Future of the Post Office

Kieran Mullan Excerpts

Wednesday 13th November 2024 Commons Chamber

[Gareth Thomas]

I agree with my hon. Friend that we need to see a faster roll-out of banking hubs. Given that the Conservative party sat back and did nothing while 9,500 bank branches closed, the urgency of the task of rolling out banking branches and improving the banking offer through the post office is acutely felt by my Department.

[Dr Kieran Mullan (Bexhill and Battle) (Con)]

The post office in Bexhill provides vital banking and other services to my constituents, and I have already been contacted by people concerned about its possible closure. Can the Minister ensure that the consultations he keeps mentioning include local communities and service users, and can he guarantee, given Labour’s manifesto commitment to strengthen the post office network, that nothing will be done to reduce the scope of post office services available to my constituents, or the time when they are available?

[Gareth Thomas]

I can be absolutely clear with the hon. Gentleman: I said no decision had been made on any individual directly managed branch, and that is absolutely true. We are also clear that sub-postmasters, trade unions and communities will have to be consulted about the future of directly managed branches. We want an improvement in the services that post offices can provide; that is one of the reasons for our work on banking services with the Post Office going forward.

Post Office Horizon Scandal

Kieran Mullan Excerpts

Thursday 18th July 2024 Commons Chamber

[Justin Madders]

I thank the hon. Member for his question, and join him in praising Lord Arbuthnot’s work in this area. As of 31 May, £222 million has already been paid out in compensation. There have actually been significant interim payments as well. We understand that, while this is a very large scheme, it is important that we get early payments, so I assure the hon. Member that interim payments are a very large part of this programme.

[Dr Kieran Mullan (Bexhill and Battle) (Con)]

The legislation that we passed was a blanket measure. It might be clear to us who is or is not included, but for the individuals affected it will not necessarily have been clear. Will the Minister update the House on the progress that has been made in identifying them and writing to them to confirm that their convictions have been quashed?

[Justin Madders]

I thank the hon. Member for his important question. We have been working closely with colleagues in the Ministry of Justice to identify those people who are affected by the legislation, and they will be contacted in due course if they have not been already.

Covid-19: Response and Excess Deaths

Kieran Mullan Excerpts

Thursday 18th April 2024 Commons Chamber

[Sir Christopher Chope]

I agree that the benefits outweigh the risks, but I do not think we have ever had a system in this country where we license drugs on the basis that they will do more harm than good to those who take them. If the drugs are potentially significantly harmful to a large number of patients, those drugs do not get their licence—and why should they?

[Dr Kieran Mullan (Crewe and Nantwich) (Con)]

With respect, that is exactly what we do. Antibiotics cause anaphylactic reactions that kill people. We give antibiotics to people knowing that a very small portion of them will be killed by them but, overall, they save many more lives than they take. That is why they get a licence.

[Sir Christopher Chope]

The key question is: do the people who are being prescribed the antibiotics know that there is a risk that they will die as a result of them being prescribed? If so, they are told that, but nobody who was affected by the covid-19 vaccines was told that they were anything other than absolutely safe and effective. That is the basis upon which a lot of the litigation will be founded.

--- Later in debate ---

[Sir Christopher Chope]

I am most grateful to the hon. Gentleman for bringing his scientific expertise to the debate, because I am no scientist; I am a mere lawyer.

[Dr Mullan]

May I try to add some further clarity? There are actually a range of side effects, many of which occur over time. Ibuprofen, for instance, is another medicine that we might consider safe and call safe, and a large number of people take it, but eventually, after many years, some will suffer a stomach bleed that causes them to pass away as a result of taking too much ibuprofen over time, although that was medically allowed and considered to be safe. I am afraid that the attempt to give a scientific explanation is based on a flawed understanding of medicines and side effects, which has been demonstrated by numerous people on the other side of the debate.

[Sir Christopher Chope]

I will not be able to adjudicate on whether my hon. Friend or the hon. Member for Kirkcaldy and Cowdenbeath (Neale Hanvey) is right, but I look forward to my hon. Friend’s being able to make his own speech and to its being subjected to scrutiny by the hon. Gentleman. That is a spectacle to which I think we are all looking forward.

--- Later in debate ---

[Graham Stringer]

No, I am not surprised about that. Inquiries take a long time and their reports and recommendations often gather dust. I have never made this point before, and I hope I am not going off-piste too much, Madam Deputy Speaker, but every time there is an horrific murder of a child we get a report with 90-odd recommendations, and the question is: does that protect the next child? No, it does not. I do not believe that these inquiries do. We need serious cultural change in many of these organisations, rather than another report on something. That is an easy thing to say and a very difficult thing to achieve.

Let me come on to the other part of the debate, which is about excess deaths and the number of deaths. It appears that just over 200,000 people were killed in this country by, or died of, covid. I had my doubts about these figures from the beginning. On a number of occasions, right from the start of covid, the Science and Technology Committee heard from statisticians. We had Sir Ian Diamond and Professor Spiegelhalter in to talk to us about the statistics. We heard from people from what is now the UK Health Security Agency but was then a named part of the NHS. We asked them whether they had the statistics on the difference between people who died from covid and those who died with it. If someone was dying of cancer and went into hospital, there was a fair chance that they would have got covid, because there was not perfect protection within hospitals. Such a person would then be registered as having been a covid death, but clearly they were going to die of cancer. From the very beginning, that obscured the statistics.

[Dr Mullan]

A number of statistics were used to profile the causes of death during the pandemic, but ultimately the most reliable statistics come from the death certificates, where a clinician has to make a judgment about whether something was a cause or an association. Those figures are reliable, and they match and mirror the other figures. So we have to be careful about disparaging the statistics that were used to monitor the profile of the pandemic over time in the rapid way we needed and the more authoritative and credible figures that do demonstrate quite a close match and help in genuinely understanding who did and did not die from covid.

[Graham Stringer]

The hon. Gentleman makes a fair point, but I happen to know that in some local authorities, instructions went out to the people who were registering deaths essentially to say, “If there is a cough involved in this, we want it down as covid.” There was a different process because the health service was not working under normal—[Interruption.] If the hon. Gentleman wants to correct me, I am happy to allow him to do so.

[Dr Mullan]

To come to that conclusion, one has to say that individual clinicians joined in a conspiracy to lie about what was on a death certificate. We can cast these aspersions, but someone has to fill that certificate in and I do not accept that individual doctors deliberately misled with what was on someone’s death certificate—that is what the hon. Gentleman is suggesting.

[Graham Stringer]

I am not suggesting that at all. I am suggesting that at that time, when it was difficult to examine people because there was a distance between clinicians and the people who had suffered death, there was a temptation and a view that covid should go on the death certificates. I suggest no conspiracy, though. I do not believe in conspiracies.

--- Later in debate ---

[Dr Mullan]

Would the hon. Gentleman inform the House, in what is normally done, what percentage of medicines are normally subjected to a longitudinal study before they are put on the market?

[Neale Hanvey]

I am sorry, but I did not quite catch the hon. Gentleman’s question.

[Dr Mullan]

Can the hon. Gentleman tell the House what percentage of medicines that normally go to market are subjected to a longitudinal study, which is what he is talking about, before that is done?

[Neale Hanvey]

That was not actually the point I was making. I was making the point that any clinical trial, whether something is ruled in or ruled out, is subject to GCP guidelines, and it is up to the medical research ethics committee to sign off the protocol.

[Dr Mullan]

indicated dissent.

[Neale Hanvey]

Well, the hon. Gentleman can shake his head, but that is my experience. I worked at University College London Hospitals and the Royal Marsden, and those are the principles that we applied in such a context. I can only speak to my experience. I am not a member of the ABPI, so I cannot give him those types of data. I am talking about GCP as a general principle. If he does not believe in GCP as a general principle, that is a different discussion.

[Neale Hanvey]

I thank the hon. Lady for her question. I think we all understand the situation that we were in. I am not using a retrospectoscope to say that things should not have been done in the way they were done. However, they should have been conducted absolutely in accordance with GCP guidelines, and that is the fundamental crux of the matter. I am not suggesting for a moment that that was not the spirit in which the various companies entered into this, but we are talking about—

[Dr Mullan]

Will the hon. Gentleman give way?

[Neale Hanvey]

Will the hon. Gentleman let me finish the point I am making?

I am sorry, but I have now forgotten the point I was going to make to the hon. Lady. I do not think anybody entered into this to do the wrong thing, but there are fundamental questions about how we move things forward now and whether harm was inflicted as part of the administration of these agents.

[Dr Mullan]

Will the hon. Gentleman give way?

[Neale Hanvey]

I will give way one more time.

[Dr Mullan]

I am very grateful. I raise this because the hon. Member for North West Leicestershire (Andrew Bridgen) made a point about timelines, saying that the trial was done in eight weeks and asking how the vaccine could possibly be safe. The reason why I mentioned longitudinal studies is that a common deliberate attempt to mislead people about what went on with the vaccine is to suggest that, because the trial was done over a short period of time, it could not possibly have been done correctly. Typically, trials take a long time because it takes a long time to recruit the right number of patients and to do the work. In such a trial, the same number of patients go through it over a longer period, but that does not change the baseline data, which is based on how many patients there are. We do not typically use longitudinal studies, and that vaccine trial was done by using a lot of people in a short space of time to create the same amount of evidence.

[Neale Hanvey]

I thank the hon. Gentleman for that clarifying point. People I have spoken to who were involved in those clinical trials have raised serious and significant concerns about the way that their experience after the drug was administered to them, and the impact that it had on them in an acute way, was either minimised or written out of trial data. That is a serious allegation, and everyone should be interested in understanding the detail. It is certainly not what I would understand would fit within the principles of GCP, and there are serious questions about how trial studies were conducted. As the hon. Member for North West Leicestershire said, the longitudinal element of that was impossible—we are now seeing that—but that does not mean we can ignore it, absolutely not. The principles I have been outlining are there because they are the basis on which good science is established and based.

Let me move to some of the questions that we must raise and answer today, openly and transparently, and with full access to ONS record-level data. I am not saying that that should be disclosed to all and sundry, but surely the Government cannot defend the position that they are not willing to release that information to interested clinicians and clinical academics as a minimum. Those are the people who need to interrogate the data. It is of little relevance to me—I do not have the means or academic ability to interpret it—but it is something that interested clinical academics should have access to.

Let me move on to what we know about some of the issues surrounding mRNA technology. We know that it does not replicate locally, as we were assured it would do on launch. It metastasises to distant tissue, and replicates spike protein systemically distant from the site of administration. That is problematic for a number of reasons. According to the University of London Professor of Oncology, and principal of the Institute for Cancer Vaccines and Immunotherapy, Professor Angus Dalgleish, this has precipitated various serious and sometimes fatal consequences due to antibody development mediated by the spike protein. I will not go into the detail of that, but at a meeting convened by the hon. Member for North West Leicestershire, Professor Dalgleish told us that the UK Government and their agencies are in serious denial about this issue, resulting in many deaths being poorly understood.

Let me give a couple of examples. Vaccine-induced immune thrombotic thrombocytopenia is one of the principal causes of blood clot formation, which can cause stroke, pulmonary emboli, and other cardiac-related events including heart attacks, all of which can be life-limiting or fatal. Another antibody linked to the spike protein exerts an effect on myelin, and is associated with Guillain-Barré syndrome and transverse myelitis, which is a swelling around the spinal cord. Professor Dalgleish believes that that constitutes medical negligence, because the facts are there for all to see. He contends that many deaths are as a direct result of unnecessary vaccination. Furthermore, he advises that there are a greater number of yellow cards in MHRA for covid vaccines than for all other vaccines recorded, and nothing has really been done.

In a recent written answer to me, it was confirmed that the MHRA has received 489,004 spontaneous suspected adverse drug reaction reports relating to the covid-19 vaccine, up to and including 28 February this year. Across the United Kingdom, 2,734 of those reports were associated with a fatal outcome. Of course the true number is unknown—that is the nature of yellow card reporting, as only a fraction of adverse events are reported—and that is probably because of limited public awareness about some of the potential consequences and complications of vaccines, and the well-understood under-reporting of those adverse events. That is important, because the yellow card system is a key element of safe and effective clinical care. If things are not being evaluated properly, I can think of no greater betrayal of the MHRA’s clinical governance responsibility. I suggest that accountability for that must be swift and decisive. The rigorous assessment of these data is essential and must be actioned urgently. Will the Minister now engage with the MHRA and invite it to come to the House to explain the facts on these reports?

Another issue, which arises from a further written question that I tabled, relates to the role of the MHRA. It has a crucial role—in fact, it is a statutory function—to provide post-marketing surveillance and to operate the yellow card system, but the Minister responded to my question about the assessment of the potential implications of the BMJ article “Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine is ‘likely’ responsible for deaths of some elderly patients, Norwegian review finds” by stating:

“The MHRA communicates safety advice based upon consideration of the totality of evidence from all relevant information sources, rather than the strengths and limitations of individual data sources.”

Surely, a fundamental step in any meta-analysis of published data is to interrogate the robustness of those data and for the public to have confidence that that is happening.

That point links right back to where I started, on the Cass report. One of the fundamental failings that the report identified was circular citation among various different organisations. They were validating one another’s position to create a false impression that there was an evidence base for the practice they were involved in. If the MHRA will say, “We do not interrogate the data when we do a meta-analysis,” who does? Who will validate the data? If I can hand over to the MHRA a whole load of numbers and it will just count them and accept that I have said my methodological rigour is robust, that is not good enough as far as I am concerned.

The Minister’s response to my written question was that the MHRA does not

“assign causality at the level of individual reports,”

as that is not its responsibility. If that is the case, whose responsibility is it? Who is interrogating the data and making that decision? If no one is, how can we get from correlation to a developed picture of causation? That is an essential step. It raises fundamental questions about that responsibility and the reliability of the data that the MHRA is relying on. If we are to learn anything from the general implications of the Cass report, we must have a clear steer from the MHRA on how these fundamental scientific principles will be observed and upheld.

I will canter through some important published evidence, which comes back to the correlation/causation discussion. In a 2021 study looking at cardiac inflammatory markers in patients receiving mRNA vaccines, Steven Gundry observed that mRNA vaccination numerically increased markers

“previously described by others for denoting inflammation on the endothelium and T cell infiltration of cardiac muscle”

in a patient population receiving the vaccine. A 2022 study by Fraiman et al. noted that the

“excess risk of serious adverse events”

identified in their study pointed

“to the need for formal harm-benefit analyses”.

That suggestion is wholly consistent with the principles set out in the declaration of Helsinki and is an ethical imperative.

In 2023, a pre-print Lancet study by Nicolas Hulscher et al., including leading cardiologist Peter McCullough and Yale epidemiologist Harvey Risch, reviewed 325 autopsies after covid vaccination and found that 74% of the deaths were attributable to the vaccine. That study, which was published online, was then swiftly removed, allegedly for issues with ideological rigour. I wonder whether it was the MHRA that did the assessment of its rigour. Surely those data and findings—however problematic some of the methodology might have been—demand further scrutiny, not removal.

A December 2023 Lancet Regional Health study by Jonathan Pearson-Stuttard et al. examined excess mortality in England post the covid-19 pandemic and the implications for secondary prevention. It stated:

“Many countries, including the UK, have continued to experience an apparent excess of deaths long after the peaks associated with the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020 and 2021. Numbers of excess deaths estimated in this period are considerable.”

It noted that

“overall trends tend to be consistent across the various methods.”

It continued:

“The causes of these excess deaths are likely to be multiple…Further analysis by cause and by age- and sex-group may help quantify the relative contributions of these causes.”

I ask again: should we not at least be curious about this?

The study continued:

“The greatest numbers of excess deaths in the acute phase of the pandemic were in older adults. The pattern now is one of persisting excess deaths which are most prominent in relative terms in middle-aged and younger adults, with deaths from CVD causes and deaths in private homes being most affected.”

That is a completely different clinical picture. It continued:

“Timely and granular analyses are needed to describe such trends and so to inform prevention and disease management efforts.”

Documents recently disclosed as part of a freedom of information lawsuit against the US Food and Drug Administration indicate that the agency was aware that the safety monitoring system for Pfizer’s covid-19 vaccine was “not sufficient” for assessing associated heart conditions when it licensed the company’s vaccine. Those documents also reveal numerous manufacturing concerns with Pfizer batches that were released to the public and show that the FDA knew about a phenomenon known as vaccine-associated enhanced diseases in those who were vaccinated and experienced breakthrough covid-19.

Let us move on to what we do not know. We have had no real progress on the points raised in the debate, particularly on record-level data. We need either that data to be released to clinical academics and others or a cogent explanation for why that is not happening. Why were those concerns kept hidden by the FDA? Are similar concerns or issues being hidden by the UK Government? Some of the points made about the delay in the MHRA taking action on clinical impacts is relevant to that point.

According to a House of Commons Library briefing, the Government-operated vaccine damage payment scheme, which has been discussed in both this debate and the previous one, provides only a one-off tax-free payment, which is currently a modest £120,000, to applicants where a vaccine has caused severe disablement. Data on VDPS claims relating to covid-19 vaccination is not routinely published, so we do not have particular metrics that establish how many claims are being made against those vaccines.

The most recent data is from September 2023. According to the NHS Business Services Authority, at that time it had received 7,160 claims relating to covid-19. Following medical assessment, 142 claims—just under 2%—were awarded, and 3,030 were rejected. A further 192 claims were found to be “invalid”. We need to understand why that was. What are claims being measured against and who is interpreting the clinical assessment information? We must also ask whether the exclusion criteria are reliable, given the concerns raised in the debate.

Based on the data that I have here, there are currently 3,796 unresolved claims, 1,010 of which have been unresolved for more than six months. If the 142 successful claims receive the full payment, the total cost will be around £17 million. If there are a further 177 successful claims from the unresolved cases, the associated cost will be a further £21 million. I am advised that the Government set aside some funding for this issue, but this has the hallmarks of the contaminated blood scandal written all over it. We must get ahead of the game and make sure that people get the compensation that they desperately need at a time when it is important to them.

There is another question: why are the Government so willing to pick up the tab on vaccine injury, however inadequate the scheme is, given the fatalities and the significant life-limiting impact on the victims? These concerns have been amplified significantly following the publication in The Spectator Australia of an account by genomics scientist Kevin McKernan of his accidental discovery. It states:

“While running an experiment in his Boston lab, McKernan used some vials of mRNA Pfizer and Moderna Covid vaccines as controls. He was ‘shocked’ to find that they were allegedly contaminated with tiny fragments of plasmid DNA.”

His concern has been considered further by Professor Angus Dalgleish, who noted that the contaminant, simian virus 40, is

“a sequence that is ‘used to drive DNA into the nucleus, especially in gene therapies’ and that this is ‘something that regulatory agencies around the world have specifically said is not possible with the mRNA vaccines’. These SV40 promotors are also well recognised as being oncogenic”—

or cancer-inducing genetic material. Other scientists have confirmed those findings. Professor Dalgleish further notes:

“To put it bluntly, this means that they are not vaccines at all but a…Genetically Modified Organism that should have been subject to totally different regulatory conditions and certainly not be classed as vaccines.”

Worryingly, Professor Dalgleish also notes that oncologists have contacted him from across the world, and the consensus is that this is thought to be precipitating relapse in melanoma, lymphoma, leukaemia and kidney cancers. He concludes with the following warning:

“To advise booster vaccines, as is the current case, is no more and no less than medical incompetence; to continue to do so”—

with his cited evidence—

“is medical negligence which can carry a custodial sentence.”

--- Later in debate ---

[Maria Caulfield]

The hon. Gentleman may have missed my last sentence before his intervention. I said that the ONS data shows that in every week in 2024 so far, we have had negative excess deaths. That goes specifically to his point.

We are not complacent, though. As I set out in previous debates, when we have seen those rises in excess deaths—and we have seen significant excess deaths—we have looked at that data to see the cause behind it, whether it is the vaccine, covid, or other factors. We have been working so hard, and I am really pleased that we are now starting to see negative excess deaths.

Let me highlight some of the work that we have been doing in looking at those figures. We had an incident of high flu prevalence in 2022, with a peak of 31.8% of flu tests being positive. That is highly likely to be because we locked down the country for two years and people’s immune systems were not used to flu. That is why, last winter, we brought forward our flu vaccine, and extended it the year before to the over 65s; we recognised that people’s immunity to flu and respiratory illnesses was low because we had locked them down. I think that we need to be honest about that. This winter, as a result, we have seen fewer admissions and fewer deaths from flu and respiratory illnesses.

We have also seen challenges with other health conditions, such as diabetes and cardiac disease, for which people would routinely have come forward for checks. Routine treatments and access to appointments are difficult even now, given the backlog of examinations and tests that need to happen. When we looked at this, we saw that last year, the rate of deaths from cardiovascular disease was 2% higher than expected, with there having been more than 2,200 excess deaths.

That is why we are reinvesting in our NHS health check. It was on pause during covid, when people could not get their blood pressure or cholesterol checked and could not go on smoking prevention programmes. We restarted those, and as a result, excess deaths from cardiac disease are starting to fall. We want to use the opportunity to roll out our new digital health checks. We recognise that access to GPs is sometimes difficult, but this roll-out is expected to deliver an additional 1 million checks in the first four years. We also have a £10 million pilot to deliver cardiovascular checks in the workplace. Again, that is about making it as easy as possible for people to get checked. We have our Pharmacy First roll-out as well. That is all for general health purposes. We know that all these things contributed to excess death rates.

I want to touch on the crux of the matter, which is the covid vaccine; that has come through in all these debates. I was not a Health Minister at the time, so I did not have to make these difficult decisions, but the hon. Member for Blackley and Broughton is absolutely right: as the pandemic preparedness Minister, I want the findings of the inquiry. I have to make difficult decisions now about potential future pandemics that may never happen, but could happen tomorrow—we just do not know. The results of the inquiry with regard to lockdowns, face masks and vaccines will all be really useful information, and at the moment, I am not much the wiser on those results.

On module 4, I want to see any evidence about vaccine safety, because that is how we learn. I think we are all singing from the same hymn sheet. We want to do the best, but during the pandemic, when we watched TV footage from around the world, and the media were often pushing us to lock down harder, faster and longer, we had to make difficult decisions without the benefit of hindsight.

I went back to the wards during covid, and I looked after covid patients who were being treated for cancer. We lost many of them, and we lost a number of staff, too. I have seen this from both sides of the fence.

[Dr Mullan]

Of all the concerning points that the hon. Member for North West Leicestershire (Andrew Bridgen) made in his opening speech, particularly abhorrent was the suggestion that people who were not eligible for a ventilator were essentially condemned to death. That is a deeply disturbing thing to say, and it does not reflect my experience. I was privileged to volunteer on the frontline, as the Minister did, and I saw staff battling as best they could to save people, using all the medical treatments available, whatever the patient’s age. Will the Minister join me in paying tribute to those staff who worked so hard to save as many lives as they could?

[Maria Caulfield]

Absolutely, and I thank my hon. Friend for his work during those difficult times. We did not have a vaccine in those days, and we did not know how long covid was going to last. I reassure the relatives who are listening to this debate that we treated every single patient in the best way we could. If they needed a ventilator, we often had to ship them out of hospital to get them to a ventilator, but they got one. If they did not need a ventilator, we treated them. We did not leave people to die, and I reassure relatives who might think that we did that it certainly was not my experience of looking after patients.

It is important to look at the data on covid vaccinations. The Office for National Statistics published data last August showing that people who received a covid-19 vaccination had a lower mortality rate than those who had not been vaccinated. Given that 93.6% of the population has been vaccinated with either one or two doses, or multiple does, it is almost impossible to determine correlation versus causation. Vaccinated people will feature highly in excess death numbers because most people have been vaccinated, which is why we need to go through the data really carefully and not just take the first data at face value.

The covid virus continues to circulate, and we are now living with covid. Some people are still very vulnerable to covid, although the current variant is obviously less severe than the initial variant. We have just had our spring vaccine roll-out, and those who are invited should please go to get their vaccine. We know that it makes a difference to the most vulnerable. Over this winter, after both the flu and covid vaccine roll-outs, we have seen a significant reduction in hospital admissions.

Workers (Predictable Terms and Conditions) Bill

Kieran Mullan Excerpts

3rd reading
Friday 24th March 2023 Commons Chamber

[Dr Kieran Mullan (Crewe and Nantwich) (Con)]

I support the Bill and congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for Blackpool South (Scott Benton) on guiding its passage through the House. It is fantastic to follow my hon. Friend the Member for Newbury (Laura Farris), who always does such a good job of outlining the complexities and ins and outs of employment law. She has made huge contributions to other debates and has done so again today.

The position taken by my hon. Friend the Member for Blackpool South demonstrates the Conservative approach to the issue. We have heard again and again from the Labour party—I think this is still its current policy—that we must ban zero-hours contracts. Actually, as students I and many others benefited from access to zero-hours contracts and the flexibility to fit things in as we liked. We know that they are also hugely important in the NHS for people who may want to do a lot of hours one week and fewer hours the next. There is always a balance to be struck, and it may be helpful for the NHS that there is a balance between permanent staff and flexible staff.

I want to emphasise that the right way to approach things, rather than banning these contracts, is to do what we are doing: look at how we can advance the law in smaller ways to make the overall position better. I congratulate my hon. Friend on his contribution, which edges forward a situation that can be improved but certainly should not be banned.

[Mr Deputy Speaker (Sir Roger Gale)]

I call the shadow Minister.

[Imran Hussain (Bradford East) (Lab)]

I also start by welcoming the Bill brought by the hon. Member for Blackpool South (Scott Benton). As a Member of this House representing one of the most deprived constituencies in the country, which is not unlike my own, he too will know the role that bad pay, long hours and few rights play in trapping working people in a constant cycle of poverty and deprivation and entrenching poverty in his constituency—again, not unlike many constituencies up and down the country.

I am glad this Bill to address one of the biggest challenges faced by working people is finally reaching its conclusion today. I am glad the Government have supported the Bill through its passage. Given the negligible trickle of Bills that relate to the employment rights of working people have come before the House during their more than a decade in office—unless, of course, they concern taking rights away through their anti-trade union restrictions—in contrast with the recent flood of employment rights legislation proposed from the Back Benches, it would seem that the Government have suddenly discovered the exploitation suffered by working people. But that is not the case.

At the end of 2019—well over three years ago—the Government promised to introduce an employment Bill, which many, including Labour MPs, hoped would address the exploitation of working people and would help create an economy and workforce fit for the modern day. We warned the Government years ago, long before even the 2015 general election, about the exploitation of those on zero-hours contracts and in the gig economy. Trade unions have been banging on the Government’s door urging for stronger protection for workers in a changing economy. We know full well that the Government knew of the hardships created for working people because of zero-hours contracts, so pleading ignorance is no defence for their failure to act. In fact, there is no defence at all.

[Dr Mullan]

Forgive me if the hon. Member was going to clarify this, but is it still the Labour party’s position that it will ban zero-hours contracts?

[Imran Hussain]

Yes, it absolutely is, and I will go on to clarify that in my remarks. The Government’s only excuse for their refusal to tackle the exploitation of working people before their support for this Bill is that Ministers were too busy hailing the alleged benefits of being on zero-hours contracts. The reality is that the advantages of these contracts asserted by the Government are frankly alien to people on them. What they face is no utopia of flexibility, but a prison of exploitation by bad bosses at worst or a world of uncertainty at best. As has been pointed out during the passage of the Bill, people are often compelled to accept shifts that they do not want—and so they struggle to work—because they know that if they turn them down, they may not get any hours at all in future.

--- Later in debate ---

[Imran Hussain]

I will refer the Minister to another survey. By far the most over-represented groups of people on zero-hours contracts are women and those from ethnic minority backgrounds. The Minister quotes statistics, but in the current market people who have a choice between zero-hours contracts or no work at all are a different case altogether.

[Dr Mullan]

As this is obviously a strongly felt position from the Labour party, I assume that there is not a single Labour-led local authority employing people on zero-hours contracts. If the hon. Gentleman cannot confirm that, will he write to me and explain what steps he will take with his Labour local authority leadership figures to ensure that they do not make use of these contracts, which the Labour party clearly feels are immoral?

[Imran Hussain]

The point that the hon. Gentleman makes is political point scoring on a very serious issue. The fact remains, and this is perhaps where he could direct his energies, that his Government ordered the Taylor review more than five years ago, the findings of which were published in their “Good Work Plan” in 2018. Where has he been for the past few years not questioning his own Government on why they are failing working people, and frankly, why they have failed those being exploited by zero-hours contracts until today? That is perhaps the question he should be asking.

People on zero-hours contracts often face having the shifts they had planned and budgeted for cancelled, leaving them unable to make their bills add up at the end of the month. They are often offered shifts at short notice, forcing them to go to great expense to arrange childcare and transport. As I set out on Second Reading, when the Conservative party came to power, just over 150,000 people were employed on zero-hours contracts. At the last count, more than 1 million were employed on them according to the Office for National Statistics.

As the Bill recognises, for a small group of people who are okay with varying shift patterns and do not face significant outgoings, the contracts may fit better, but let us not kid ourselves: the flexibility of zero-hours contracts is flexibility for the employer, not for working people. As I have mentioned, it is also not as though the Government have never had a chance to improve the rights of working people before this Bill today. They commissioned Matthew Taylor to carry out a review on modern working practices and then accepted his recommendations in full as far back as 2018, but rather than implementing the recommendations, they sat on the review instead. Many of them, including recommendation 13 to allow workers on zero-hours contracts

“a right to request a contract that better reflects the hours they work”,

have gone unfulfilled. That is, until the hon. Member for Blackpool South (Scott Benton) introduced his Bill last year, four years on from the Taylor review.

That lack of progress in implementing the Taylor review’s recommendations almost five years later is lamentable for us, but is devastating for those working people who would be helped by the greater security at work that the recommendations would provide. It is right that the hon. Member’s Bill addresses that issue to some degree. We therefore support the Government in ensuring that this Bill and Bills like it get on to the statute book, because long overdue as it is, it is a step in the right direction towards stronger rights and better protections for an overexploited workforce. However, I cannot let the opportunity of today’s debate go by without asking whether Government support would have been quite so forthcoming had it not been for the relentless pressure they have faced from our trade unions, which have long campaigned for zero-hours contract workers to get the protections they need and deserve.

Although it has taken this Conservative Government years to take some form of action on strengthening workers’ rights by supporting the private Members’ Bills brought by several hon. Members, rather than by introducing their own employment Bill, the next Labour Government will not be so timid. As set out by the leader of the Labour party—the next Prime Minister—within the first 100 days of taking office, a Labour Government will bring legislation to the Floor of the House to begin to deliver our groundbreaking new deal for working people, which will ensure that our economy is fit for the 21st century and will transform the rights and protections afforded to ordinary working people for the better. That includes stronger protections for those on zero-hours contracts, with a ban on contracts without a minimum number of guaranteed hours and the right to a contract reflecting hours normally worked, and a requirement for employers to provide reasonable notice of shift changes, with wages paid in full to workers whose shifts are cancelled without notice, so they are no longer left to shoulder the burden and suffer the costs of unexpected last-minute changes.

Oral Answers to Questions

Kieran Mullan Excerpts

Tuesday 7th March 2023 Commons Chamber

[Neil O’Brien]

I am sure the hon. Gentleman’s question will indeed expedite it.

[Dr Kieran Mullan (Crewe and Nantwich) (Con)]

16. What progress his Department has made on increasing the number of primary care staff.

[Layla Moran (Oxford West and Abingdon) (LD)]

19. What steps is he taking to increase the number of GPs.

[The Secretary of State for Health and Social Care (Steve Barclay)]

Since March 2019, GPs have recruited over 25,000 staff such as pharmacists, physiotherapists and mental health practitioners, and we are on track to hit our 26,000 additional staff commitment.

[Dr Mullan]

As a doctor myself, I will be very happy to see one of those many fantastic professionals the Secretary of State mentioned, including pharmacists and physios, in the primary care setting, but I understand from local GPs that patients do not always have the confidence to do that and 111 is not necessarily directing people to see the wider team. Can we ensure 111 is set up to direct people to different professionals, and can we do something to promote and educate the public on how fantastic that wider healthcare team is in primary care?

[Steve Barclay]

My hon. Friend is absolutely right, which is why I commissioned through NHS England a review of 111. It was initially designed for a different purpose. That allows the GP service to be the front door it has become in the NHS. Through the chief executive of Milton Keynes University Hospital, we have done significant work on the NHS app, so it can better enable patients to get to the right place for the care they need.