Oral Answers to Questions
Debate between Liz Kendall and Julia Lopez(5 days, 2 hours ago)
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Julia Lopez (Hornchurch and Upminster) (Con)
Amid the utter muck-storm of this week, it is World Cancer Day, when we should be thanking our incredible scientists whose breakthroughs give hope to patients at their lowest ebb. Does the Secretary of State think that her Government should charge VAT on medicines being supplied to those patients for free?
Liz Kendall
I am very proud that this Government have today announced their proposals to improve cancer care for people right across the country. It is essential that we get more people access to faster, better services, and I have always believed that we need to do that in the way that is fairest for people and that backs our great scientists to make even more improvements. That is why I am so proud of our life sciences sector plan, alongside the 10-year NHS plan.
Julia Lopez
I did not uncover any answer there. Charities and life sciences firms are telling me that this Government have begun to issue tax bills on free drugs, such that one company is stopping a compassionate access scheme and withdrawing two critical cancer drugs, and more could follow suit. This is a disaster for patients, a disaster for securing clinical trials, and a disaster for this Government’s cancer strategy. Will the Secretary of State and the Chancellor commit to stopping those bills as a matter of urgency, for the sake of patients and of our vital life sciences industry?
Liz Kendall
This Government are transforming life sciences through the biggest ever investment in research and development, and a 10-year NHS plan that will radically reduce the time for drugs to get to clinical trial. We are also ensuring that our pharmaceuticals sector has a proper deal, including with the NHS. That is how we get better services for patients, and I am proud of this Government’s record.
Mobile Phones and Social Media: Use by Children
Debate between Liz Kendall and Julia Lopez(2 weeks, 6 days ago)
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Julia Lopez (Hornchurch and Upminster) (Con)
I thank the Secretary of State for advance notice of her statement. What does an ailing Prime Minister do to demonstrate firm and decisive leadership? He launches a consultation, with a variety of options. What does he do when the Conservative party, the House of Lords, trade unions and more than 60 of his own Labour MPs line up against him on a tricky issue? Rather than take a clear position on a social media ban for children and getting phones out of schools, as the Conservative leader has done, this Prime Minister finds an unkempt meadow with some lengthy grass in it, and he boots the tricky issue right in. The House does not just need to take my word for it. One senior Labour MP has said that this consultation will “take too long”. Another said, referring to a social media ban,
“The immediate reaction is that this is just a way of kicking it into the long grass.”
There is a straightforward question that Ministers must answer today: is the Government’s apparent change of heart on a social media ban for real? Is this consultation a way of elegantly managing yet another U-turn, or is it simply a device to get the Prime Minister through the parliamentary week, while the position remains unchanged? If it is progress, it can be celebrated, but let us not forget that until very recently, the Prime Minister said that he was personally opposed to a social media ban for children. In December, the Culture Secretary confirmed that she is against one. The Business Secretary is opposed. The Chief Secretary to the Prime Minister said on the media this very morning that the Government do not take a view. In fact, the only senior Labour figure we know who is clearly in favour of a ban is Andy Burnham. That is some leadership.
What is the Secretary of State’s personal view, and what is her message to Labour MPs who would like to vote for a ban this week? Each of those rebel MPs will be asking themselves, “After the Prime Minister has Grand Old Duke of York-ed me up and down so many hills, can I really trust him to see this through?” That is especially so given that this same proposal was tabled previously, and Labour voted it down, just as it voted down our amendment to the Children’s Wellbeing and Schools Bill on a phone ban in schools. It is just like when they were told not to support their own colleague, the hon. Member for Whitehaven and Workington (Josh MacAlister), when he had a private Member’s Bill on this issue. Knowing where the Secretary of State personally stands on a ban—not where she stands on a consultation and not what she thinks about having a variety of options—may help ease the minds of Labour MPs.
What of the timeline? Does a three-month consultation mean that legislation to introduce a social media ban will be ready in time for the King’s Speech? If not, and if MPs do not vote for a ban this week, they will not have another chance to do so for 18 months. The opportunity to change things is now. How many on the Government Benches will take that chance?
The Government must have a great deal of the evidence that they need. The Secretary of State’s predecessor commissioned a University of Cambridge review of children’s wellbeing in relation to smartphone use, messaging and social media, which was due to report in December. Can the Secretary of State tell us what the report said? The urgency is obvious. Everyone, especially parents, can see what social media is doing to children. It is not just exposure to extreme or explicit content, although of course that matters. The Online Safety Act 2023, which we introduced, is already addressing illegal material and age-gating, and that work is ongoing. However, the harm goes wider. Social media has created an anxious generation hooked by products designed to be addictive, displacing real-world activity and undermining attention, emotional regulation and mental health. Schools and families deal daily with the consequences: cyber-bullying, social anxiety and fractured concentration.
China’s version of TikTok, Douyin, limits children to an hour a day and promotes educational content, but western platforms do the opposite: engagement loops are optimised for emotional arousal. We welcome scrutiny of those algorithms and steps to stop children’s data being exploited, but there is a simpler option, which is to keep children off these platforms altogether while allowing adults the freedom that follows. Conservatives believe in parental responsibility: we believe in freedom for adults, but we also believe in protecting children. We believe in policing age, not policing speech. It is not to strip parents of their roles and responsibilities to recognise that the online world can be a discombobulating nightmare to supervise. It is not to be a modern-day Mary Whitehouse to worry deeply about children being exposed to images and topics that they are simply not equipped to deal with.
This consultation also includes a rethink on phones in schools. I see that the Education Secretary is present; for months she told us that it was a gimmick and unnecessary, although most secondary school pupils say that phones are still used extensively. By when will phones be banned in schools, and how quickly will Ofsted enforce that? Will it be enforcing against guidance or against the law, because guidance is simply not enough? We must be up front in saying that the challenges of implementing any social media ban are real. We support the Government as they navigate those challenges because we want this to work, but can the Secretary of State make it clear that digital ID will not be a requirement to pass age verification on social media sites?
The truth is that the internet grew as a pioneer society, with consequences that we are all reckoning with. It now needs to be retrofitted with very clear rules for children. They need to be protected. Other countries are taking the approach of a social media ban; will this Government in the UK do the same?
Liz Kendall
The hon. Lady has talked about leadership. May I remind the House that last week, when the Prime Minister and I showed strong and firm leadership on X and Grok, she claimed that the issues were a legal grey area—which they are not—and compared our stance to that of the mullahs of Iran, which would be laughable if it were not so offensive.
The hon. Lady asked whether we had published the research by Professor Orben. Yes, we have: we have published it today, and we are going further with some—[Interruption.]
Social Media: Non-consensual Sexual Deepfakes
Debate between Liz Kendall and Julia Lopez(4 weeks ago)
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Julia Lopez (Hornchurch and Upminster) (Con)
I thank the Secretary of State for advance notice of her statement. Last week, public outrage was rightly expressed about the use of artificial intelligence to undress women and children in photographs by X’s AI assistant Grok. The use of AI in that way without consent is wrong. It is disturbing, and in many cases it is illegal. We support Ofcom in taking enforcement action where an AI tool is used to generate illegal content, especially of children. We support the Government’s stance on nudification tools.
X itself has warned of consequences for anyone prompting Grok to make illegal content. The tools in question have been put behind a paywall, for the easy identification via name and bank details of anyone misusing them. Beyond the platform, however, the Internet Watch Foundation has identified cases where perpetrators have used Grok in tandem with other AI tools to generate category A material. As the Chairman of the Culture, Media and Sport Committee, my hon. Friend the Member for Gosport (Dame Caroline Dinenage), has rightly said, such mainstream AI tools must not become an enabling step in the child abuse production pipeline.
Law already exists to deal with much of this, including the Protection of Children Act 1978, the Criminal Justice Act 2003, the Sexual Offences Act 2003, the Data (Use and Access) Act 2025—in which the Government voted against tougher amendments tabled by Baroness Owen of Alderley Edge—and the Online Safety Act 2023. Those laws should be enforced. We await Ofcom, the independent regular, setting out its next steps.
Regardless of the law, it is right to expect AI companies to anticipate and prevent misuse of products before their deployment through rigorous red teaming. I accept that for a law to deter, the enforcement threat must be credible, but its use must also be proportionate.
Notwithstanding the soft back-pedalling of the Secretary of State today, the Government’s appendage swinging over the weekend was extremely serious. Ministers mooted as an urgent remedy the banning of a site with 21 million monthly users in this country, despite another Minister guffawing that banning X was “conspiracy theory No. 3,627.”
Since their invention, the internet and social media have been misused—often criminally—by people traffickers, paedophiles and fraudsters: the gutter dwellers of our society. Nobody is on their side, but Government have never before proposed blocking TikTok, Google or Facebook wholesale for the frequent and often flagrant misuse of their sites. That would be an extraordinarily serious move against a platform that can be used for good—for uncovering scandals, sparking democratic revolution, and allowing the free exchange of ideas, day to day, including those that we do not like. It is that very power for good that makes Iran’s mullahs reach to block the internet in the face of courageous protesters.
This episode poses legitimate questions about who holds power in the internet age. Many worry about the accrued influence of big tech titans—me included—but they worry, too, about the power of Government to divert, hide and duck accountability. They worry about this Government.
The uncomfortable truth for all of us is that some of this imagery sits in a legal grey area. What Grok has produced at scale in 2026 is a modern-day iteration of an old problem, from crude drawings to photoshop. Grok is not the only tool capable of generating false or offensive imagery, and not all of this content will cross the threshold into illegality. Plenty of it is sick, degrading and morally repugnant but does not cross the criminal threshold. What, then, is the Secretary of State proposing to do about the difficult enforcement choices that a regulator or police force must make? The risk is that, with finite resource, and in a highly politically sensitive environment, regulators could be diverted from pursuing the most abhorrent and dangerous crimes.
If we wish to mitigate the risk to children, one simple intervention may help stop them sharing their own image too freely: raising the digital age of consent for social media to 16. The cross-party consensus is growing. The Mayor of Manchester, Andy Burnham, agrees with that idea; does the Secretary of State? She knows that there are geopolitical consequences to her rhetoric. Figures close to President Trump have already threatened sanctions. Has the Secretary of State engaged with the US Government? Has she been advised on the nature of any retaliation, were the UK Government to block X? The US-UK tech deal has already been paused. We need clarity on what else is at stake.
To conclude, the Tech Secretary has said:
“We are as determined to ensure women and girls are safe online as we are to ensure they are safe in the real world”,
so will she ensure that the Government enforce against themselves for their failure to advance the rape gang inquiry, their failure to stop puberty-blocking trials, their failure to implement guidance on single-sex spaces, and their inability to deport illegal migrants who have committed sex offences? This Government rightly worry about the online sphere, and we support them on that, but there is plenty to be getting on with in the real world.
Liz Kendall
I was going to say that I was grateful to the hon. Lady for her support for Ofcom’s action and investigations, and her support for our action on banning nudification apps, and that I hope she and her party will actually vote for the Crime and Policing Bill in its final stages, but she then began her own campaign of misinformation in the House. I merely stated the facts about the Online Safety Act. There is a backstop power in the Act, which I remind her that her party voted for in government. Under that power, in the most serious cases, if Ofcom believes that a company is refusing to comply with the law, Ofcom has the power to apply to a court for serious business disruption measures to stop people accessing a platform. If she disagrees with her own Government’s legislation, she should make that clear to the House.
The legislation is extremely clear that it is a criminal offence to share or attempt to share non-consensual intimate images. It is going to be illegal to create or ask to create those images. The ban on nudification apps will be an important change. As I have said, this is nothing to do with freedom of speech; it is about upholding British values and the British law. I also gently point out to the hon. Lady, who mentioned our allies in the United States, that the President signed the Take it Down Act, which deals precisely with non-consensual intimate images. Maybe she should do a little bit more research, rather than just reading headlines, online or in newspapers.
I think the public will be clear about what change they want, and I genuinely hope that this is something we can work on across the House. It is because I am such a champion of freedom of speech that I do not want women to be bullied or harassed off any platform, and want their views and voices heard. The hon. Lady’s colleagues might wish that she would take the same approach; I see that from their faces.
Oral Answers to Questions
Debate between Liz Kendall and Julia Lopez(1 month, 3 weeks ago)
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Julia Lopez (Hornchurch and Upminster) (Con)
Ministers are making very big claims about the pharmaceuticals deal with America, to make up for the billions lost in life sciences investment under Labour. Life sciences firms are telling me that unless the Government reveal what is actually in the deal, those claims are completely hollow. Can the Secretary of State reveal—she could not tell us this two weeks ago—how much the deal is costing the NHS and when she will publish the full legal text, so that we know the details of what the most favoured nation mitigations actually are?
Liz Kendall
I may have to offer the hon. Lady a mince pie because she is talking baubles. This pharmaceutical deal will deliver faster access to new medicines for NHS patients and the security and stability that our world-leading pharmaceutical sector needs, including 0% tariffs on its exports to America for three years. We are also updating the National Institute for Health and Care Excellence guidelines for the first time in 20 years. This is a significant deal, which the Association of the British Pharmaceutical Industry has welcomed. It is a pity that the hon. Lady continues to act like Scrooge.
Julia Lopez
If we are making Christmas jokes, I think this deal is all tinsel and no tree. The problem is that Labour trumpets about these deals and is then completely sketchy about what has actually been agreed—just like the US-UK tech deal: we now find out from President Trump that he has put that deal on ice. Can the Secretary of State confirm that, despite all the golden carriage action in September and the Prime Minister honking on about his negotiating skills, the Prime Minister has actually nailed down none of the key details on pharma, no zero-tariff pact on steel and no deal on tech?
Liz Kendall
We have signed a ground-breaking US-UK tech partnership deal that has delivered over £30 billion of investment to the UK, alongside our biggest ever investment into research and development, with four AI growth zones, delivering 13,000 jobs in north Wales, south Wales, the south-east and the north-east. There is our plan to upskill 7.5 million workers in AI skills and our backing of great British scientists. That is a record that I am proud of; it is a pity that the hon. Lady remains the ghost of Christmas past.
Oral Answers to Questions
Debate between Liz Kendall and Julia Lopez(2 months, 4 weeks ago)
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Julia Lopez (Hornchurch and Upminster) (Con)
It is very tempting to ask the Secretary of State whether she is on Team Wes or Team Keir, but from the sounds of it today, she is on Team 4% Kendall. I will ask instead about one of the Prime Minister’s most cynical bloopers: mandatory digital ID. The Prime Minister says that mandatory digital ID will curb illegal migration. By how much will it do so by the end of this Parliament?
Liz Kendall
I am proudly on Team UK, as are the other Members on the Government Benches. That is why we are focused on creating jobs and growth in every part of the country, backing Britain’s best researchers and innovators, and modernising our public services using the power of tech, AI and digital ID. These are the British public’s priorities; it is a pity that Opposition Members are not focused on them.
Julia Lopez
Team UK, not Team Keir—I understand. The whole mandatory ID scheme hangs on the promise to curb illegal migration, but the Secretary of State can provide no numbers on that—not a percentage or even a range. Labour has already made employing Brits harder and more expensive, and now people will not be able to get a job if they resist a mandatory digital identity that will not stop the boats. Did the Prime Minister take this project away from the Secretary of State because he has no faith in her, or because she cannot bear to repeat his guff?
Liz Kendall
Digital ID will modernise the state and public services to better meet people’s needs, fit services around them and help to tackle illegal immigration, which is what the British public want and need to see. It is right that the Cabinet Office and my right hon. Friend the Chief Secretary to the Prime Minister are leading this vital cross-Government programme. When it is implemented and when services are fitted around people—[Interruption.] The hon. Lady is chuntering from a sedentary position, Mr Speaker, but it is precisely in order to modernise the state that we are doing this. Unless she is focused on the future, the hon. Lady’s party will remain stuck in the past.
Digital ID
Debate between Liz Kendall and Julia Lopez(3 months, 3 weeks ago)
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Julia Lopez (Hornchurch and Upminster) (Con)
Nearly three weeks ago, the Prime Minister unveiled a plan for mandatory digital identity that will fundamentally shift the balance of power between citizen and state. He did not announce it here in this House, but at a love-in of the progressive left, sponsored by Labour Together and haunted by the ghost of Tony Blair. The justification was his own catastrophic failure on migration. He knows it will not stop the boats. When Brits are forced to have ID as illegal migration continues unabated, it will simply confirm fears of a two-tier society, fuelling the division and conspiracy theories that he so arrogantly claims he is the antidote to. What a cynical mess. Can the Secretary of State set out how the scheme will identify illegal migrants working in the black economy, when their gangmasters are experts at avoiding any state interaction? She rather slinked away from those key points in her wonderfully innocuous statement about making it easier to join libraries. We have in the official press release this glorious piece of doublethink:
“It will not be compulsory to obtain a digital ID but it will be mandatory for some applications.”
When employment itself requires Government-issued identity, you cannot meaningfully consent—unless, of course, you never want to work.
Here is the fundamental issue: in a free society, the burden of proof has always rested with government to justify its actions to earn our trust. Mandatory digital identity reverses that. While today the scheme focuses on work checks, Labour says it wants to extend this type of mandate into more areas of our lives. Which areas? Where does it stop? I understand that even 13-year-olds are now being considered. What about those without digital access? Labour has deprioritised gigabit roll-out and published a very worthy digital inclusion action plan without any action.
The Prime Minister points to Estonia and India as models we should seek to replicate, despite serious cyber vulnerabilities. The UK’s own sign-on system was breached during red team testing this very March. When 2.8 million people petitioned against the plan, the Government assured them that they would adhere to the highest security standards. Can the Secretary of State confirm to us here today that the system on which her mandatory ID will be built already meets those standards, and that the National Cyber Security Centre will publicly back her up?
This crafty scheme was not in Labour’s manifesto. Even the Cabinet think the whole thing is a fantasy. The Secretary of State cannot even bring herself to tweet about it. Why does the Prime Minister keep handing her his steaming messes to scoop up? The migration argument has totally bombed—we heard it here today. She and the Prime Minister are now reframing this whole thing as the route to better online services—no more rifling around for utility bills; not an ID, we hear today, but a key. They are deliberately conflating two very different things.
Better and more convenient online services were already coming in. We already had right to work and rent checks, convenient DBS—Disclosure and Barring Service—checks and driving licence renewals, all designed with choice, consent and privacy in mind, paper options retained, nobody forced down the digital route and trust as the key, and private identity providers enabled. This is not about Luddites versus modernisers; this is about the fact that Labour cannot resist its big fat socialist dreams: centralised databases, state mandation, big money, the exclusion of private sector expertise. Why create this honeypot for hackers? How much will it cost? Why should we trust Labour to be the verifier of someone’s identity, when during the passage of the Data (Use and Access) Act 2025 it would not even commit to recording someone’s sex accurately?
Let me be clear: Conservatives oppose mandatory digital identity in principle and in practice. If we believed it was necessary, we would have introduced it in government. We chose not to because you can deliver better online services without resorting to a costly, controlling, complex and risky system. This is a cynical distraction from a desperate Prime Minister. He wants people to believe that mandatory ID will fix his migration mess, but it will not. Channel crossings will continue until he introduces a real deterrent, but he has not got the guts to take on the lawfare industry that made him.
We believe that government should empower citizens, not the other way round; that government should earn citizens’ trust, not the other way round. Only those entitled to benefits should receive them and those with no right to be here must leave, but those imperatives are not best delivered by controlling British people instead of those who do not play by the rules. The Government who promised to tread lightly on our lives have got their boots out. Will the Secretary of State now kill this plan, rather than be the sacrificial lamb for another of this Prime Minister’s grubby mistakes?
Liz Kendall
Well, Madam Deputy Speaker, that is definitely the first time I have been called a big fat socialist. [Laughter.]
The hon. Lady asks how it will help crack down on illegal immigration. Making ID mandatory and digital will really help us to get, much more swiftly and automatically, more actionable intelligence about rogue employers, and about who are doing the checks they are required to do and who are not.
Secondly, the hon. Lady talks about those who are digitally excluded. As I said in my statement, I take that issue extremely seriously. We actually have a digital inclusion action plan. The Conservatives did not do one for 10 years. If they cared so much about it, perhaps they would have done.
Understandably and rightly, I am sure we will have lots of questions about having the highest possible standards. We will be working to international best practice standards. There are not many advantages to lagging behind so many other countries—many other countries—that have digital ID, but one is that we can learn from their experience when things have gone wrong and how they improved their security. That is what we intend to do.
I finish by saying this. The hon. Lady comes to the Dispatch Box with fire and brimstone, but it is quite interesting that she differs from the shadow Home Secretary. Back in February, the right hon. Member for Croydon South (Chris Philp) backed the idea, saying there were “very significant benefits”. In August, he said the Conservatives should consider it. The Conservatives’ leader in June said that she had moved her position on digital ID and that if it could answer difficult problems then, yes, that was something they would look at. Given the amount of flip-flops on the other side of the Chamber, you would think it was still summer. They are not serious, and they are not credible. Until they are, they are not electable.
Oral Answers to Questions
Debate between Liz Kendall and Julia Lopez(4 months, 4 weeks ago)
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Mr Speaker
We now come to the shadow Secretary of State. I welcome her to her new position.
Julia Lopez (Hornchurch and Upminster) (Con)
Thank you, Mr Speaker. I welcome the new Secretary of State to her place and, of course, I welcome her stellar team. The Minister of State, Department for Science, Innovation and Technology, the right hon. Member for Edinburgh South (Ian Murray), is so hot that he snared two jobs from the guy who just fired him. The Tech Secretary replaces the Ozempic of Whitehall, the right hon. Member for Hove and Portslade (Peter Kyle), who claimed that his digital plan would shear £45 billion of fat from the Government. By how much did it cut the civil service?
Liz Kendall
I believe that using tech and AI to modernise our public services enables the people who work in the public sector to spend more time on the things they want to spend time on—serving the users of public services—and less time on red tape and bureaucracy, much of which was put in place by the hon. Lady’s Government.
Julia Lopez
I fully agree with the right hon. Lady, but the number of civil servants has risen to a 20-year high under Labour. If somebody in the private sector led a reverse efficiency drive, they would get sacked; Labour made the person responsible Business Secretary. For a welfare meltdown, you get to be the Minister for the future, but while AI is screaming for cheap electricity, the Prime Minister cannot sack his failing Energy Secretary. Why should the tech sector believe that this is a Government of delivery?
Liz Kendall
Because this Government believe that science, technology and innovation are how this country will seize the opportunities of the future. Unlike Opposition Members, we are determined to deliver that change for people in every part of the country, no matter where they live, because our people are our best asset. We want to grow the economy, transform our public services, and sort out the mess left by Opposition Members.
Oral Answers to Questions
Debate between Liz Kendall and Julia Lopez(7 months, 2 weeks ago)
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Liz Kendall
The hon. Gentleman will know that that assessment does not take into account all the steps that we are taking to get more sick and disabled people into work, with the biggest ever investment into support—support that was denied to them by Conservative Members, who wrote people off, consigned them to a life on benefit and then blamed them. We take a different approach. We believe that sick and disabled people should have the same rights, chances and choices to work as anybody else. That will be a key measure in tackling poverty.
Julia Lopez (Hornchurch and Upminster) (Con)