April 2026

The hon. Member raises the scale of public interest in this issue in Northern Ireland, and the number of people who are fed up and have had too much of gambling adverts, particularly those that are bombarding our children. I am glad he raises the situation in Northern Ireland, and we should be working together more to tackle this issue.

I thank my hon. Friend, who is a member of the Select Committee, for his engagement and his work. I also thank all the other Committee members and the Clerk for their work on this important report. The point raised by my hon. Friend is so important. I visited Crawford primary school in my constituency this morning before I came here, and the key issue raised by the headteacher was temporary accommodation and how the number of children living in TA is affecting their educational attainment. We re

The hon. Member is absolutely right. It is really important for us to look at housing issues right across these isles, and any best practice we can learn from in England should be shared with Northern Ireland Ministers. I am sure that my hon. Friend the Minister will do so when she talks with her counterpart across the Irish sea.

I am grateful to the Backbench Business Committee for allocating time for this important statement. This week, the Housing, Communities and Local Government Committee published our fifth report as part of our inquiry into housing conditions across England. The subject of the report is housing conditions of temporary accommodation provided to households facing homelessness. We also published a report on social housing in February, and we hope to report on conditions in the private rented sector i

I thank my hon. Friend the Member for Redditch (Chris Bloore) for his contribution, and the hon. Member for Harrow East (Bob Blackman) for bringing forward this debate. His speech reflected his extensive experience in this area, and he relayed to the House some of the success his legislation has already had. I want to start by saying, in response to the hon. Gentleman’s points at the end about what he is asking the Government to do and his summary of the next steps, that I wholeheartedly agree w

I thank my hon. Friend for that intervention. The trigger points she mentions, which can inadvertently exacerbate homelessness, are exactly the point of the duty to collaborate that we have brought forward in the homelessness strategy. We will be working on the exact point she mentions. It is important to get the detail right. There is, rightly, broad support for improving standards in supported housing. The hon. Gentleman mentioned the consultation response that the Government published this mo

There is a response to that in the consultation response that we published recently. I am very conscious of all the potential effects of local government reorganisation. I think the creation of unitary councils is the right thing to do, because the splitting of functions can make tackling homelessness and bringing the Act into force harder than it needs to be. However, I am conscious that this will be a period of transition and that the areas undergoing reorganisation need particular attention i

Moving on slightly from Northern Ireland to Kilburn, in my constituency, there are a lot of gambling shops and casinos on Kilburn High Road. A constituent recently told me she had entered into the Gambling Commission’s self-exclusion agreement. Her regular casino knew that, but still allowed her in, and she subsequently lost thousands of pounds. My hon. Friend is talking about advertising, but is he aware of the shortcomings of the Gambling Commission’s self-exclusion agreement? It seems to be f

T6. I welcome what my right hon. Friends have been doing on public procurement. On car hire services, it is expected that around 20% of fleet industry vehicles will be electric, but less than 1% of Government purchases have been for electric vehicle hire. I know that the Government take this issue seriously, so will the Minister lay out what the Government are doing to ensure that they hire more electric vehicles?

Parliamentary appearance by Mr Toby Perkins

In a previous question, my hon. Friend said that Harlow Town were the Man City of non-league football. May I simply suggest that he is the Man City of speaking in this Chamber in terms of the quality and regularity of his contributions? That may be challenged by the hon. Member for Strangford (Jim Shannon)—let us look at the data. I echo what my hon. Friend said in his question, because it is really important for us to impress on the public that data is secure and safe. This Government take that

I am terribly sorry to hear my hon. Friend’s story about her constituent. It does sound like another failure of the self-exclusion system. We have heard similar stories in other places; I met one person with lived experience in Portsmouth, who signed up to self-exclusion but was able to gamble away his life savings in several shops that were not enforcing the rules properly. The principle of credible evidence being shown—as it was with the tobacco industry and the junk food industry—should also

I am afraid that is not correct. The Gambling Commission has not written to me challenging my figures. Members of the gambling industry have written to the all-party group challenging some of the figures in other reports, but our figures are from the Gambling Commission’s own survey on children and young people. The statistics I have pulled out today are directly from that survey, and no one is challenging those statistics.

Parliamentary appearance by Liz Twist

They have not written to me. We need to properly safeguard the next generation from gambling advertising that aims to normalise an activity that has been proven to be extremely harmful, and something that the Government have the power to act on today.

The hon. Member talks about Formula 1, as well as other sports, but does he remember the rules that changed the tobacco sponsorship of Formula 1 and the strong resistance of that industry to those changes because of the arguments he is making right now? Does he also recognise that Formula 1 has become more successful after those changes?

The hon. Member is making his point very well. He is talking about the unregulated market, which we also have real concerns about. Does he share my concern that some unregulated market advertising is being mixed with the regulated market advertising? Right now, we have premier league football clubs with unregulated front-of-shirt sponsors, and that should not be allowed.

12. What recent steps he has taken to ensure that people infected and affected by contaminated blood are compensated.

My hon. Friend makes a really important point. There is a lot that is positive about the clause, but, as he rightly says, we have to think about it in the context of all the other changes. Unfortunately, we could find that the other changes unwind the good that is done by this clause. That said, it is still a positive clause, and I am pleased to see it in the Bill and to debate it today. Lastly, I want to flag that in its evidence, Victim Not Suspect notes a need to address verification and/or t

It is truly a pleasure to get to a part of the Bill on which I suspect we will agree more than we will not. I think we will all find that rather refreshing after the last few sittings. Clause 8 seeks to introduce a new framework governing the admissibility of evidence about the previous sexual behaviour of the complainant. I very much welcome the fact that we are now having this debate and looking to address some of the issues we currently see in the justice system with respect to sexual assault