Minister for Men and Boys

Debate between Tessa Munt and Sam Rushworth

Wednesday 25th February 2026 Westminster Hall

[Sam Rushworth (Bishop Auckland) (Lab)]

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mr Twigg. I thank the hon. Member for Hinckley and Bosworth (Dr Evans) for securing this debate and for his excellent speech. Although we represent different parties, and although I believe he heckled me the last time I spoke in the Chamber, there is a great deal of unity on the issue. Perhaps this is a moment when men and boys and their needs are being recognised. We need to seize that moment. I declare an interest: I co-chair the all-party parliamentary group on men and boys’ issues with the hon. Member for East Grinstead and Uckfield (Mims Davies).

Men and women are different. They are different by birth and by nature, but also by socialisation. That is not to deny that there are many different ways of being male and being female. Indeed, in my own home, I am a man who is inclined to being emotional. I like musical theatre and baking, and I am married to a wonderful woman who likes mechanics and rugby. We have a happy and rich marriage. I do not think that we should stereotype men and women, but they are different, and we do have different socialisation. Gender inequality is real, and gender inequality hurts everyone differently. It is wrong to ignore the gendered aspects of challenges that limit any human being from fulfilling their potential. It was wrong when society did that for far too long to women and girls, and it is wrong that we continue to ignore some of the gendered issues that affect men and boys.

I represent a constituency, Bishop Auckland, where I see boys who have too often felt left behind. There is underachievement at every stage of education, there is a lack of emotional support and there is a system that too often blames boys rather than backing them. I was pleased to lead a debate last year on the educational disadvantage that keenly affects northern and particularly north-eastern working-class boys. I made the point that we only have to go back as far as the 1970s to see girls underachieving in the education curriculum. There was rightly a big public outcry and specific gendered strategies were developed, such as getting more girls into science and technology. That was the right thing to do.

Today, however, we see that girls are outperforming boys at every educational stage. The north-east has the lowest GCSE attainment nationally, and only 60% of boys are school-ready before they start early-years education, compared with 75% of girls. Boys go on to score half a grade lower on average at GCSE. They account for 70% of permanent exclusions and 95% of youth custody. In the area that I represent, one in seven young men is not in education, employment or training, which is nearly double the rate for young women. Structural inequality means that working-class boys start behind and stay behind.

I am pleased that the Government are making great strides in their strategy on violence against women and girls, which is timely and important. It is also important that boys and men be partners in that strategy, but we must not lose sight of the fact that 2 million men every year are victims of sexual assault, domestic abuse or stalking, representing 37% of the victims of that type of behaviour.

I was similarly pleased to see the Health Secretary launching a men’s health strategy on International Men’s Day. That was urgently needed, and it is great that it has been brought forward. I appreciate the comments that have been made in this debate about men’s mental health, which is a particular challenge in my community. Mental health challenges are driven by issues such as loneliness, but a common cause, which I see in my surgeries all the time, is men being denied access to their children. Through no fault of their own and with no accusation of wrongdoing, they are simply not able to enjoy a family life. That means children missing out on fathers, and fathers missing out on the company of children.

[Tessa Munt]

I am particularly grateful to the hon. Gentleman for making that point, because it is an area of interest to me. I have been a long-term supporter of Families Need Fathers, although not necessarily Fathers4Justice, which pinged off out of that. I tried to work out exactly how many times judges have allowed child arrangements orders to be given to fathers, but no data is kept. If we do not have data about how many children live with which parent—or about where there are shared parental orders, which in my view have to be the route forward, except in exceptional circumstances—how can we possibly know what is happening?

[Sam Rushworth]

The hon. Member makes an excellent point. We need a separate debate on that issue, and a much wider investigation.

I am pleased that online safety is also having its moment. Online safety is so important for our children, but it is also important for adults. I am particularly concerned by violent pornography. It harms women and girls, and it harms men and boys. It harms adults as much as it harms children. We need to take it much more seriously.

I have listed a few aspects of life that I believe are gendered and need a particular gendered approach: men’s health, education, work, fatherhood, safety. I do not know whether a men’s Minister is the answer— I certainly would not want to set men and women up in competition, because I think they are equal partners in addressing these challenges—but at the very least the Government need a men’s champion to ensure that we mainstream these issues, as we have been doing for decades. We have talked about gender mainstreaming, which has meant women and girls, but it also needs to mean men and boys, through different aspects of government, whether that is in relation to health, to education, to employment or to family law. We need to look at this together, for all our sakes.

--- Later in debate ---

[Tessa Munt]

We need to do more than watch out; that is completely unacceptable. I know so many men who have been the victims of domestic abuse. That is shockingly bad.

[Sam Rushworth]

I believe I am correct in saying that we do not disaggregate domestic abuse figures by gender. What is reported as domestic abuse is often assumed to mean violence against women, but it is actually just domestic abuse. That can include abuse against men, who are included in those statistics. Will the hon. Member speak about that?

[Tessa Munt]

I absolutely agree. That goes back to the business of data. We need to have the data, and I ask the Minister to look at that issue as well. I have made several points about data and statistics. If we do not know what is going on, we cannot possibly make an intelligent assumption about anything.

Another area—to criticise my own gender—is that of children so often being used as a weapon against men. Again, this is something that I have seen in the groups in which I have been involved and in my work in the past: the use of children, most often—though not always—by women is a shocking indictment. We have not got to grips with that, and we absolutely need to.

I have listened to all the comments about education, and I want to make a quick observation about macho male culture. The President of the United States seems to typify what people might think of as an alpha male leader. His version of masculinity seems to see dominance, subordination of others and aggression as desirable and socially valued traits. His politics has been explicitly endorsed by Andrew Tate—I can hardly bring myself to say his name—but in that context, I thank Gareth Southgate. He raised the alarm in his public lecture that young men definitely do not have positive role models, which makes them vulnerable to the influence of online personalities who promote negative ideologies about women and the world generally. The world is not against men and boys, in my view, and people saying that that is the case is unhelpful. That is why we should laud the efforts of Gareth Southgate to rebalance that.

I will quickly comment on prostate cancer. One in eight men gets prostate cancer, and black men are twice as likely to get it as those of other colours, so screening for men with the relevant genetic variants is good—but that is for a very small group. Last weekend, I was pleased to be at Wells town hall in my constituency, where the Cheddar Rotary and the Wells Lions club, and a whole group of fantastic health professionals spent the day testing 320 men. The misfortune was that about 38 of them could not turn up, for one reason or another, but it is brilliant when that sort of stuff happens in our communities. That is a start, but we need Government to step up on prostate cancer.

I want to talk very briefly about male suicide. Some 14 men a day take their own lives. Again, there are some amazing things that happen. The all-party parliamentary group on men and boys’ issues, co-chaired by the hon. Member for Bishop Auckland (Sam Rushworth), identified that many men view suicide as a rational solution to life’s events that they cannot solve any longer, whether that is relationship breakdown or financial pressures. Rather than viewing suicide as a clinical condition and a health issue, they see it as a life problem.

Here, I pay tribute to the late Derek Mead, who provides a room at the cattle market at Junction 24 on the M5 where health checks for farmers are available. There is also a lady called Susie Wilkinson in my constituency, who is part of the Farming Community Network. Those are people who support people in the community.

I will write to the Minister with several things that my party has asked for to promote mental health. There are so many things. There should be an MOT at key points in men’s lives, and in people’s lives generally. In conclusion I think that we probably need to have a Minister for men and boys in the short term.