March 2026

Order. The hon. Gentleman has not been reading the media—we had some good news this morning, which has moved us forward. I just wanted to make sure everyone is up to date with the important information.

We now come on to the Front Benchers. Everyone is entitled to at least 10 minutes, but I think you can work out that you have a little bit more if you want to take it.

Can the Minister make sure that he allows two minutes at the end for the mover to wind up?

Parliamentary appearance by Alex Mayer

Q5. Too often, I hear from families of children with special educational needs and disabilities in Hertford and Stortford whose children have been left out of education for months or even years because they cannot get a school place that meets their needs within a reasonable distance. I am campaigning for more investment in the bricks and mortar SEND provision that semi-rural communities like ours need, so that families can access support early and easily and their children can thrive in educati

Q8. National Highways, a Government-owned company, has reneged on a promise to replace a demolished footbridge at Park Lane West in Netherton. The footbridge crossed one of the busiest roads and junctions in Merseyside, used by countless residents, particularly children and parents going to and from infant and primary schools. My constituents have requested that that bridge be replaced—no ifs or buts. Will the Prime Minister support my constituents’ very reasonable request to honour that promise

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mr Betts—and I genuinely hope you have some good news about Sheffield Wednesday in the next few days.

I stand corrected, Mr Betts—I was in meetings all morning, so I have not seen the sports news yet. For constituencies like mine, which were dependent on heavy industry, the development of high technology offers new growth opportunities that we can harness in our valley communities once again. I want to focus my comments on a company called Academii. Academii helps organisations improve their workplace training by replacing one-size-fits-all learning with streamlined content, smart delivery and m

I am always happy to take interventions, but my hon. Friend seems to have written my speech for me, because I will develop that argument as I go along. I note he is from Leeds—Leeds pinch all of Sheffield Wednesday’s best managers, do they not, Mr Betts? Spin-outs offer postgraduate students the sought-after opportunity to work in a start-up, allowing them to develop skills and experience outside of academia. At a time when many graduates are struggling to navigate the job market, spin-out compa

Parliamentary appearance by Afzal Khan

I beg to move, That this House has considered Sikh and Jewish ethnicity data collection by public bodies. It is a pleasure to serve under your chairship, Mr Betts. I welcome my hon. Friend the Minister to her role. For more than 40 years, Sikhs and Jews have been recognised in law as both ethnic and religious groups. That is long-established; it was confirmed by the 1983 Mandla v. Dowell-Lee judgment and reaffirmed by the Equality Act 2010. Yet, in practice, our systems still fail to acknowledge

The hon. Gentleman makes a really important point, and I will come on to why this is important in practice. We are both legislators in this House, and he is right: we both take our responsibilities very seriously and want to see all communities treated fairly under the law, so we must implement it. I really value his intervention and thank him for it. As I said, my own written parliamentary questions have revealed that Government Departments do not collect ethnicity data on Sikhs and Jews. As th

Absolutely; I think that is really important. I have a staffer who, equally, is Jewish and does not feel that he is religious, and he wants the option to tick his ethnicity because, as he says, “I am Jewish.” This is simply giving people the option; no one is forcing anyone to tick any other box—they can tick any box they think reflects their ethnicity. But given the Equality Act, and given race hate and the rise in antisemitism, we absolutely should be collecting ethnicity data. My staffer shou

My hon. Friend makes an important point, and I really value his expertise in this House. Health inequalities are an area where we really see this issue being played out. The NHS is doing some directed work with the Jewish community; I know that, because it is happening in my constituency. That is because many Jewish women of Ashkenazi descent are predisposed to breast cancer, for example, and I can give lots of similar examples about the Sikh community. That is why we must consider the real-life

My hon. Friend does some fantastic work locally with her communities, and I know that she supports this campaign and really understands the real-life impact it has. She talked about anti-Sikh hate. We have seen a rise in hate crime across communities, but it is especially marked in the latest Home Office data. The data shows that there has been an increase of 20% in religious hate against the Sikh community. I will go on to say a bit more about how hate crime is recorded for both the Jewish comm

Can I seek clarity from the Minister? All the correspondence I have had from the Home Office says that it has been told to use existing categories in the census, according to the ONS, and that is why it does not collect the data.

Last month, The Guardian revealed that suicides following domestic abuse may be vastly under-reported, with research in Kent suggesting that they could be 15 times more prevalent. There has been just one manslaughter conviction from such a death in the whole of UK legal history. Liberal Democrats in the other place recently tabled an amendment to the Crime and Policing Bill, supported by Women’s Aid and Advocacy After Fatal Domestic Abuse, which would require police to investigate suicides as po

I refer the House to my entry in the Register of Members’ Financial Interests. I thank all postal workers in Stockport and across the UK. It is important to highlight that it was the coalition Government—the Liberal Democrats and the Conservatives—who privatised Royal Mail. I ran an online survey about Royal Mail services in my constituency. Some 89% of respondents said that they were unhappy, angry or disappointed by the service in Stockport. There was one example of mail not being delivered fo

It is sad but true that International Women’s Day rings hollow for far too many women, particularly the three brave women I have just met. They are survivors of Epstein and, for them, important days like that come and go. What is the Minister doing to ensure that we do not just mark important days for women and girls, but give them the protection and justice that they deserve? What is she doing to hold perpetrators such as Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor to account for not just reports of sharing sta

rose—