Luke Taylor

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairship, Mr Twigg. I congratulate the hon. Member for Portsmouth North (Amanda Martin) on bringing this important debate to Westminster Hall. Emergency workers are heroes who carry this country on their shoulders. They may be there with someone in their final moments, they may have to put their life on the line to rescue someone in harm’s way and, sadly, they may also witness extraordinary abuse and violence—all in a day’s work. They are heroes because they take that mantle on with pride and commitment. They are the best of us because they cope with the unbelievable stress of constantly having to expect the unexpected. What they should not have to expect, however, is extraordinary abuse, violence or risk to life and limb to be targeted at them for doing their jobs. It is not part of the job to be insulted. It is not par for the course to be assaulted. There is no excuse for this vile and disgusting behaviour—yet it is on the rise. There were 22,536 incidents of violence, aggression and abuse against paramedics and other ambulance workers in 2024-25, up 15% from a year before, according to the Association of Ambulance Chief Executives. Since many incidents go unreported, that number is likely an underestimate. The latest NHS staff survey found that nearly one in seven workers in England were physically attacked by patients or the public last year—the highest level in three years. I recently met with representatives from the Royal College of Nursing, who told me about the scale of the challenge their members face, often on top of incredibly difficult working conditions. They pointed out that some trusts have had to take the extraordinary step of launching awareness campaigns encouraging patients not to abuse nursing staff, such as Chelsea and Westminster hospital’s “I Am Human” campaign. Could there be a sorrier reflection of the state of affairs than a campaign asking people not to harm those who are there to help them? This entire debate is taking place in the context of the outrageous scenes we saw earlier this year in Portsmouth and across the south coast, in which thugs—that is who they are: thugs—targeted RNLI volunteers and staff for daring to comply with the law, their mandate and simple human conscience. The RNLI is a British institution, and those who take on this difficult work sum up what is best about this country, not least the Dunkirk spirit of ordinary people performing brave feats of rescue at sea; yet these heroes were subject to abuse both in person and online. They were confronted in public and doxed online, their children were bullied at school because of their parents’ rescue work, and they were forced to pause their services in Portsmouth altogether—all of that due to a handful of small people with small hearts and an even smaller and warped worldview whipped up by the extreme right. The Liberal Democrats are clear that the targeting of emergency workers in the RNLI and across the emergency services is egregious on a human level, dangerous at a public health level and a critical risk to wider faith in public institutions at a Government level. It is egregious on a human level to do what those committing these crimes are doing—namely, refusing to see the human being behind the uniform or disregarding their right to go about doing their job safely. There is never an excuse for this kind of behaviour, and it is right that a specific offence was created in the Assaults on Emergency Workers (Offences) Act 2018. It is dangerous at a public health level, because when threats, intimidation and violence go up, the attractiveness of a career in the emergency services predictably declines, compounding existing shortages in policing, paramedics and nursing. To take policing alone, when officers are already overstretched, these issues only compound the strain of facing the work day and lead to sickness-related absences. Between the challenges facing police officers and the fact that in London alone there are currently 189,000 rest days owed to officers, this gruelling picture is clear. That is why the Liberal Democrats are calling for funding so that police services can offer their officers proactive mental health and wellbeing check-ups every six months, as well as a package of policies to recruit more officers to ease the burden on the existing workforce. It is why we supported and continue to support the 2018 Act that created a specific offence for assault of an emergency worker, and why I call on the Government to foster stronger links between hospital staff and local police so that they can work towards a stronger, more assuring police presence in medical settings, where appropriate and necessary. It is also why we continue to publicly and proudly stand up for the RNLI by calling out the dangerous and un-British extremists who have targeted it, enflamed by the dehumanising rhetoric that too many on the right of politics espouse. Particularly dangerous are the repeated descriptions of the RNLI as a “taxi service” for migrants: a disgraceful misrepresentation of the role of those heroic volunteers and other staff. I am sad not to see Reform Members in this debate to condemn and to withdraw completely those remarks. With all that in mind, we Liberal Democrats are keen to hear what specific additional steps the Government are taking to home in on the perpetrators of these crimes and to tackle the broader set of challenges facing our emergency services. I hope the Minister will give specific indications of what the Government plan to do.