Rachel Gilmour
Main Page: Rachel Gilmour (Liberal Democrat - Tiverton and Minehead)(1 day, 18 hours ago)
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Rachel Gilmour (Tiverton and Minehead) (LD)
It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Ms Furniss. I thank the hon. Member for Morecambe and Lunesdale (Lizzi Collinge) for securing this debate.
Ashley Combe, which sits above Porlock Weir, was Ada Lovelace’s home for many summers. She would walk across west Somerset, admiring its fauna and flora, including the forked spleenwort. There is a famous quote from the late, great Christopher Hitchens:
“The cure for poverty has a name, in fact. It’s called ‘the empowerment of women’.”
It is in that spirit that I speak today.
Despite the rich intellectual legacy Ada has left behind in her summer spot, STEM paths in the area, and in particular the numbers of girls going into STEM, leave much to be desired. The west Somerset part of my constituency, for all its natural beauty, suffers from the country’s lowest social mobility and ranks among the poorest for travel times to employment—at the 96th percentile. In our part of the world, we are hampered by inaccessibility which stifles ambition and aspiration. The development of Hinkley C in the years ahead will lead to inward commuting and a further exacerbation of inequality in transportation.
I laud the fact that Nicola Fauvel has been appointed station director at Hinkley Point C, having migrated from Hinkley Point B, where she became only the second woman to head a British nuclear power station. A cultural sea change was needed, and I know that Nicola has been supported no end by the group chief executive officer for the Nuclear Decommissioning Authority, David Peattie, and his fantastic team.
Enter the wonderful Ada in Porlock community action group. And I am delighted to say that members from the committee at Ada in Porlock join us here today. Still somewhat in its infancy, having run for just a year and a half, it has been at the heart of a number of community projects. Those initiatives have unveiled the truth that the gap between male and female interest in STEM widens, although the number of STEM students has risen by half in the last five years.
In each generation there is an Ada Lovelace and a Marie Curie. Somewhere out there today is a female scientific savante who does not know it yet. It is that potential force—the potential energy, to borrow from scientific speak—that has not been tapped into to the fullest extent. That is where the wonder lies: the randomness of greatness, the untapped potential of so many. There are more Adas out there. We know it, especially in Porlock in west Somerset—in my beautiful, wonderful constituency.