Contribution
It is a pleasure to serve under your chairship, Mrs Hobhouse. I want to put it on the record that Paddington is my favourite bear, and I have a large poster of Paddington in Westminster in my office, so I do not want people to get the wrong end of the stick and think he is only liked by certain other parties.
In the early years of the 20th century, a young girl was growing up in a Georgian house at the end of the high street in Leighton Buzzard. As a child, she would often wonder why things went missing or were not exactly where she remembered leaving them: a stamp that had disappeared, a safety pin that turned up somewhere entirely unexpected, or maybe a missing potato. She imagined that tiny people were living quietly in the corners of her home, borrowing things. She was Mary Norton, who became the author of the world-famous book “The Borrowers”, putting Leighton Buzzard on the map for readers forever.
Today, the house that Mary Norton grew up in is part of Leighton middle school, which I had the pleasure of visiting recently, where I met enthusiastic, curious and thoughtful pupils. I love going to schools across my constituency—it is one of my favourite things to do. In Lime Tree academy in Houghton Regis I recently met Fatima, who told me that she had read every single book in the school library. Sadly, not all her peers are such strong readers.
Less than half of white working-class pupils in central Bedfordshire reach the expected standard of reading in year 6—that is the lowest figure in the entire country. Can the Minister tell me what bespoke help is available for schools that have been let down for decades by Tory Governments and the council’s local education authority? I know from visiting classrooms that the teachers are just as dedicated and the children are just as eager to learn as elsewhere in the country. There are systemic problems that need to be sorted out, including the three-tier system that we have.
I welcome the new National Year of Reading. I note that it is the third: there was one in 1998, one in 2008 and now one in 2026. Those years are linked, I think, by the fact that we had Labour Governments in all of them. The campaign asks families across the country to read together for just 10 minutes a day.
As has been noted before, there are fantastic places to read, including local libraries. Over the summer I went to Dunstable library, which is a fantastic facility. I met a young girl there who was reading all about Arrietty, star of “The Borrowers”. My constituency also has brilliant bookshops, including Book Leighton Buzzard, an independent bookshop that is bringing authors into classrooms throughout 2026 as part of the Year of Reading.
One thing that I do rather a lot is turn to a little part of a book that people may not always read—the bit that says where it is printed. I have a reason for that, which some hon. Members may know about. In my constituency there is a facility run by Amazon, which prints books on demand. When I went there for the first time I found it a fascinating place, because they print lots of individual books. It looks like a shelf, a bookshop or a library, because all those books are different shapes, sizes and colours.
I flicked through a book at the facility and it said in it, “Printed by Amazon in the UK.” I thought, “That’s not good enough, is it? I want people to know exactly where in the UK it was printed.” I asked the bosses whether they would change it, and I think they thought I was being a bit daft about the topic. I thought, “Well, I am going to keep on asking about this,” but I kept on being ignored for a little while.
Then I stumbled upon an idea. I thought, “I know— I am going to write my own book: a little children’s book about a book with an identity crisis, who goes all around the country trying to find out where he was printed.” He goes all the way to the west of England to see if he was born—printed—there, and he goes all the way up to Scotland. He goes to Liverpool and finds out about the Beatles, but does not think he was published there. Finally, the local MP intervenes, and thankfully, the book finds out that he is actually from Dunstable.
I sent the book to the Amazon bosses to be printed, and said, “All the best stories have happy endings, so please make my story have a happy ending too,” and they did that for me. Now every single book printed on demand by Amazon proudly says, “Printed in Dunstable” on it.
The self-publishing industry is really changing: the number of self-published books now exceeds the number of traditionally published ones. My office manager has penned one called “Ash”, a thriller set in Iceland, and I have a friend called Stephen Rogers who wrote about a nuclear disaster in the Bristol channel. In Dunstable, publishing has truly been democratised. More than a million books have now flown off the printing press there, all proudly saying, “Printed in Dunstable”, which has put the town on the map and is a phrase that I will always enjoy reading.