or directed to websites with chatbots that could only take very basic information. It felt as if the whole country was falling apart, frankly.

We are talking about people who are very vulnerable, sometimes elderly and often unable to access the internet. A whole range of services simply are not set up to deal with these situations. We need a much better system to ensure that those who are most vulnerable can speak to a human being, get information across about the emergency they face and make sure that someone deals with it. Can we please have a debate about ensuring that these customer-facing organisations are in a much better place to deal with these situations?

[Penny Mordaunt]

The hon. Gentleman has raised an extremely important issue, and I think a debate on it would be very well attended. I also think his experiences will be of value to the national resilience teams, which want to ensure that everyone is using good practice. If he writes to either the Cabinet Office or my office with some of his feedback and suggestions, I shall ensure that they are looked at seriously.