Contribution
I thank the Leader of the House very much for the business.
As the House will know, this is the week of Holocaust Memorial Day, and I am delighted that we will be debating it in this Chamber later today. I am sure colleagues will have visited the extraordinary exhibition of shoes in Portcullis House. I visited Auschwitz in 1988, when Poland was under communist control, and saw the originals of that exhibition—it was a profoundly moving experience. I know that everyone present will share my sense of sorrow and remembrance for all those who died.
This is also the week in which we note with great sadness the death of Captain Philip Muldowney in a live-fire exercise. We send our very best to his fellow soldiers, his friends and his family. I also put on record my personal sadness on the death of Howard Flight, Lord Flight, a dedicated servant of this House and the other place over many years.
This week, the Prime Minister demonstrated his genius and political touch once again by getting Andy Burnham barred from standing in the Gorton and Denton by-election, in which he would almost certainly have been hammered if he had stood—problem solved.
Meanwhile, the Resolution Foundation has calculated that the extra uncertainty created by the Chancellor’s repeated U-turns has already cost, or will cost, this country £8.2 billion, which will only increase over time. The figure is based on official Office for Budget Responsibility numbers and includes the Government’s U-turns on personal independence payments, universal credit and the winter fuel allowance, but not the additional uncertainty created by their recent U-turns on business rates for pubs and inheritance tax rules for farmers. Those will take the cost closer to £9 billion-worth of unnecessary extra burden on the people of this country created by the Government since July 2024. And lest we forget, even without any U-turns, the extra cost of servicing UK Government debt since July 2024 has been, and remains—again, thanks to the Chancellor of the Exchequer —higher than in either the US or the eurozone. That is according to Labour’s own friendly think-tank, the Institute for Public Policy Research.
Finally, extraordinarily—irony of ironies—we hear that Sir Tony Blair will sit on President Trump’s so-called board of peace for the reconstruction of Gaza, to which one can only say, in the words of the late, great Tom Lehrer, “Satire is dead.” This is the man who took this country to war in the middle east on a false prospectus. One must ask: have the people of Gaza not suffered enough?
I note that AstraZeneca is accompanying the Prime Minister on his trip to China. As the House will know, AstraZeneca is the single biggest investor in research and development in the United Kingdom. Its best-selling, global best-in-class breast cancer drug, Enhertu, is available for reimbursement in America, Germany, France, Italy, Spain, Scandinavia and Japan. Within these islands, it is available for reimbursement in Scotland, but not in England, outside a few special cases. That is an insult to AstraZeneca, but still more to the 46,000 women a year who are diagnosed with breast cancer in England, and the millions more who have had breast cancer, who are at risk and who are unable to be treated affordably as a result. There is deep concern among all Members of the House about this issue. Does the Leader of the House share my view of it, and will he take up the matter urgently with his Cabinet colleagues?
Finally, data from this week shows that over the last year police numbers have fallen sharply. Between September 2024 and September 2025, the number of full-time equivalent police officers fell by 1,318. Police staff were down 529, and police community support officers were down 204. The number of special constables was down 514, and police volunteers were down 429. In total, around 3,000 fewer people are now involved in policing our communities. Those figures compare the same point in both years, precisely because recruitment happens in cycles, so there can be no statistical disguising.
I actually rather agree with Commissioner Rowley, who has said that police should be judged by outputs rather than inputs—a very welcome corrective to the endless tendency started, I am afraid, under Messrs Blair and Brown to trumpet increased spending as though it is the same thing as results—but that hardly applies to the number of volunteers and specials, both of which are down. In general, fewer officers and staff mean fewer crimes investigated, fewer patrols on our streets and slower responses to 999 calls. The Home Secretary’s announcement earlier this week was silent on protecting overall police numbers, so could the Leader of the House spell out whether the Government’s policy is to allow police numbers to decline over time? Could the House have an up-to-date statement on that specific issue?