May 2026

On Friday, I was at Leeds Trinity University and met with a group of future teachers. They were talking about the exclusion-to-offending pipeline in our schools, and the challenges in meeting the needs of SEND children. Will the Secretary of State elaborate further on what tangible steps his Department will take with the DFE to get this right?

Parliamentary appearance by Preet Kaur Gill

Parliamentary appearance by Margaret Mullane

Parliamentary appearance by Dame Siobhain McDonagh

Parliamentary appearance by Helen Morgan

On Friday, I opened the new Premier Inn in my constituency—a project that was passed under the last Conservative Government—but many businesses in my constituency are failing because of increased costs and regulation. Does my right hon. Friend agree that this is an absolute travesty for our country?

My constituency of North West Leicestershire is right in the centre of the UK. It is a constituency of makers and movers, with around 25% working in logistics, and a further 15% in manufacturing, mining and utilities, the latter of which aligns with one of the broader industrial strengths of the east midlands, as one of the most manufacturing-intensive regions in the country. North West Leicestershire is also home to one of three sites in the only inland freeport in the UK. However, the site pro

My constituency is the single biggest contributor to the Exchequer of any constituency outside London. It is home to almost 5,500 businesses, and their opinion matters. As their representative in this place, I want to convey the message from the small businesses, entrepreneurs and major employers that this King’s Speech and this Government are failing to protect them, failing to promote them, failing to get growth, and failing them. Businesses are struggling with everything, everywhere, all at o

I thank the Secretary of State for his statement and welcome the publication of the White Paper. Education has a vital role to play in reducing youth offending. There is a strong link between the offences committed by young people and educational disengagement earlier in their lives. What is the Secretary of State doing to ensure that the Department for Education’s work on persistent absence, exclusions, special educational needs and disabilities, and support for care-experienced young people is

I welcome many of the measures in the Gracious Speech, including legislation to strengthen our relationship with the European Union. Brexit has been the unmitigated disaster that the evidence always suggested it would be, and it is the Government’s responsibility both to act in the national interest by seeking to build closer alliances with the EU, and to continue to work to build a national consensus that it is in the UK’s economic, security and cultural interests to do so. We are focused on ec

King’s Speeches are partly about what a Government do, and partly about what a Government do not do. The omission in this King’s Speech is exactly as my hon. Friend suggests: a macroeconomic approach, particularly to productivity. This is a huge drag on our economy, and one might have expected further measures to be announced dealing with that macroeconomic problem, for it relates closely to the problems that he has set out in his speech already.

The hon. Gentleman is making a powerful point, which relates closely to an intervention that I made a few moments ago. If we are really to address the productivity gap, two things are essential: R&D, which breeds innovation to make our economy more efficient and effective, and investment in skills—particularly high-level skills, but skills across the board. Neither of those elements is emphasised in the King’s Speech. The hon. Gentleman clearly thinks they should be, and so do I.

My hon. Friend is right about young people, and he will be as shocked as I am that over a million of them are not in education, employment or training. Much has been said about growth, but what matters is per capita growth—making all our people better off—and yet, to go back to my earlier point, there is nothing in the King’s Speech about investment in skills, which allows people to get their foot on the ladder, businesses to thrive and the economy to boom.

I am delighted to hear what my constituency neighbour is saying, because she is right; these careless corporates who have little interest in energy—and even less in the environment—are riding roughshod over the will of local people in order to impose huge plants on the best and most versatile land. As I said to the Prime Minister recently, this compromises our food security at the very time that we should be building greater economic resilience.

As you might know, Madam Deputy Speaker, I try to read a lot of fiction—I read two novels a month—but I sometimes think I do not need to, because what we are hearing now is a fiction about the European Union. In every Department in which I served as a Minister, I tried to encourage the procurement of British products and services, including vehicles. Every time I did so I was told that it was impossible because of EU regulations and rules, particularly state aid rules. That disadvantaged British

The hon. Member is right that the pubs, clubs, small shops and associations—the things that Edmund Burke called the “little platoons”—are what constitute civil society. Yet successive Governments, including this one, have capitulated to huge, corporate, multinational, globalist businesses. Nothing in the King’s Speech casts us in a separate, distinctive direction, and the hon. Member is right to champion those little platoons in a Burkean fashion.

For that to happen, Governments and Parliament must take back control, and successive Governments have divested themselves of that control by, as Simon Case said when he left office, giving more power to unelected and unaccountable bodies of all kinds and types. For the Government to act, they need levers to pull to make the kind of difference that my hon. Friend described, and Governments have less and less ability to do that, yet the King’s Speech does not address that fundamental need for a c

I might press my hon. Friend a little further. The other way of dealing with that is to improve productivity, as I said earlier. He is right, of course, that the cost burden is fundamentally important, but it can be made better through greater efficiency. Indeed, the Government themselves have said that, as successive Governments have, but we must put in place measures—very often, tough measures—to deliver that kind of productivity.

I met residents of Georgian Court in Spalding a day or two ago. They live in a McCarthy & Stone home, and their freeholder has put up their ground rent by around 100%. That is exactly the kind of thing to which the hon. Lady is drawing the House’s attention, and it must be dealt with in the Bill set out in the King’s Speech.

Parliamentary appearance by Kirsty Blackman