Jonathan Davies

I am grateful to have the opportunity to speak in this debate, and I am pleased to follow the powerful speech of the hon. Member for Cheltenham (Max Wilkinson). This wide-ranging Bill cuts across many aspects of Government and people’s lives. We must harness the power of data to drive economic growth, to support a modern digital Government and build more efficient, effective public services, and to support people to have improved lives more generally. For too long this potential has not been fully realised, holding back businesses, public services, learning and education, and people up and down the country more generally. This mission-led Government’s plan for change—delivering economic growth, better public services and action on the environment—cannot be fully realised without some of the opportunities that this Bill creates. Measures in the Bill are expected to free up 1.5 million hours of police time, meaning officers will have more time to tackle crime rather than dealing with admin. This will be welcome in communities blighted by antisocial behaviour and among retailers who have been affected by shoplifting or violence against shop workers—the Co-op in Oakwood in my constituency is an example. It will also be welcomed in terms of the service victims of domestic violence receive from the police, as they will have more time to take preventive work and support victims, including my constituent Hayley who came to me to talk about her experience of domestic violence. It is also estimated that measures in this Bill will free up a huge amount of time within the NHS for clinicians, potentially saving lives as well as making services more accessible and responsive to people’s needs. That is vital as the Government have inherited from their predecessors the longest waiting times in NHS history. The Bill will also improve the information that regulators receive, enabling a real-time view of how a service is performing. Old models of regulation, where inspectors would go in on a periodic rolling basis, are often insufficient and not responsive to a service’s current situation. We have seen examples in the NHS and education where extremely poor services have not been of a standard that people have a right to expect—there has been abuse in some cases—but regulators’ oversight has not been modern enough to capture that and drive regulatory action.