Puberty Suppressants Trial
Tom Tugendhat Excerpts(1 week ago)
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Wes Streeting
My hon. Friend is absolutely right that we must engage with due care and sensitivity on this issue. I can share with the House that these exchanges, Government policy, what is said by me and others, are followed extremely closely by this group of children and young people, who are extremely online, and by the wider LGBT+ community. My hon. Friend is right that trans people are often at the wrong end of the statistics as victims of hate crime, discrimination and mental ill health. We must always tread carefully when talking about suicide in this context, and bear in mind the warnings of the Government’s adviser on suicide prevention, Professor Louis Appleby, and the way in which that issue has been deployed irresponsibly by critics of the ban on puberty blockers that was put in place—we bear all those things in mind. I do think we have a high-quality trial set up. I do have confidence in the clinicians. We have had a cross-party briefing from the clinical team. I am happy to repeat that exercise, to keep coming back to the House and to arrange briefings for MPs and peers on a cross-party basis so that we can follow this closely, as we should.
Tom Tugendhat (Tonbridge) (Con)
I welcome the care with which the right hon. Member has approached much of this, and I appreciate that he has before him some very difficult decisions, especially because of the way the report was written. But I must come back to the simple truth that these are very young children, and decisions will be made for them—I appreciate by parents, taking that element of consent—that are genuinely irreversible. Whatever happens, we will see eight, nine, 10-year-olds grow up to be 18, 20, 25-year-olds—at least we hope we will—who have effectively been experimented on. Some of those children will resent greatly not just the system and their parents, but those who allowed this to happen, and here I identify the Department for Health and Social Care, not necessarily the Secretary of State himself. What provision is he putting in place to ensure that should those children wish to bring legal action against the Department, against those who took these decisions at a time when they were not able to give any form of informed consent, they will be able to have redress and their day in court?
Wes Streeting
I first thank the right hon. Member for the way in which he puts his concerns. I know he is concerned about this trial and that he has stated publicly his opposition to it, and I enormously respect the way in which he has done that. These are finely balanced judgments, and I acknowledge that.
The Cass review found that puberty blockers have been prescribed routinely without good evidence for their safety or effectiveness, and that is why a clinical trial was proposed. They are licensed and used safely in much younger children for precocious puberty or in older adults for certain cancers. For adolescents, the interaction with all the different processes of puberty may be very significant, which is why more evidence and a better understanding of their impact is needed in this patient group. Anyone on the trial can choose to stop taking puberty-suppressing hormones and leave the trial at any time; they do not need to give a reason. If a young person decides to stop taking puberty-suppressing hormones, their care in the NHS, including the gender service, will not change in any other way, and their doctors will explain to them and their parents or guardians what treatment options are available.
I know that there are concerns about the longer-term impacts on fertility. Prospective participants will be given comprehensive information on the advantages and potential risks of the hormones, including details about preserving fertility. Doctors will explain the possible long-term consequences and available options. Young people will also be offered consultation with a fertility specialist. The young person and their parent or guardian must clearly demonstrate a full understanding of all these issues—only then, after that, would a clinician sign off on admission to the trial.
Income Tax (Charge)
Tom Tugendhat Excerpts(1 year, 1 month ago)
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Tom Tugendhat (Tonbridge) (Con)
I pay tribute to the hon. Member for Stourbridge (Cat Eccles), who gave a very full description of the constituency that she is privileged to represent. Her predecessor, Suzanne Webb, was a great friend of mine. The hon. Lady has taken over from a fine individual, who is now contributing in many other ways to our national life. I also pay tribute to the hon. Member for Yeovil (Adam Dance), who has the great good fortune of representing my godson, a farmer in his constituency, who will no doubt be contacting the hon. Gentleman shortly about some of the issues that have arisen in recent days.
I myself want to speak about those issues. Today, we are rightly speaking about public services—the NHS, on which we all rely, and those important elements in our lives that keep us together, underpin our economy and really hold us strong. But we are not just speaking about the product, the outcome—the output of those doctors, that money or those services. We are also speaking about the input, because we simply cannot have the one without the other. That is what I want to address.
What we have seen in this Budget is not just the largest tax rise in decades, the highest tax take since the war and greater indebtedness, effectively burdening our children with what we are spending today. When it comes to the fundamental challenge, the Budget is failing to understand how an economy works and why the relationship between generations matters so much. The story that the Budget tells is about a Government who do not understand what a family, generation or business is and do not understand why businesses investing today need the ability to plan long-term and not just be taxed halfway through.
The point is seen most obviously in the tax on farming and on the inheritability of farming property. The truth is that farms are unlike many businesses; they cannot simply be salami-sliced in the hope that they will survive. That just does not work. Individuals end up being forced to decide not just to pay the 20% that the Government ask for but to sell the 100% to liquidate the assets required. That is injecting a dangerous short-termism into the economy.
The truth is that the Government can really only do two things. The first, really important thing is to keep us safe. We all know that the first job of government is national defence and national security. But the second thing, often overlooked, is the ability to extend time horizons. It is very difficult for individuals to have time horizons beyond a certain point. In early human existence, the horizon was a harvest or a season; in the Anglo-Saxon period, people may have got it to a generation or possibly even a reign. But the genius of the industrial age and our democratic age has been to extend that time horizon over generations. We have done that through the rule of law and through understanding taxation and the predictability of an economy. We have done it because we have understood that if parents invest, children, grandchildren and great-grandchildren can reap the rewards.
What the Government have done, I am afraid, is to reverse that. They have shortened the time horizon and assumed that people—all our citizens—are not investors in the future, but employees of today. That fundamental misunderstanding of what it is to grow an economy is why this Budget is so bad.
Paul Waugh
I thank the right hon. Gentleman on the Tory Benches, which are singularly understaffed right now. But it is the almost criminal levels of understaffing in our NHS that affects most of our constituents. He is an honourable gentleman, so does he not feel a sense of shame that, every single day in our NHS, midwives, doctors and nurses cannot fill their staff rotas? They cannot do the job that they want to do and that we need them to do.
Tom Tugendhat
It is a pleasure to hear the hon. Gentleman, who has come off the fence and now has a seat; he can express his views freely. What fills me with sorrow is when I look at the future—when I look at the businesses that have invested so hard in places such as Tonbridge and now cannot pass that on over generations and over time. The investment timeline is being reduced and so is the growth. Do not just take my word for it—the Office for Budget Responsibility, the National Farmers Union and every business in this country have been clear on the point. The Government are not just taking the eggs from the golden goose; they are slaughtering the goose by trying to get the eggs out quicker. That simply does not work.
We all know what is going to happen next: the Government are going to have to come back for more. We just need to look at the predictions by various financial bodies over the last few days, which have been talking about our running out of the money raised in the Budget in the next two or three years. We know why that is going to happen. This Budget is not investing—worse than that, it is not encouraging investing. It is trying to exploit.
Sarah Smith (Hyndburn) (Lab)
As a member of the Government at the time of the disastrous mini-Budget, does the right hon. Gentleman seriously expect us to take lessons from him on how we grow the economy, return to economic stability and get the desperately needed investment into our public services that his Government failed to deliver for the past 14 years?
Tom Tugendhat
The hon. Lady can play politics if she likes; I am trying to think about the future of the country.
Dyson, who was not in any Government, is pointing out the problems being raised. Minette Batters, who was not in any Government, is pointing out the problems being raised.
Tom Tugendhat
No, not just now.
The truth is that what we are seeing is a level of short-termism. That is completely clear in agriculture and industry, but the tragedy is that it is also clear in education. A great privilege of being the MP for Tonbridge is that I represent some of the finest schools in this country—others may claim that title, but I know that I speak the truth when I say that. Many of those schools are grant-maintained in different ways; others are private. They are, in many ways, a web of education that works extremely well together in our community. Some, such as Hillview School for Girls—a fantastic school at which I was privileged to be on the governing board—are state schools, while others, such as the Judd school, are grammar schools, and one, Tonbridge school, is private.
The truth is that the 20% plus business rates—I think the extra cost that will now fall on private schools comes to about 40%—means that every single kid in my constituency will have to pay for the VAT in some way. Either they will have to pay for it because fees go up, or they will pay for it because class sizes are larger. I am afraid that the schools will not be able to swallow the costs, so we will see pressure all the way through.
Tom Tugendhat
I will not, because I have been asked to be quick.
That is not just a burden on those kids, but a rejection of the relationship between family members in their willingness and desire to invest in the future.
I know that the Labour Government claim that the only way for investment to be done is by the state, that the only thing that really matters is when that is done by a bureaucrat and a civil servant, that the only thing that really counts is when the Government pay for it. But we know that is simply not true. We know that business and the freedom to invest, plan and forecast are what make an economy grow. Sadly, the Government have tried to nationalise the future, shorten the time horizon and make us all pay for it. That is why growth is falling, taxes are rising and the future is made worse again and again under Labour.