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  • Layla Moran – 2022 Speech on Long Covid

    Layla Moran – 2022 Speech on Long Covid

    The statement made by Layla Moran, the Liberal Democrat MP for Oxford West and Abingdon, in the House of Commons on 31 March 2022.

    I beg to move,

    That this House has considered the impact of long covid on the UK workforce.

    I thank the Backbench Business Committee for allowing us to hold this updated debate on long covid. I also thank my co-sponsors, some of whom, I am sad to say, are at home ill with covid and very much wanted to be here today. Also the fact that the debate has moved weeks has not helped. For those watching at home, I have been contacted by several Members who are very sorry that they are not able to be here. I also want to put on record my thanks to the many hundreds of people who, over the years, have contacted the all-party group on coronavirus with their personal stories, many of which are very heart warming, but also moving and worrying because it is a debilitating condition. What I say to all of them is: “We hear you, you have not been forgotten and we will continue to fight for you.”

    I want to recognise the actions that the Government have taken so far. I was pleased that, after the first debate we had on the issue in January 2021, the Government made some £18.5 million available for research into long covid, including treatment, and delivered even more funding in the summer, which is incredibly welcome. In that debate, I also welcomed the new dedicated long covid clinics and the publishing of guidance to medical professionals by the National Institute for Health and Care Excellence, the Scottish Intercollegiate Guidelines Network and the Royal College of General Practitioners. However, despite that welcome action, it has felt, over the past eight months, that long covid has totally dropped off the radar and, on this issue, there has been very little debate.

    I thank the Under-Secretary of State for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy, the hon. Member for Sutton and Cheam (Paul Scully) for coming to the Chamber to answer this debate. I believe that it is the first time that the Department for Business Energy and Industrial Strategy has answered in the Chamber on this. I will focus my remarks on the effect that long covid has had on the workforce because our belief is that this is a looming crisis that we need to think ahead about and that it would be wrong for us just to focus on the medical side— there are broader implications here.

    Although there are many understandable reasons why this matter may have dropped off the radar, including the cost of living crisis and the war in Ukraine, I argue that these things are very much linked. How are we going to have a strong and productive economy if large swathes of our workforce are struggling to do the jobs that they are meant to be doing? How can we help them to recover?

    Over this past year, we have had more information and learned more about long covid, although it is worth saying that there is still no cure. There are treatment plans that can help with symptoms, but the past year has been awful for many, including Andrew, a headteacher whom I spoke about in the debate a year ago, who received multiple written warnings about his inability to do the job in the day. I went back to him and asked how he was. He said:

    “I made the difficult decision to resign from my post as a headteacher, so my limited energies could focus on coming to terms with my illness rather than continuing to face dismissal from a career that I had committed the past 25 years to and one that I dearly love.”

    I also got an email from Nell, one of my constituents, who is a doctor. She said:

    “I adore being a hospital doctor. I love my patients and I trained for years to do this. It’s been nearly two years of struggling with my health after covid, and while I continue to slowly recover, I don’t know if I can do this much longer. I’m so very sorry—I feel that I have let you down writing this.”

    To Nell, I say that I do not believe that she has let anyone down, but I think that, to an extent, the Government have let her down.

    Seema Malhotra (Feltham and Heston) (Lab/Co-op)

    I thank the hon. Member for giving way and for her excellent speech. I also thank the Backbench Business Committee for granting the debate. She has raised a couple of cases that she has heard about. I have been in touch a lot with Sam, a carer in my constituency. At the very beginning when she had long covid, people did not understand the condition and it was not taken seriously, and it has affected her ability to work ever since. Does the hon. Member agree that, as well as dealing with the health side and getting more research on how the condition affects people so differently, it is important to have guidance for employers—she will probably come on to this—on how to deal with this and how to support those who may have long covid through that very difficult period? As we do not know how long the condition lasts, we need a proper long-term strategy for those who are affected and for their families.

    Layla Moran

    The hon. Member hits the nail on the head. People can recover, and very often do, but the way to help them do that is very badly explained to employers right now. Indeed, I will come on to talk in some detail about that.

    Many people were told, especially at the beginning, that long covid was something that they were making up. They were told that it was all in their head. I have a research paper here that shows that scans have been done on people’s chests and the reason they were suffering from breathlessness was that the tissue was fundamentally damaged. This is very much a real disease, which now needs a real response.

    It is not just public sector workers who have dealt with this. I spoke to Rebecca, who gave evidence to the all-party parliamentary group. She was a fitness instructor, Madam Deputy Speaker. You would think that a fitness instructor would be very healthy and would have very good lungs—before the pandemic, anyway. She used to teach 14 high-intensity classes a week and ran her own business. Now long covid means that she is in bed 60% of the time and describes being

    “unable to return to work, and to be the mum, wife or friend I once was”.

    It is utterly heartbreaking. We now need to accept that, if we are going to live with covid, we also have to live with long covid. In the evidence sessions that the APPG took in December and January, we heard how the condition is still severely impacting the lives and livelihoods of people across the country. They described how the condition has left them unable to work, sometimes unable to move, forcing them into long periods of absence from work, dipping into their savings and doing anything to stay afloat—something that is much more difficult now with the cost of living crisis.

    A study released this month by Queen Mary University concluded that becoming infected with covid increases the risk of economic hardship, especially if the individual develops long covid. Those individuals describe a patchwork of uneven availability when it comes to long covid clinics and many are desperate for treatment. We heard from one nurse, for example, who has spent thousands of pounds going to Germany to get treatment that she is not able to access here. Public sector workers gave their lives for us. When we were all allowed to be at home, they went in, and they are the ones, according to Office for National Statistics surveys, who have the highest prevalence of long covid. I believe that we owe them so much more than they have had so far.

    Unsurprisingly, though, it is not just about public services. We have 1.4 million people across the country experiencing self-reported long covid symptoms. That is 2.4% of the population and that cuts across every single sector, not just the public sector.

    In the hospitality sector, which, as the Minister will know, is already struggling, 2.6% of workers have long covid. If we take the 3 million workforce estimate from UKHospitality, that equates to 70,000 workers unable to do their jobs as they did before. In retail, it is 2.3%, which equates to just under 70,000 workers; for personal service, such as beauticians, it is a bit less at 6,000, but still 2.1%. Those are big numbers in sectors that are already struggling post pandemic and struggling with workers’ visas following Brexit. They do not need this.

    Mary Glindon (North Tyneside) (Lab)

    I congratulate the hon. Lady and her colleagues on securing this important debate. Does she agree that it is not only the people who have had long covid who suffer, but their family members who have to care for them? My constituent Julie Wells has had a working life of nearly 40 years. Her teenage daughter, on a second dose of covid, has been left with totally debilitating symptoms and now needs constant care. Julie hopes at best to get back to part-time work, but she may not. That is a full-time person lost to the workforce because of caring for a family member.

    Layla Moran

    I thank the hon. Lady for her intervention. The caring responsibilities are greatly increased, as is the prevalence in children. I was alerted by my hon. Friend the Member for St Albans (Daisy Cooper) to a case of a parent who is asking for dispensation for her child from taking examinations because she has missed so many days of school. I am talking to the Education Secretary separately about that point, but long covid affects the entire family, not just the workforce.

    Some 1.5 million people have long covid, but 989,000 people say that those long covid symptoms adversely affect their day-to-day activities and 281,000 people report that their ability to undertake their day-to-day activities had been “limited a lot”. That often means they must take part-time instead of full-time work, and sadly it often means they are unable to recover well because they are pushed to try to get back to work.

    The effect on business is now being better documented. The Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development found that a quarter of UK employers cited long covid as one of the main causes of long-term sickness absence among their staff. For small businesses, the effects can be devastating. The Federation of Small Businesses has shared guidance on how to help with statutory sick pay and arranging for temporary staff cover.

    However, I am concerned that the ACAS guidance right now is pretty sparse; I hope the Minister might take that up. The guidance signposts to other websites but does not make it clear that one of the most important things to do with long covid is often to let someone rest. People say “listen to your body” when it comes to medical things; I am afraid that with long covid that is actually the treatment plan.

    If someone is forced or encouraged into work by their employer—often inadvertently, if they do not have proper guidance—it can set them back and cause even more problems down the line. One of our main calls is for employer guidance, but I also urge the Government to look at the ACAS website, for example, and ensure that it is clear to employers how they can help and support their employees to stay at home and rest as long as they need to, so that they come back and we do not unnecessarily lose people from the workforce.

    A legal expert speaking to the APPG described the lack of access to financial support and said,

    “lots of people with Long Covid find themselves starting for the very first time to be involved in the obstacle course which is our benefit system”.

    It is clear that long covid is having a serious impact on the ability of our workforce to do their jobs, and we can only expect that to get worse as the virus spreads through the population again and we get more cases of long covid.

    What can we do? The all-party group has released a report on long covid this week; if the Minister has not seen it, I would be happy to give him a copy. In it, we make 10 recommendations, but I will highlight just a few. First, the Government need urgently to prioritise research treatments for long covid patients. We welcome the money already committed, but we would contrast it with the United States, for example, where $1 billion has been earmarked for this, because the US recognises the effect long covid could have on its economy and sees this as an investment. I urge the UK Government to find similar ambition.

    Secondly, we call for employer guidelines, set out by the Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy in conjunction with the Department of Health and Social Care, to help all businesses to help their employees back into work. Thirdly, we call for the UK Government to launch a compensation scheme for all those frontline workers currently living with long covid, similar to the armed forces compensation scheme.

    The Minister will perhaps be aware that the process for the designation of an occupational disease is ongoing; we are hopeful that that will report back soon, and we are discussing that with the Department for Work and Pensions. That designation could be game-changing, particularly in those public sector areas where prevalence was incredibly high, such as education, the health and social care workforce and public transport, which had some of the highest prevalences of covid, particularly at the beginning.

    The Office for National Statistics survey points to where we need to look. However, I urge the Government not to wait for that designation. Many of those workers, as in my examples, have already left the professions. They are leaving the sector or deciding to take early retirement, and this is a time when our economy needs a boost. It needs those experienced workers. At the moment, we are not paying any attention to that.

    The main reason we secured this debate was to urge the Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy to look ahead and take this seriously. The best thing we can do right now is to help hard-pressed people in the UK in our fight against Putin, against the cost of living crisis and all the rest. If we are to get our economy back on its feet, we must get our workers back at their desks. If those workers have long covid, there is currently very little out there to support them or those businesses that desperately want them back.

  • Bernard Hogan-Howe – 2022 Comments on Live Facial Recognition

    Bernard Hogan-Howe – 2022 Comments on Live Facial Recognition

    The comments made by Bernard Hogan-Howe, the crossbench Peer, in the House of Lords on 4 April 2022.

    My Lords, I generally support the extension of facial recognition technology, although I take the point made by the noble Lord, Lord Clement-Jones, that it needs serious consideration. Technology is moving forward so fast that I think it is hard for all of us keep track of it. The three principles that the Minister might agree should underpin that are transparency of use, accountability about its use and that people should have a remedy. If things are done wrong, they should be able to check to see what they can do about it.

    But the benefits are pretty outstanding. I know that, post the riots of 2011, we had to deploy 800 officers to look at 250,000 hours of rioters on CCTV footage. This allowed us to arrest 5,500 people over 18 months, but it took us 800 people. There has to be a smarter way of doing that. That would have been a retrospective use. Therefore, does the Minister agree that careful improvements in the future are wise, and that we should not stop, as the noble Lord, Lord Clement-Jones, suggested, the use of it altogether?

  • David Lammy – 2022 Dr. Jean Mayer Global Citizenship Award Address

    David Lammy – 2022 Dr. Jean Mayer Global Citizenship Award Address

    The speech made by David Lammy, the Shadow Foreign Secretary, in the United States on 31 March 2022.

    Thank you to the institute for Global Leadership and The Fletcher School at Tufts University for hosting me to speak about foreign policy at this extremely important moment.

    In the late 1990s I had my first taste of Massachusetts when I studied just a short bus ride away…

    …at Harvard Law School.

    It was an inspiring time.

    I will never forget my first big exposure to the American constitution.

    The first lesson I learned was that democracy as proclaimed by America’s founding fathers is…

    …always has been…

    …and always will be…

    …a work in progress.

    I also learned that the great story of the 20th century is one of how different groups…

    …the working class, people of colour, women, LGBT+…

    …fought hard to secure rights long denied their forebears.

    Back in the late 90s, so much was changing.

    We were living in the wake of two liberal revolutions.

    The first was social and cultural…

    …with its roots in the swinging 60s.

    The second was economic…

    …the free market revolution set alight by Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher in the 1980s.

    The Soviet Union had collapsed not long before.

    Communism and autocracy had capitulated to capitalism and democracy.

    Francis Fukuyama suggested this marked the “end-point of mankind’s ideological evolution…

    …and the universalisation of Western liberal democracy as the final form of human government.”

    Progressives were winning or about to win on both sides of the Atlantic.

    Bill Clinton was in the White House.

    Tony Blair had just won a Labour landslide in the UK.

    The march towards a 21st century future was filled with hope.

    But as we reached the global financial crisis of 2008…

    …that hope had started to evaporate.

    The twin liberal revolutions had come at a high price.

    Creating a hyper-individualistic culture…

    Where rights overtook responsibilities.

    Where we could reach billions of others instantly on our smartphones…

    …but had fewer meaningful connections.

    Where the rich got richer…

    …inequality accelerated.

    …and the pursuit of profit was prioritised over democratic values.

    The age of individualism was defined by another paradox.

    The more atomised we became…

    …the more we sought belonging in tribal identities.

    From the relatively benign…

    …to the outright destructive.

    Islamist Extremism.

    Far-Right terrorism.

    Organised crime gangs.

    Online, our opinions did not gain the nuance that results from sophisticated debate.

    We gained access to infinite amounts of information, but we lost the guardrails that sorted fact from fabrication.

    Algorithms designed by tech companies to grip eyeballs pushed many of us to new extremes.

    The common ground upon which democracies depend began to crumble.

    And malign actors…

    …including governments like Vladimir Putin’s…

    …turned to ethno-nationalist authoritarian politics…

    …and exploited online spaces to interfere in our democracies…

    …with disinformation and lies.

    Abroad, Putin took advantage of unsuccessful Western interventions…

    …the decline of American hegemony…

    …and a newly multi-polar world.

    He invaded and still occupies part of Georgia.

    He annexed Crimea.

    And sought to carve off parts of eastern Ukraine.

    He used the strength of his armed forces to prop up the monstrous Bashar Al Assad who used chemical weapons against the Syrian people.

    …and helped drive a refugee crisis that reached Europe…

    Which was seized upon by hard right populists to inflame new divisions between Us and Them.

    Meanwhile…

    …authoritarians and their acolytes…

    …from Nigel Farage, to Donald Trump, to Matteo Salvini and Marine Le Pen…

    …publicly expressed sympathies with Vladimir Putin…

    …as they rose to prominence in our own democracies.

    Parading their illiberalism as patriotism.

    Pretending to be protectors of their nations…

    …while attacking the values of freedom, equality and democracy that they were founded upon.

    At the same time, Putin saw we were in a cost-of-living crisis…

    …A climate crisis…

    …And a global pandemic.

    After years of sowing disunity in our democracies…

    …exploiting the vulnerabilities left by the two liberal revolutions…

    …it is no coincidence Putin saw this as our moment of maximum weakness…

    …and chose it as the moment to start his barbaric and illegal invasion of Ukraine.

    Under the fog of disorder, he thought he could act with impunity.

    But the strength and unity of the opposition Putin has faced shows he cannot.

    Remarkable and courageous defence of their homeland by the Ukrainian people.

    Tougher global sanctions than many thought possible.

    Unity within an EU previously considered fractured.

    A turning point in defence policy for Germany, Sweden, Finland and Poland.

    NATO with more focus than ever since the cold war.

    And 141 countries in the UN’s general assembly voting to condemn Putin’s war of aggression.

    Despite the strong reaction we have seen…

    …this is not a moment to be complacent.

    It is time for a radical re-think in foreign policy…

    …and a reboot of our diplomacy.

    Mistakes of the west

    Putin’s invasion is shocking.

    The images of tanks rolling across the borders of European nations reopens the deepest wounds of our continent’s history.

    Many have said the world changed on February 24th.

    It did.

    The horrific war in Ukraine is solely of Putin’s making…

    …but it also highlighted contradictions in the West’s relationship with Russia…

    …as well as flaws in our broader foreign policy assumptions.

    Many in Europe believed the era of wars between states was over.

    We reshaped our security, defence, intelligence and diplomacy to tackle different threats – allowing core capabilities to dwindle.

    Just months before Russia’s invasion, Boris Johnson said that the era of tank battles on European soil was over…

    …Now we see tanks rolling across frontiers in Europe.

    Borders changed by force.

    Nuclear threats issued.

    We must adjust our mindset and adapt our thinking.

    For too long, Western governments…

    …including Britain’s Conservatives…

    …believed they could ignore domestic policies which undermined our

    foreign policy.

    We tolerated dependence on Russian oil and gas…

    …funding Putin’s war chest…

    …regardless of his aggression and despite the urgent need to decarbonise.

    Dirty Russian money…

    …the loot of Putin’s dictatorship…

    …was embraced…

    From our football clubs to our politics…

    …Oligarchs and kleptocrats used Britain’s capital as both the hiding place and service industry for their ill-gotten gains.

    A spider’s web of dirty money spread across London.

    Fuelling crime on our streets.

    Making property unaffordable.

    Laundering reputations.

    Silencing critics.

    And sustaining Putin’s authoritarian regime.

    This disregard for the contradictions in our policy has been exposed by this crisis.

    We must end the hypocrisy.

    Too often we saw the world as we wanted it to be…

    …not as it was.

    Some believed Putin could be moderated and influenced by our engagement…

    What the Germans called

    …change through trade.

    We have repeatedly been overly optimistic, even naïve…

    …particularly when we stood to profit.

    Even when Putin broke international law…

    …and invaded his neighbours…

    …our responses were weak.

    The tame response to the seizure of Crimea in 2014 is one of the reasons we could not deter Putin this time around.

    We must finally be realistic about the worldview in the Kremlin.

    We’ve long known that Putin saw the collapse of the Soviet Union not as liberation but as humiliation…

    …A catastrophe with consequences he told us – time and again – that he wanted to reverse.

    Putin seeks a sphere of influence…

    …a reconstituted Russian empire…

    …whether we like it or not.

    Putin believes that domestic survival depends on total dominance of the political sphere…

    …the elimination of opponents…

    …and the fanning of bigotry, nationalism and nostalgia.

    He will ruthlessly pursue Russia’s interests as he sees them…

    …in zero-sum terms.

    And he has taken lessons from the Arab Spring.

    Seeing democratic revolutions as contagious.

    When he saw the 2014 democratic revolution in Ukraine, he feared that dangers of one in Russia as well.

    It is time to understand Putin on his own terms.

    But it is not only Britain’s Conservative government which made strategic mistakes on Russia.

    Trump’s disastrous spell in the White House…

    …Where he cosied up to dictators from Putin to Kim Jong Un…

    …while distancing the US from its traditional allies in the EU…

    …and institutions like NATO…

    …shows the danger of turning against the institutions the West has created.

    For too long parts of the left…

    …even some members of my own party…

    … falsely divided the world into two camps.

    America and the West on one side…

    …and their victims on the other.

    This has never been right…

    …but this view has now been exposed for all to see as a farce.

    The rising aggression of countries including Russia, China and Iran…

    …In particular Putin’s barbaric and illegal invasion of Ukraine…

    …are definitive proof the world’s wrongs do not all stem from western actions.

    We must confront our own historic mistakes…

    …but if we fail to see beyond them…

    …and falsely believe Western nations have nothing to contribute…

    …we miss the value of making common cause for people fighting for democracy around the world.

    And we forget the value of the international institutions that arose to protect us all.

    Lessons from the Cold War

    Many people have drawn historical analogies with our current situation.

    Some have suggested we are entering a new Cold War.

    The Cold War analogy has limitations.

    The world today is far more interdependent and economically interconnected than it was in the days of the Iron Curtain.

    Unlike China, Russia is not a serious economic competitor to the West.

    It does not represent a coherent ideology like Communism.

    It is a nuclear superpower but it is a middling and unbalanced economy in freefall…

    …with a leader clinging to a blood and soil nationalism of the past.

    But there are some reflections we can draw from the Cold War that may be useful for the months and years ahead.

    We need a patient, long-term strategy.

    To equip ourselves for the task of a sustained confrontation…

    …not just with Putin but with Putinism and its imitators.

    Dictatorships are no longer controlled by one bad actor in isolation.

    But by interlinked networks of illicit finance, security services and peddlers of misinformation.

    Not only inside one country, or even one region.

    But across the world.

    They aren’t unified by one particular political ideology.

    But the shared desire to hold power at any cost to their people – and enrich themselves.

    To counter this network of Putinists, we must show that we can ditch the short-termism.

    …On energy, on economics, on politics and on security…

    …that for too long has dogged our approach.

    The first step to signalling this change should be to ban all foreign campaign contributions from our politics…

    …saying a clear no to malign interference in our democracies.

    And we must properly regulate big tech…

    …so that it is forced to quickly remove disinformation campaigns…

    …or face punishing fines.

    We must also double down on unity.

    Our strength comes from our alliances…

    …rooted in common values…

    …not the transactional marriages of convenience or coercion, which characterise Russia’s alliances.

    We must capitalise on the united economic front that has been formed against Putin.

    In the Cold War, there were mechanisms like COCOM…

    …the Coordinating Committee for Common Export Controls…

    …to sustain common approaches to export controls.

    We should consider whether we need new structures to ensure the UK, US, Europe, Japan, Australia, Canada and others partners can maintain a common approach.

    And we should seek to build the widest possible diplomatic coalition in opposition to this war.

    This neo-imperialism is not just a challenge to the West.

    If one sovereign UN member-state can be carved up on a whim, all states are threatened.

    The Cold War also teaches us the imperative to manage the risks of escalation.

    Both lessons to learn and mistakes to avoid.

    Preventing a catastrophic conflict took strategy and resolve, diplomacy and deterrence.

    Even before this crisis we had already lost too much of the architecture of arms control built in the Cold War and post-Cold War period…

    …such as the INF and Open Skies Treaties.

    We should maximise pressure on Putin, and support the Ukrainians in their fight, including with arms…

    …but also keep open channels of communication, maintain military transparency and seek to avoid miscalculation.

    NATO was right to rule out a No-Fly Zone, which would bring Russia and NATO into direct conflict.

    But Russia must know our absolute commitment to the principle that if a NATO Ally is the victim of an armed attack…

    …each and every other member of the Alliance will respond.

    And we need to be ready for modern acts of aggression…

    …with accelerating and enhancing joint cyber defences among NATO member states.

    Finally the Cold War teaches us that we must remain open to the Russian people.

    Ordinary Russians did not start this war.

    Many have courageously protested against it.

    It takes real courage to challenge your government if you live in an authoritarian state.

    We must always distinguish between Putin and the Russian people.

    And reach as many as we can with objective news.

    Allies should coordinate to get credible information to the Russian public through whatever means available…

    … with direct financial and diplomatic support to civil society and independent journalism.

    We must think creatively about how to strengthen the voices of moderation and reform.

    And we must be a safe haven to Russians fleeing political persecution.

    Labour’s Foreign Policy

    Living in an age of authoritarians means re-assessing our strategic priorities.

    This must mark a turning point for Britain, and for our allies.

    After years of distraction and insularity, Britain can carve a new leading position on the world stage.

    First, we must strengthen our defences and lead the debate about the future of European security.

    Britain has left the EU. The task now is to make Brexit work. On both sides of the channel.

    It is time to leave behind the petty diplomatic spats with our neighbours pursued by this UK government…

    …designed only to serve short term domestic political interests.

    The British government must stop putting peace on the island of Ireland at risk…

    …with its reckless threats to the Good Friday Agreement.

    We need a government that can rebuild relations of trust and mutual respect with our closest neighbours on the continent…

    …based on our shared values and common interests.

    We need to end more than a decade of cuts to the army and rethink the assumptions in the Integrated Review.

    The Government has pursued an Indo-Pacific tilt…

    …but it must not do so at the cost of our commitments to European security.

    As war ravages parts of our continent…

    …we need to put past Brexit divisions behind us.

    Stop seeking rows with European partners…

    …and use this moment to explore new ways to rebuild relations with European allies through a new UK-EU security pact.

    Second, we must sprint towards decarbonisation and end our dependency on dirty fossil fuels.

    Much of the funding for Putin’s war machine has come from us and our partners…

    …running our industries…

    …heating our homes…

    ….and filling our cars with oil and gas from Russia…

    …$700m per day from Europe…

    We can revolutionise that if we have the will.

    The UK Government has said that the UK will end Russian oil imports to the UK by the end of 2022.

    We support this.

    But on its own this move will not shield us from rocketing energy prices.

    Our Prime Minister’s moves to fill the gap of Russian energy have so far been to look for new authoritarians from which to buy oil.

    Whether Iran, Saudi Arabia or elsewhere….

    Short-termist.

    Ill-judged.

    And not learning the lessons of Putin.

    Fossil fuels empower the worst sorts of dictators

    The only true form of energy independence is through clean energy.

    This is why a Labour government in Britain would quadruple investment in a Green recovery…

    …£225bn over the next 8 years.

    Third, we must finally end our role as a facilitator of illicit finance and cleanse our society from dirty money…

    …not just from Russia…

    …but from corrupt elites across the world who have used Britain and our overseas territories to hide their ill-gotten wealth under our noses.

    Fourth, we must restore our soft power

    Because it is not only tyrants’ actions we must change…

    …but the minds of their publics.

    The United States and the UK together do so much good through the development we lead across the world.

    But Britain has stepped back from its former leadership, cutting billions in aid, and mismanaging the merger of our development and foreign ministries, leaving them less than the sum of their parts.

    Facing the largest refugee crisis in Europe since the Second World War…

    …the importance of humanitarian aid and long-term development could not be greater.

    One of the UK’s greatest exports is the BBC World Service…

    …which plays a unique role…

    …both in delivering information to populations living in authoritarian regimes…

    …and embodying the free speech and independent media that are cornerstones of our democracies…

    …reaching nearly 400m people per week.

    In the first weeks of Putin’s invasion…

    …the BBC’s Russian language service audience tripled, and has now been subject to new restrictions in Russia.

    But the fact that just 13% of Russians see Russia as the aggressor in Putin’s illegal war shows the scale of the task.

    A Labour government would truly value the BBC World Service.

    …alongside a refreshed British Council

    And be a beacon for our values around the world.

    Conclusion

    I started this speech by saying my time in the US taught me the great story of the 20th century is one of how minority groups gained rights through liberal democracy.

    If this is true, the story of the 21st century is so far a story of the reverse.

    Every year freedom house releases a report of the state of global democracy.

    This year’s was titled: ‘The Global Expansion of Authoritarian Rule’

    These times are dark…

    …but they are not without promise.

    We should take encouragement from Vladimir Putin’s current failure to achieve his objectives in Ukraine.

    Russia’s huge, poorly organised army being out fought by Ukraine’s smaller but more skilful and determined troops…

    …Because unlike the Russians, they actually know what they’re fighting for.

    It’s the same thing that generations of British and American troops, diplomats, activists, and ordinary people have struggled for…

    …the hope that our democracies are supposed to represent.

    Ukraine’s formidable and courageous leader…

    …Volodymyr Zelenskyy…

    …has called upon our collective conscience…

    …he has shown what it means to fight for a democratic nation state.

    Using Ukraine’s heroics as inspiration…

    …Together Britain, the United States, the EU and the rest of our allies and partners around the world have the chance to move past the age of authoritarians.

    Reaffirming our commitment to the values we share…

    …freedom, democracy and the rule of law.

    Restoring the international institutions that spread them.

    And giving hope to our nations once again.

  • Volodymyr Zelenskyy – 2022 Statement on the Situation in Ukraine (04/04/2022)

    Volodymyr Zelenskyy – 2022 Statement on the Situation in Ukraine (04/04/2022)

    The statement made by Volodymyr Zelenskyy, the President of Ukraine, on 4 April 2022.

    Ukrainians!

    All our defenders!

    Today has been a really difficult day. Emotional.

    I’ve visited our cities in the Kyiv region, which we liberated from the occupiers. Stoyanka, Irpin, Bucha.

    Of course, now this area does not look like yesterday. The bodies of killed people, killed Ukrainians have already been taken from most streets. But in the yards, in the houses, the dead still remain.

    The cities are simply ruined. Burnt military equipment on the roads, destroyed cars. It is especially hard to look at the traces of bullets on cars with the inscription “Children”.

    We have just begun an investigation into all that the occupiers have done. At present, there is information about more than three hundred people killed and tortured in Bucha alone. It is likely that the list of victims will be much larger when the whole city is checked. And this is only one city.

    One of the many Ukrainian communities that the Russian military managed to seize.

    There is already information that the number of victims of the occupiers may be even higher in Borodyanka and some other liberated cities. In many villages of the liberated districts of the Kyiv, Chernihiv and Sumy regions, the occupiers did things that the locals had not seen even during the Nazi occupation 80 years ago. The occupiers will definitely bear responsibility for this.

    We are already doing everything possible to identify all the Russian military involved in these crimes as soon as possible. Everything to punish them. This will be a joint work of our state with the European Union and international institutions, in particular with the International Criminal Court.

    I discussed this issue today with President of the European Commission Ursula von der Leyen. And also with Chancellor of Austria Nehammer. We agreed on his visit to Ukraine in the near future.

    I also discussed the investigation into the war crimes of Russian troops with Polish President Duda. We also talked about new sanctions against Russia, humanitarian and defense cooperation with Poland.

    All crimes of the occupiers are documented. The necessary procedural basis is provided for bringing the guilty Russian military to justice for every crime they commit.

    I would like to emphasize that we are interested in the most complete, transparent investigation, the results of which will be known and explained to the entire international community. We provide maximum access for journalists to Bucha and other liberated cities of Ukraine. For hundreds of journalists from around the world. And we are interested in having thousands of journalists there. As many as possible! For the world to see what Russia has done.

    I’m sure you know about the new old tactics of Russian propagandists who are constantly trying to reject accusations of the Russian military.

    Why the new old? Everything is simple. Because they used the same tactics when the occupiers shot down a Malaysian Boeing over Donbas. They blamed Ukraine. They even came up with various conspiracy theories. They even went so far as to claim that the corpses were “thrown” on board the plane before it crashed.

    Now they are doing the same thing. The same lies. They are trying to distort the facts. But, as then, they will not succeed. They will not be able to deceive the whole world.

    The time will come when every Russian will learn the whole truth about who of their fellow citizens killed. Who gave orders. Who turned a blind eye to the murders. We will establish all this. And make it globally known.

    It is now 2022. And we have much more tools than those who prosecuted the Nazis after World War II.

    We must also be aware that after the revealed mass killings of civilians in the Kyiv region, the occupiers may have a different attitude to their crimes in another part of our country where they came. They are already launching a false campaign to conceal their guilt in the mass killings of civilians in Mariupol. They will do dozens of stage interviews, re-edited recordings, and will kill people specifically to make it look like they were killed by someone else.

    Probably, now the occupiers will try to hide the traces of their crimes. They did not do this in Bucha when they retreated. But in another area it is possible.

    I want to say right away: every normal person in the world understands who brought war and mass deaths to Ukrainian land. There is ample evidence that it is Russian troops who destroy peaceful cities, abduct, torture, kill civilians.

    Therefore, Russian propagandists and their leaders can now succeed in only one thing:

    making their work enough for the verdict of the future tribunal, which will be similar to the verdict of Julius Streicher, one of the ideologues of Nazism, editor-in-chief of the Der Stürmer weekly. He was executed for anti-Semitic propaganda and calls for genocide.

    Nowadays people are not executed already. But all skabeevas, evening loudmouths, frontline liars and their bosses in Moscow should remember: the end of your life will be behind bars. At best.

    I would also like to note the reaction of the leaders of the democratic world to what they saw in Bucha. The sanctions response to Russia’s massacre of civilians must finally be powerful. But was it really necessary to wait for this to reject doubts and indecision? Did hundreds of our people really have to die in agony for some European leaders to finally understand that the Russian state deserves the most severe pressure?

    This breaks the heart of every Ukrainian. It breaks my heart. Because only now do we hear from all world leaders statements that should have been made long ago, when everything was already completely clear.

    I emphasize once again: Ukraine must get all the necessary weapons to drive the occupiers out of our land as soon as possible, to liberate our cities. And if we had already got what we needed – all these planes, tanks, artillery, anti-missile and anti-ship weapons, we could have saved thousands of people. I do not blame you – I blame only the Russian military. But you could have helped.

    I will continue to say this to the face of all those on whom the decision on weapons for Ukraine depends.

    We have already started preparing all the necessary work to restore normal life in the liberated areas. Mine clearance of the territory is carried out. Our sappers neutralize thousands of explosive devices every day! In the near future we will restore electricity supply, restore water supply to this whole territory of our state. We will provide medical care, normal access to goods – as much as possible in the current conditions.

    Of course, we will rebuild the destroyed and damaged housing. We will rebuild roads, bridges, infrastructure. Life will come again to every city, to every community that the occupiers tried to destroy.

    This week I continue to address the parliaments of the nations of the world. Today was Romania. I thanked the Romanian people for their warm attitude towards our migrants. It’s true. I called for greater sanctions against Russia. I also said that Romania’s leadership was indispensable for ensuring security in the Black Sea region and for restoring justice in Europe as a whole.

    Tomorrow I will address the Spanish Parliament. And also the UN Security Council.

    Today I expressed condolences to the President of the Republic of Lithuania and to the entire Lithuanian people over the brutal murder of the world-famous documentary filmmaker Mantas Kvedaravičius by the Russian occupiers in Mariupol. In 2016, he made a film about our peaceful Mariupol, which shortly before found itself on the frontline of the war in Donbas. And now it was there that his life was taken. May the memory of him live forever!

    We continue to prepare for even more brutal activity of the occupiers in the eastern and southern directions. We know what they are going to do in Donbas. We know what they are going to do near Kharkiv, in some other parts of the country. Russia concentrates a significant amount of military and equipment there. And this activity proves that sanctions imposed against Russia are not enough. There will be more.

    If the Russian leadership does not begin to really seek peace, really negotiate peace, they will put their country in the worst condition in 50 years. The so-called wicked 90’s will seem prosperous and calm.

    And traditionally, before delivering this address, I signed a decree awarding our Ukrainian heroes. 152 servicemen of the Armed Forces of Ukraine received state awards, three of them posthumously.

    Eternal glory to all our heroes!

    Eternal memory to everyone who perished for our country!

    Glory to Ukraine!

  • Volodymyr Zelenskyy – 2022 Statement on the Situation in Ukraine (03/04/2022)

    Volodymyr Zelenskyy – 2022 Statement on the Situation in Ukraine (03/04/2022)

    The statement made by Volodymyr Zelenskyy, the President of Ukraine, on 3 April 2022.

    Today this address will be without greetings. I do not want any extra words.

    Presidents do not usually record addresses like this. But today I have to say just that. After what was revealed in Bucha and our other cities the occupiers were expelled from. Hundreds of people were killed. Tortured, executed civilians. Corpses on the streets. Mined area. Even the bodies of the dead were mined!

    The pervasive consequences of looting. Concentrated evil has come to our land. Murderers. Torturers. Rapists. Looters. Who call themselves the army. And who deserve only death after what they did.

    I want every mother of every Russian soldier to see the bodies of the killed people in Bucha, in Irpin, in Hostomel. What did they do? Why were they killed? What did the man who was riding his bicycle down the street do? Why were ordinary civilians in an ordinary peaceful city tortured to death? Why were women strangled after their earrings were ripped out of their ears? How could women be raped and killed in front of children? How could their corpses be desecrated even after death? Why did they crush the bodies of people with tanks? What did the Ukrainian city of Bucha do to your Russia? How did all this become possible?

    Russian mothers! Even if you raised looters, how did they also become butchers? You couldn’t be unaware of what’s inside your children. You couldn’t overlook that they are deprived of everything human. No soul. No heart. They killed deliberately and with pleasure.

    I want all the leaders of the Russian Federation to see how their orders are being fulfilled. Such orders. Such a fulfillment. And joint responsibility. For these murders, for these tortures, for these arms torn off by explosions that lie on the streets. For shots in the back of the head of tied people.

    This is how the Russian state will now be perceived. This is your image.

    Your culture and human appearance perished together with the Ukrainian men and women to whom you came.

    I approved a decision to create a special mechanism of justice in Ukraine for the investigation and judicial examination of every crime of the occupiers on the territory of our state. The essence of this mechanism is the joint work of national and international experts: investigators, prosecutors and judges. This mechanism will help Ukraine and the world bring to concrete justice those who unleashed or in any way participated in this terrible war against the Ukrainian people and in crimes against our people.

    The Ministry of Foreign Affairs, the Office of the Prosecutor General, the National Police, the Security Service, the Intelligence Service and other structures within their competence must make every effort to ensure that the mechanism is operational immediately.

    I call on all our citizens and friends of Ukraine in the world who can join this work and help establish justice to do so.

    The world has already seen many war crimes. At different times. On different continents. But it is time to do everything possible to make the war crimes of the Russian military the last manifestation of such evil on earth.

    Everyone guilty of such crimes will be included in a special Book of Torturers, will be found and punished.

    Ukrainians!

    I want you to realize that. We drove the enemy out of several regions. But Russian troops still control the occupied areas of other regions. And after the expulsion of the occupiers, even worse things can be found there. Even more deaths and tortures. Because this is the nature of the Russian military who came to our land. These are bastards who can’t do otherwise. And they had such orders.

    All partners of Ukraine will be informed in detail about what happened in the temporarily occupied territory of our state. War crimes in Bucha and other cities during the Russian occupation will also be considered by the UN Security Council on Tuesday.

    There will definitely be a new package of sanctions against Russia. But I’m sure that’s not enough. More conclusions are needed. Not only about Russia, but also about the political behavior that actually allowed this evil to come to our land.

    Today is the fourteenth anniversary of the NATO summit in Bucharest. Then there was a chance to take Ukraine out of the “gray zone” in Eastern Europe. Out of the “gray zone” between NATO and Russia.

    Out of the gray zone, in which Moscow thinks they are allowed everything. Even the most dreadful war crimes.

    Under optimistic diplomatic statements that Ukraine could become a member of NATO, then, in 2008, refusal to accept Ukraine into the Alliance was hidden. The absurd fear of some politicians towards Russia was hidden. They thought that by refusing Ukraine, they would be able to appease Russia, to convince it to respect Ukraine and live normally next to us.

    During the 14 years since that miscalculation, Ukraine has experienced a revolution and eight years of war in Donbas. And now we are fighting for life in the most horrific war in Europe since World War II.

    I invite Mrs. Merkel and Mr. Sarkozy to visit Bucha and see what the policy of concessions to Russia has led to in 14 years. To see with their own eyes the tortured Ukrainian men and women.

    I want to be understood correctly. We do not blame the West. We do not blame anyone but the specific Russian military who did this against our people. And those who gave them orders. But we have the right to talk about indecision. About the path to such Bucha, to such Hostomel, to such Kharkiv, to such Mariupol. We have no indecision. No matter whether we are in a certain bloc or non-aligned, we understand one thing: we must be strong.

    Fourteen years ago, Russia’s leader in Bucharest told Western leaders that there was no country like Ukraine. And we prove that there is such a country. It was and it will be.

    We will not hide behind the strong of this world. We will not beg anyone.

    Honestly, we shouldn’t have asked for help with weapons to protect ourselves from this evil that came to our land. All the necessary weapons should have been given to us anyway – without requests. Because they themselves realized what evil had come and what it had brought with it.

    We see what’s at stake in this war. We see what we are defending.

    There are standards of the Ukrainian army – moral and professional. And it is not our army that has to adjust now. These are many other armies that should learn from our military.

    And there are standards of the Ukrainian people. And there are standards of the Russian occupiers. This is good and evil. This is Europe and a black hole that wants to tear it all apart and absorb.

    We will win this war. Even if individual politicians are still unable to overcome the indecision they will pass on to their successors together with their offices.

    And all the necessary services are already working in Bucha to bring the city back to life. Restore electricity supply, water supply. Restore the work of medical institutions. Rebuild the infrastructure. Give security to people. Because Russia was expelled. And Ukraine is returning. And brings life back.

    Today I visited our border guards, our heroes in the hospital of the Border Guard Service of Ukraine. Wounded warriors.

    I presented state awards to the eight of them. I also awarded the orthopedist-traumatologist – medical service officer who is a leading military traumatologist in Ukraine and has already saved many Ukrainian defenders.

    In total, 41 border guards received state awards under this decree.

    It was the servicemen of the State Border Guard Service who first met the occupiers with fire when they went on the offensive on February 24. Now our boys and girls are returning to the state border as we expel the occupiers.

    I am sure the time will come and the whole line of the state border of Ukraine will be restored.

    And for this to happen sooner, we must all be focused, ready to boldly face evil and respond to every criminal act against Ukraine, against our people, against our freedom.

    Evil will be punished.

    Glory to Ukraine!

  • Volodymyr Zelenskyy – 2022 Statement on the Situation in Ukraine (02/04/2022)

    Volodymyr Zelenskyy – 2022 Statement on the Situation in Ukraine (02/04/2022)

    The statement made by Volodymyr Zelenskyy, the President of Ukraine, on 2 April 2022.

    Ukrainians!

    Strong people of the indomitable country!

    Another day of our defense has passed. Another day of many that are gradually, with difficulties, but steadily bringing us closer to peace. To peace that no one will give us a gift. We need to understand it clearly. Because there are no subjects in the world that can stop wars and give peace.

    The global security architecture has failed. Peace for us will not be the result of any decisions of the enemy somewhere in Moscow as well. We should not cherish empty hopes that they will simply leave our land. We can only gain peace. We can gain it in hard battles and in parallel – in negotiations, and in parallel – in daily vigorous work.

    Therefore, each of us must continue to do everything we can. In all directions. To support our Armed Forces. To preserve and develop economic activity in Ukraine – as much as possible now.

    To support all our citizens… Wherever they are, whoever they are.

    In peacetime warm words sustained the vital forces. And in wartime it is even more important. When we may not even know what a person is going through. What a loss. What help a person needs. But we can see that a person needs help. We need to support this person. We should at least hear this person. Say a few kind words. Something needs to be done to support the life of this person. This must be done. You should be attentive to everyone around you!

    When people defend themselves in a war of annihilation, when there is a question of the lives or deaths of millions, there are no unimportant things. There are no unimportant moments. Everything matters. And everyone can contribute to the victory of all. Someone with a weapon in their hands. Someone – at work. And someone – with a warm word and help at the right time.

    So do everything you can for us to withstand together in this war for our freedom, for our independence. For Ukraine to live.

    Due to such sincere and constant support of each other, due to unity and attention to the neighbor, the people can overcome the most difficult challenges. And drive out the enemy, which is many times bigger in numbers.

    Our defenders continue to regain control over communities in the Kyiv and Chernihiv regions. There are more and more Ukrainian national flags in the areas that have been temporarily occupied.

    The Armed Forces of Ukraine do not release the invaders without a fight. Inflict fire damage. They are destroying everyone we can reach.

    We are strengthening our defenses in the eastern direction and in Donbas. We are aware that the enemy has reserves to increase pressure in the east.

    What is the goal of Russian troops? They want to capture both Donbas and the south of Ukraine. What is our goal? Protect us, our freedom, our land and our people.

    Do everything for protection.

    Our heroic Mariupol continues to hold back a significant part of the enemy forces. Thanks to this resistance, thanks to the courage and resilience of our other cities, Ukraine has gained invaluable time. The time that allows us to undermine the enemy’s tactics and weaken their capabilities.

    Unfortunately, Ukraine has not yet received enough modern Western anti-missile systems. Has not received aircraft. Hasn’t received what the partners could provide. Could – and still can!

    Every Russian missile that hit our cities and every bomb dropped on our people, on our children only adds black paint to the history that will describe everyone on whom the decision depended. Decision whether to help Ukraine with modern weapons.

    I would like to thank the residents of our Enerhodar separately. Those brave Ukrainians who went to a rally today to defend their city. To protect our state.

    In response, the occupiers opened fire and used grenades against completely peaceful people, which are on their land, within their law. There will be an answer for each wounded person. And the Ukrainian character cannot be conquered by any pressure or violence.

    I am grateful to everyone who takes to the streets in the temporarily occupied cities. To all who are not afraid and go out. I am grateful to all who are afraid and come out. To all those who feel that without this decision to defend Ukraine and their freedom, the occupiers can gain a foothold.

    And when people protest – and the more people protest – the harder it is for the occupiers to destroy us, to destroy our freedom. This is our common struggle! And it will be our common victory.

    I would also like to say a few words to those politicians, some deputies of the Verkhovna Rada of Ukraine who absolutely do not understand what is happening in the hearts of our people. They don’t understand it so much that they even decided to change the national anthem. I have a question for these people: what have you done in your life to give you the moral right to change the words of the anthem? Are you outstanding poets? Maybe you excelled in the battles for Ukraine? Or now is such a time that you can change the anthem whenever you want?

    Cool down emotions. Stop pretending to be fools. I believe that the authors of these and other similar bills, proposals, should take up arms and go to the battlefield, if you have these opportunities. Only there will you understand something.

    And even if they accidentally vote for something like this, I still will not sign such bills. Don’t waste time.

    I want to turn to another person who does not seem to fully understand what is happening. Not only in Ukraine, but throughout Europe. To the Prime Minister of Hungary. He is virtually the only one in Europe to openly support Mr. Putin.

    We did not ask for anything special from official Budapest. We didn’t even get what everyone else is doing! Doing for the sake of peace. We did not receive the vital transit of defense aid, we did not see moral leadership.

    We saw no effort to stop the war! Why so?

    The whole of Europe wants peace. The whole of Europe does not want the battlefield to be moved from Mariupol to Budapest or from Kharkiv to Krakow or from Chernihiv to Vilnius.

    The whole of Europe is trying to stop the war, to restore peace. Then why is official Budapest opposed to the whole of Europe, to all civilized countries? For what?

    The main thing for us is the opinion of the people. The Ukrainian people support the Hungarian people. The Hungarian people support the Ukrainian people. We value peace equally, we value freedom equally. It will always be so. We will always live in good neighborliness. And I am convinced that our minorities should be the bridges that unite us even more.

    Politicians come and go. And the truth remains. That’s what I’m talking about – the truth. And I always say what I think. When I am speaking of Hungary, I mean Hungary. And I don’t need to mask my thoughts. If we need to speak of Germany, we are speaking of Germany. If I need to speak of another country, I’m speaking of another country.

    If it’s a war, then I call it a war, not a “special operation.” If this is a threat to the whole of Europe, then I call it a threat to the whole of Europe.

    This is called the honesty that Mr. Orban lacks. He may have lost it somewhere in his contacts with Moscow.

    I spoke today with the President of Colombia. I am very grateful to him for his support and solidarity with Ukraine. The list of countries that honestly say that freedom matters and the war must stop is expanding.

    I also spoke with British Prime Minister Johnson. A meaningful, pleasant conversation. We agreed on new defensive support for Ukraine. New package. Very, very tangible support. We also agree on the strengthening of sanctions against Russia. Extremely tangible. Agreed on joint steps to achieve peace. Thank you Boris for the leadership! Historical leadership. I’m sure of it.

    In the afternoon I held a large meeting with the economic bloc of the Cabinet of Ministers and the Office of the President. The economic frontline is another direction of our struggle for our state, for our people.

    We discussed in great detail the situation with sowing, with the supply of food to Ukrainians, with the supply of fuel, the situation in the energy sector, the situation with the main sectors of the state.

    The Minister of Finance reported on the state of implementation of the state budget, details of negotiations with partners on financial support for Ukraine.

    In wartime, economic relations must remain one hundred percent managed, no matter how difficult it may be for all of us. Because it’s about perspective. About the perspective of life for more than 40 million Ukrainians, about what our tomorrow will be like. The participants of the meeting received clear tasks.

    And finally. Already traditional.

    I signed a decree on state awards to our heroes – the heroes of our state. 131 servicemen of the Armed Forces of Ukraine, nine of them – posthumously.

    Eternal glory to them all!

    Eternal glory to all who gave their lives for Ukraine!

    Eternal glory to all our defenders!

    Glory to Ukraine!

  • Volodymyr Zelenskyy – 2022 Statement on the Situation in Ukraine (01/04/2022)

    Volodymyr Zelenskyy – 2022 Statement on the Situation in Ukraine (01/04/2022)

    The statement made by Volodymyr Zelenskyy, the President of Ukraine, on 1 April 2022.

    Ukrainians!

    Our dear defenders!

    This day, April 1, the occupiers decided to mark with two equally silly jokes. One such joke is about people in Russia. They started the spring conscription, which looks traditional, but is still different from the usual. Because this year’s conscripts can be sent to war against our state, against our people. So, this is a guaranteed death for many very young guys.

    And although they are not our citizens, although they are citizens of the state that is at war with us on our land, it is still our duty as people to warn.

    Warn each such conscript, their parents. We don’t need more dead people here. Save your children so that they do not become villains. Don’t send them to the army. Do whatever you can to keep them alive. At home. At their home.

    The Russians won’t be told the whole truth about this conscription and about the fate of the conscripts. But still, if you can convey the truth to them – do it.

    I want to dwell on the fact that the Russian Federation is trying to take people into the army in Crimea. This is a violation of international humanitarian law and a war crime for which there will be responsibility. And which is also an argument for increasing sanctions against Russia.

    That’s why I want to tell the people of Crimea: sabotage this story. At any stage. And if it doesn’t work out, don’t fulfill criminal orders and surrender to the Armed Forces of Ukraine at the first opportunity. We will understand everything. You will live.

    The occupiers played a second very silly April Fool’s joke with some residents of the southern regions of Ukraine, where Russian troops had temporarily entered.

    They appoint some “Gauleiters”, some temporary leaders. And they are threatening employees of enterprises and authorities to cooperate with these deceived appointees.

    My message to them is simple: the responsibility for collaboration is inevitable. Tomorrow or the day after tomorrow is a secondary issue. The main thing is the inevitability that justice will be restored. Therefore, everyone who became a Gauleiter can already register somewhere in Rostov. And there will be problems for cooperation with them or with the occupiers directly. This is the last warning.

    The occupiers are withdrawing forces in the north of our country. The withdrawal is slow but noticeable. Somewhere they are expelled with battles. Somewhere they leave positions on their own. After them a complete disaster and many dangers are left. It’s true.

    Firstly, the bombing may continue. Secondly, they are mining all this territory. Mining houses, equipment, even the bodies of killed people. Too many tripwire mines, too many other dangers…

    We are moving forward. Moving carefully. And everyone who returns to this area must also be very careful! It is still impossible to return to normal life as it was. Even in the areas we return after the fighting. You will have to wait. Wait for our land to be cleared. Wait until you can be assured that new shelling is impossible.

    In the east of our country, the situation remains extremely difficult. The Russian militaries are being accumulated in Donbas, in the Kharkiv direction. They are preparing for new powerful blows. We are preparing for even more active defense. We use all opportunities – both internal and external. Necessarily.

    I emphasize once again: hard battles lie ahead. Now we cannot think that we have already passed all the tests. We all strive for victory. But when it comes everyone will see it. Everyone will feel that peace is coming.

    In the afternoon I spoke with President of France Macron. About the humanitarian situation in the Ukrainian cities shelled by the occupiers. The situation in Mariupol was discussed separately. For which, I hope, there may still be a solution. Europe has no right to react in silence to what is happening in our Mariupol. The whole world must react to this humanitarian catastrophe.

    Today humanitarian corridors worked in three regions – Donetsk, Luhansk, Zaporizhzhia. 6,266 people were rescued. In particular, 3,071 people from Mariupol.

    We are separately agreeing on the removal of the wounded and dead from the city. Our military, our civilians – all citizens. We are talking about this with Turkey as a mediator. Hopefully I will be able to report the details soon.

    In the afternoon I met with President of the European Parliament Roberta Metsola. Met in Kyiv. I am grateful to her for this important visit, which demonstrates to some other politicians that courage at a time like this is one of the most important traits for a politician. We talked about how to accelerate Ukraine’s accession to the European Union. There are specifics. We also talked about arms supplies and support of European parliamentarians in this. And also about the sanctions policy. About a deeper sanctions policy against Russia. Because if there is an embargo, then it is an embargo. If there is SWIFT, then it is for all banks. And if it is business with Russia, it is not just a suspension of activities, but a complete withdrawal of European companies from the Russian market.

    Traditionally, I signed a decree on awarding our defenders. Seven servicemen of the State Service for Special Communication and Information Protection. Two of them – posthumously.

    Eternal memory to all who died for Ukraine! Eternal gratitude to our defenders!

    And finally. Tomorrow, April 2, Ukrainian Muslims together with all Muslims of the world will celebrate the holy month of Ramadan. Sincere prayers, mutual forgiveness and good deeds characterize this month. But in Ukraine, another virtue is added – loyalty to brothers-in-arms and your people in battles.

    In the battles for the freedom of Ukraine. In our war for independence. In which we will definitely win. We will definitely achieve peace. For our entire land.

    I sincerely wish you peace! Everyone. The whole of Ukraine! All the people of the world.

    Glory to Ukraine!

  • Volodymyr Zelenskyy – 2022 Statement on the Situation in Ukraine (31/03/2022)

    Volodymyr Zelenskyy – 2022 Statement on the Situation in Ukraine (31/03/2022)

    The statement made by Volodymyr Zelenskyy, the President of Ukraine, on 31 March 2022.

    Ukrainians!

    Our defenders!

    The 36th day of our nationwide defense after eight years of war in Donbas is coming to an end. It’s hard to believe that, but March has already passed. Absolutely imperceptible!

    The passage of time is somehow not even noticed. Every day and every night has become virtually the same for us. The same day, the same night.

    And with one task for all – to protect ourselves, save people, rebuff invaders. Drive them out.

    All this March and five days of February, the invaders have been trying to break in and gain a foothold in our house from different directions – from land, from the sky, from the sea. They go, fly, swim… There is so much evil in them, so much thirst for destruction that it reminds not of people, but of something otherworldly. Some monsters that burn and loot, attack and try to kill. Some hellish chimeras.

    But when you are on your land, everything helps you. The land itself, rivers, every person. Everyone, even the one you didn’t expect from before. We endured much more than the enemy expected.

    They said – three or five days. They thought that this would be enough for them to seize our entire state. And it’s already 36. And we are standing. And we will continue to fight. Until the end.

    Until we have strength and opportunities.

    So that there are no monsters left on our land. So that if chimeras (points to the House with Chimeras – ed.), then native and good. The ones protecting us.

    I am sure that it is extremely pleasant for each of you to read and watch the news that Ukrainian cities are gradually being liberated from the occupiers.

    And so it is. Our Armed Forces, the National Police and the National Guard, intelligence are doing great. Absolute gratitude to them!

    To the north of Kyiv, in the Chernihiv direction, in the Sumy region, the expulsion of the occupiers continues. They themselves are aware that they can no longer withstand the intensity of hostilities they could have maintained in the first half of March.

    But we must also realize that for the Russian military, this is part of their tactics. All this is not occasional. We know their plans. We know what they are planning and what they are doing.

    We know that they are moving away from the areas where we are beating them to focus on others that are very important. On those where it can be difficult for us.

    That is why it is very important for everyone to show restraint. Restraint in emotions. Restraint in worries. We all equally want to win. Equally!

    But there will be battles ahead. We still have a very difficult path to cover to get everything we strive for.

    Of course, everyone should motivate our military, each other, and support our defense. Children – with “likes”. Parents – with a warm word. Volunteers – with help. The people and the state – with all the resources and opportunities that we have, that are available in Ukraine.

    Restraint in emotions, readiness to fight until we win and proper motivation for our military are essential elements.

    I also work on motivation for them. Daily. Like each of us.

    As always, before delivering the address, I signed a decree awarding our heroes. 136 servicemen of the Armed Forces of Ukraine. Thank you to everyone!

    And today another decision was made. Regarding antiheroes. Now I do not have time to deal with all the traitors. But gradually they will all be punished.

    That is why the ex-chief of the Main Department of Internal Security of the Security Service of Ukraine Naumov Andriy Olehovych and the former head of the Office of the Security Service of Ukraine in the Kherson region Kryvoruchko Serhiy Oleksandrovych are no longer generals.

    According to Article 48 of the Disciplinary Statute of the Armed Forces of Ukraine, those servicemen among senior officers who have not decided where their homeland is, who violate the military oath of allegiance to the Ukrainian people as regards the protection of our state, its freedom and independence, will inevitably be deprived of senior military ranks. Random generals don’t belong here!

    And to the real heroes of the Security Service – the same absolute gratitude, just as to each and everyone who sincerely defends our state. There are really a lot of heroes among the servicemen. We are grateful to them!

    The situation in the south and in Donbas remains extremely difficult.

    The invaders are allocating their sick creativity to the temporarily occupied areas of the Kherson region. They are trying to organize some of their incomprehensible structures there, they are trying to figure out how to consolidate their presence there.

    Of course, this is hopeless for them. The more active they are there, the more substantial the losses of Russia itself will be in the end. The losses of Russians themselves. Because who else will pay for the occupation of a foreign land?

    Also in Donbas, in Mariupol, in the Kharkiv direction, Russian troops are accumulating the potential for strikes. Powerful strikes. We will defend ourselves. We will do everything we can to stop the occupiers and clear our land of their evil and foolish chimeras.

    Today I addressed the parliaments of our partner countries: Australia, the Netherlands and Belgium. I felt total support. I am waiting for concrete steps. I called for tougher sanctions against Russia. We have to put pressure on the aggressor until the aggression is over.

    I also spoke about this with President of the European Council Charles Michel. We need more support from our partners right now. When the Russian military is concentrating additional forces in certain areas.

    In addition to sanctions, we discussed with Charles Michel economic support for Ukraine, financing of priority projects. The dynamics of our movement towards full membership in the EU.

    The sanctions policy was one of the topics of conversation between Head of the President’s Office Andriy Yermak and US National Security Advisor Jacob Sullivan.

    The United States has imposed a new package of sanctions against Russia. We are grateful. It will not allow the current sanctions to be circumvented – we have already noticed such attempts. It will also limit the work of sensitive sectors of the Russian economy – its defense sector.

    Let Moscow not forget that the sanctions policy will only be continued and intensified. As long as there is no peace – sanctions are needed. Until Russia begins to invest as sincerely in the search for peace as it invests in the destruction of our state, sanctions will remain unalterable.

    I also held talks with President of Turkey Erdoğan today. We spoke very specifically. In particular, about the prospects of negotiations in Turkey with the Russian Federation. And also about the creation of an effective system of guarantees for our state. About the security we have always needed and to the real provision of which we have come closer. I am grateful for Turkey’s readiness to become a guarantor of security for Ukraine.

    And finally. Both I and government officials have already said that the “Diia” state service has started accepting applications for compensation for the destroyed real estate of our citizens. The state will return to our people everything that the occupiers destroyed – houses, apartments, etc.

    In a few days, 25,491 applications have already been submitted. The number of residents in these houses and these apartments, which were destroyed, according to our estimates is 63 thousand 471 people. But we know that more needs to be restored. Much more.

    So tell everyone who needs it about such a government program. An important program. The opportunity to submit applications will soon be available offline, in the administrative service centers, in the mode usual for many Ukrainians.

    No matter what, we all have to think about the future. About what Ukraine will be like after this war. How we will live. Because this is a war for our future. This is a war for our lives, in which we have only one way – to gain peace for Ukraine. To gain Ukraine’s security.

    Glory to all our heroes!

    Glory to Ukraine!

  • Edward Argar – 2022 Speech on Ambulance Response Times in Shropshire

    Edward Argar – 2022 Speech on Ambulance Response Times in Shropshire

    The speech made by Edward Argar, the Minister for Health, in the House of Commons on 31 March 2022.

    Just as I had the pleasure of giving the final speech in the final debate before the House went into recess before the last half-term, I have the same privilege today. To that end, I congratulate the hon. Member for North Shropshire (Helen Morgan) on securing this important debate. In the short time in which she has been a Member of this House, she has taken an extremely close interest in the issues of ambulances and healthcare for her constituents more broadly. She has been assiduous in raising them in the House, as she has today, or through other means with Ministers and the Department. I pay tribute to her for that.

    The hon. Lady will be aware, as she has genuinely and openly said, that there are complex causes behind the challenges faced by her constituents, and also by people around the country, with the ambulance service and ambulance response times. Ambulance services have faced extraordinary pressures, which have been particularly exacerbated during the pandemic. I am sure the House will join me in expressing gratitude, as she did, to all the ambulance service staff in the NHS for their outstanding work and dedication during this time. I recognise the very powerful individual cases that the hon. Lady cited, suitably anonymised, to illustrate her arguments and her case.

    As I have mentioned, the pandemic has placed very significant demands on the service. In February this year, the service answered over 760,000 calls to 999—this is nationally, and I will turn to the hon. Lady’s local situation in due course—which is an increase of 13% on February 2020. That places very significant pressures on the ambulance service and the wider NHS, and I will turn to the broader causes shortly. She was absolutely right to highlight that the issue is often not with the ambulance service itself—the number of ambulances or the number of staff—but about handovers and the ability to do turnarounds having safely deposited a patient at an acute setting in a hospital, but I will turn to that in a minute.

    A range of other issues, as well of course as demand, impact on performance, including the need for infection prevention and control measures, which remain in place in hospitals. They may not be as acute or as severe as they were at the height of the pandemic, but they are still there, and that does have an impact. There are the handover delays the hon. Lady spoke about, which are linked to capacity with those infection prevention and control measures, but also to the ability either to treat and discharge or to admit patients to a hospital. In recent months, we have also had high workforce sickness absence rates, often down to covid and covid self-isolation, with staff quite rightly taking the view that when they test positive for covid they should stay at home until they do not.

    In spite of these pressures—and this is in no way to diminish the point the hon. Lady made about the impact on her constituents, but is by way of context—the average response time in the west midlands to category 1 calls, the most serious calls classified as life threatening, was maintained at eight minutes and 11 seconds in February 2022. That was despite of a 40% increase in that category of calls on the previous year and a 16% increase locally in 999 calls overall. At a national level, the category 1 response time has been largely maintained at about nine minutes on average over the last several months—so not quite as good as the performance in the West Midlands—despite a 23.5% increase in those incidents compared with before the pandemic. However, we are clear that there have been significant increases in response times in the other categories, which of course we must improve.

    Helen Morgan

    I just want to make the point that in Shropshire we are not seeing the same level of service that we see across the west midlands as a whole. I am calling for more granular data because I think some excellent service provided elsewhere in the West Midlands Ambulance Service area is overshadowing some of the specific problems we are seeing in Shropshire. In addition, the number of hospital admissions to the Shrewsbury and Telford Hospital NHS Trust is running roughly at the same level as in prior years, so although the covid pandemic has provided challenges in separating out such patients when they arrive through infection control measures, it is not actually leading to a higher level of admissions.

    Edward Argar

    I am grateful to the hon. Lady, and I will turn to her specific asks in a moment.

    However, I will turn now to the Bill introduced by the hon. Member for St Albans (Daisy Cooper), which I am aware of. I have to be honest and say that we do not consider that the Bill would necessarily be the most appropriate way of achieving what she wants. The challenge with that legislation is that, at a time when we wish trusts to be focused on the delivery of frontline services, it is another administrative process of data collection. I would add that trusts of course operate at trust level, not at an individual station or county level, and trusts may cover a number of counties. So while I am aware of her legislation, it is not something that I believe would achieve the outcomes or be practical in the way she wishes, and she and I regularly have a to and fro across the Dispatch Box about a number of issues when she speaks for her party on health and care matters.

    There is strong support in place to improve performance. At the national level, as the hon. Member for North Shropshire generously recognised, there was £55 million of investment last summer, in advance of the winter, to help increase ambulance staffing capacity to manage pressures. All trusts received a portion of that funding to expand capacity through additional crews on the road and additional clinical support in control rooms as well as extending hospital ambulance liaison officer cover at the most challenged acute trusts.

    On overall staffing, which includes frontline clinical staff and the clinical support staff who work with them, our ambulance service has seen about a 38% increase since 2010—the Liberal Democrats can quite rightly take some credit for that from their five years in government—and, indeed, in the last year we have seen an increase of about 500 frontline staff. So we have increased staff and continue to increase available staff.

    The £55 million was supported by an additional £4.4 million in capital investment—these are still national figures, but I will turn to her specific local circumstances—which helped to keep an additional 154 ambulances on the road during winter over and above normal levels. Call handler numbers, which are equally important, are being boosted with more than 2,400 on target to be in place by the end of March—the end of today. That is about 500 more FTE—full-time equivalent—staff compared with September 2021, with potential for services to increase in capacity further during the coming financial year.

    NHS England and Improvement is also providing targeted support to the hospitals facing the greatest issues with delays in the handover of ambulance patients, helping them to identify short and longer-term interventions to reduce delays and get ambulances swiftly back out on the road. She is right that that is hugely important, and even more so in areas with large rural populations because of the distances involved. Trusts also receive supportive continuous central monitoring and support by NHSEI’s national ambulance co-ordination centre.

    With clinical support in control rooms, the ambulance service is closing just over 11% of 999 calls with clinical advice over the phone, which is an increase of three quarters since before the pandemic. That helps to save valuable ambulance resources to respond to more urgent calls, with that clinical input ensuring that the advice and decisions are right.

    The hon. Lady will be pleased to hear that significant local support is in place to improve response times in her county. The West Midlands Ambulance Service is working with community partners to help avoid conveying patients to hospital where there is no clinical necessity, providing alternate treatment and care at home or in the community and helping to avoid unnecessary trips to hospital, thereby freeing up resources and hopefully providing a more pleasant experience for those patients.

    In raw numbers, the West Midlands Ambulance Service conveyed over 600 fewer patients to hospital in February based on the clinical advice this year compared with two years ago. It has also introduced a clinical validation team of advanced paramedics who work in control rooms and clinically triage lower urgency cases and, where appropriate, signpost patients to other services, as I alluded to. In February, that team reviewed 967 cases in Shropshire, of which 61% of were not sent an ambulance, 14% were treated on the scene and just 25% were conveyed to hospital. That was based on the clinical triage, which I am sure the hon. Lady agrees should be central to any decisions made. That has played a significant part in helping the service to tackle the pressures.

    Other practical solutions include hospital ambulance liaison officers—HALOs—who are paramedics who work with bed managers to smooth out the flow of patients coming to an A&E department. They can provide a constant flow of information about capacity to the strategic command cell at the ambulance service headquarters, escalating any issues and avoiding queueing where possible. There is also joint work to cohort ambulance patients at A&E sites, where a single ambulance crew takes responsibility for three or four patients. That releases crews to respond to outstanding calls in the community more quickly.

    A new same-day emergency centre—SDEC—has been opened at the Royal Shrewsbury to divert patients, as clinically appropriate, away from A&E, improving handover times. In the two and a half years that I have been a health Minister, I have discovered that there are probably almost as many acronyms in health as in the Ministry of Defence. Surgical SDEC capacity at the Royal Shrewsbury has also been expanded and all SDEC units receive ambulances directly for suitable patients.

    The hon. Lady rightly mentioned hospitals, and I am grateful that my hon. Friend the Member for Telford (Lucy Allan) is here and made an intervention. During her seven years in the House, she has been a regular and vocal advocate for her local hospital in Telford. I pay tribute to her, because it was due to her campaigning and tenacity that there is an A&E locally at Telford. That is still seeing patients and helping to alleviate the pressure in Shropshire. She should rightly be proud of that, having successfully campaigned for it.

    Action is being taken locally to improve the patient flow through hospitals by discharging patients more quickly to create bed space. The aim is not only to increase the number of discharges a day, but to bring more discharges forward to earlier in the day, when it is clinically safe to do so, to allow the effective discharge and transition back to care at home or in a care home. Health and care system partners locally are looking to create additional community and social care capacity to support timely discharge, create bed space to take patients from A&E and reduce ambulance handover times.

    At a national level, we have set up a national discharge taskforce. As a Minister, I get almost daily statistics about where we are on delayed discharges across the country. It is a complex picture, with a variety of reasons behind delayed discharges. The hon. Member for North Shropshire is correct that some are about delays in getting into care homes or getting domiciliary care packages or rehabilitation packages at home. Some are also down to delays in the hospital in sign-offs and procedures, and there is more that we continue to do to drive those delays down.

    Construction is also under way on a new modular ward at the Royal Shrewsbury site, with 32 additional beds in service by spring 2022. That is alongside a £9.3 million upgrade of the emergency department at the Royal Shrewsbury, delivering additional cubicles, a new and improved majors department, a new designated emergency zone for children and young people and a new clinical decisions unit. The first phase of that work is complete and all areas will be finished by spring 2022.

    The hon. Lady raised a number of other issues, including the Future Fit model. We have been clear that funding of £312 million was allocated for that project, and that remains allocated. The challenge we face is that, thus far, the trust has not proposed a solution that meets that budget. We continue to work with the trust and to encourage it to do so. I hope that it will so that we can continue to drive that important project forward.

    I will very gently push back on what the hon. Lady said about there being £10 billion of PPE that is not fit for purpose. She will know that that is not correct. In the statement that was made about write-downs, not write-offs, the amount was about £8.7 billion, and it was not all PPE, by any means, that was not fit for purpose. Only a tiny proportion of that was the case. A significant element of that was essentially due to over-ordering at the height of the pandemic to make sure that the frontline had the PPE that it needed. We were buying at the height of the market, and there is currently a glut of PPE, so its value has inevitably declined. Not all of it will be used, because we got more than we needed to make sure that clinicians and others on the frontline were not exposed.

    The hon. Lady touched on local ambulance Make Ready stations and the changes to them. Decisions on reconfigurations and changes to that are made locally by the trust; it consults, but it makes those decisions. The Government do not have any power over those matters. The Health and Care Bill, which we debated yesterday, would give the Secretary of State greater power over such reconfigurations in the way that she asked, but her hon. Friend the Member for St Albans argued against that. I gently say that that is a matter for the local trust and the usual NHS processes on reconfigurations.

    The hon. Lady touched on, I think—forgive me if I am wrong—asking the CQC to look into this issue. It is entirely open for her or others to raise it with the CQC, and the CQC will make a decision or a judgment on whether it believes that it is appropriate or otherwise to look into the matter.

    In the few seconds that I have left, before Mr Deputy Speaker calls me to order, I say that I recognise and do not in any way diminish the significance of the issues that the hon. Lady raised. I hope that I have given her some reassurance that we are working through these issues and that we continue to put the support in place to help her constituents in Shropshire and more broadly.

    Finally, the hon. Lady requested a meeting, and I am conscious that she has raised the issue of correspondence. I have asked for that; I believe that that has happened since Christmas, as the Department works through the backlog. There is still a delay in correspondence, but I have pulled that out and asked for it, and I am happy to meet her and her fellow Shropshire MPs, together with the ambulance trust, to discuss their collective concerns or reflections that they would like to put to me as a Minister.

    I conclude by wishing the hon. Lady a very happy Easter and by thanking her for bringing this to my attention and the attention of the House.

  • Helen Morgan – 2022 Speech on Ambulance Response Times in Shropshire

    Helen Morgan – 2022 Speech on Ambulance Response Times in Shropshire

    The speech made by Helen Morgan, the Liberal Democrat MP for North Shropshire, in the House of Commons on 31 March 2022.

    I thank Mr Speaker for granting today’s Adjournment debate on a topic that is so important to my constituents in North Shropshire and to people across Shropshire and across the country. I start by making it clear that I am not here to criticise the hard-working NHS staff in our ambulance services and emergency departments. Indeed, I thank them for their incredibly hard and dedicated work in difficult and demotivating circumstances, but there is clearly a problem with the provision of emergency care in Shropshire, with complex causes, and I bring it before this House to urge the Government to take some action.

    It was clear throughout my election campaign, and has been clear from my inbox since then, that stories of excessive waits for an ambulance are not a rarity. I have since urged my constituents to contact me and share their experiences. Just since Monday, my office has been met with a tidal wave of correspondence, each story as saddening and frightening as the last. A care home reported a wait of 19 hours for an elderly resident with a broken hip. An elderly diabetic man fell and dislocated his shoulder. He was advised not to drink or eat anything in case surgery was required, and then waited 15 hours for an ambulance to arrive. A disabled man fell in his bathroom and waited for 21 hours for an ambulance. He was fortunately lifted from the floor after eight hours by a helpful neighbour. A man waited with a stranger experiencing heart attack symptoms on the side of the road for hours, only to give up and drive the gentleman to A&E himself.

    A man with a suspected stroke waited nine hours for an ambulance and a further five in the ambulance waiting to be transferred into hospital. A 92-year-old lady fell at 8.30 in the morning, suffering bleeding from the head and a broken leg. She was looked after by her 75-year-old neighbour for almost eight hours until the ambulance arrived, and then waited in the ambulance for transfer into the A&E department until 2.30 the next morning. She had not eaten since 6.30 the evening before her fall. An elderly woman fell down the stairs shortly after lunch. Her emergency carers—she has a red button to press for them—made her comfortable and called an ambulance, but they could not carry on waiting forever. After an 11-hour wait, she was alone with her front door open so that the ambulance crew could access her house. That was 3 o’clock in the morning.

    I could easily spend the next half hour relating heartbreaking stories, and I thank all my constituents who contacted me for taking the time to get in touch and explain the scale of the problem. One story in particular brought the issue home, and some Members may have read about it in the newspapers. It was the story of a young footballer who slipped on AstroTurf while playing football at school. He dislocated his knee and waited so long for an ambulance that by the time one finally arrived he had developed hypothermia. I do not know whether Members can imagine the distress of this young man, and the teaching staff who stayed on in the dark, long after the school day had ended, as his condition deteriorated out in the cold.

    What all these stories have in common is that they could have been much worse. I am sure everyone in the House would agree that nobody should have to suffer waiting an excessive amount of time for an ambulance, yet tragically in North Shropshire it is pretty common. I know this problem is not unique to Shropshire. I am sure that many colleagues have received similar emails describing similar events. In parts of Britain, an excessive wait for an ambulance has become normal.

    The problems surrounding this crisis are complex, and I am not here to propose a simple quick fix. However, there are consistent themes at the core of the issue. It is vital that we recognise them if we are to work out how to move on from here. The first is the problem of handing over patients at the emergency departments in Shrewsbury and Telford. West Midlands Ambulance Service has told me that, on the day the young footballer dislocated his knee, 868 hours were lost waiting to hand over patients, and that nearly 2,600 hours were lost in the month up to 29 March. Handover times in Shropshire are significantly worse than in the rest of the country, and there have been times when every ambulance based in Shropshire is waiting outside a hospital to discharge a patient.

    The hospital trust has declared a critical incident on no less than four separate occasions so far this year, and each of those incidents coincided with an increase in the number of heartbreaking stories coming into my inbox.

    Lucy Allan (Telford) (Con)

    I congratulate the hon. Lady on bringing this incredibly important issue to the House. Such heartbreaking stories are common to all Shropshire MPs. Does she agree that a combination of factors—I am sure she will go on to discuss some of them—including the transfer of patients on to wards, as well as the inaccessibility of general practitioners, is putting additional pressure on A&E?

    Helen Morgan

    I thank the hon. Lady for her intervention, and I entirely agree with her. I will stress some of those points later in my speech.

    The emergency departments of the Shrewsbury and Telford Hospital NHS Trust report that they suffer from a shortage of space and staff, along with the additional challenges of separating covid patients—on Tuesday this week, the trust had more covid patients than at any previous point in the pandemic. The trust also reports delays in discharging patients who are well enough to leave hospital because it is struggling to find care packages or care home spaces.

    A number of care homes in Shropshire are currently closed because of the pandemic. Shropshire shares the national problem of a shortage of care workers and care homes, which is probably exacerbated by our high proportion of elderly patients. The inability to discharge patients who would doubtless be better off at home or in a care home setting reduces the flow of patients through the hospital.

    The impact of all this is that, because ambulances wait so long at hospitals, the vast majority of ambulance journeys across Shropshire begin in Shrewsbury or Telford. It is not possible to reach the most seriously ill patients towards the edge of the county within the target time if the ambulance sets out from one of those two towns. This, combined with the closure of community ambulance stations, means that very few ambulances are free in places such as Oswestry and Market Drayton when people become ill and require one.

    Another factor, as the hon. Member for Telford (Lucy Allan) alluded to, is the volume of patients accessing emergency departments, or being taken to one in an ambulance, because there is no other option locally, particularly in the evening or at the weekend. Shropshire has a worsening shortage of GPs, which is leading to patients attending emergency departments for relatively minor issues because they simply have no alternative. A key reason behind the problem of staff recruitment is the chronic lack of other services in Shropshire, but that is a debate for another day.

    The Government must deliver on their promise to recruit more GPs, and they must ensure that people with non-urgent healthcare needs are provided with adequate resources in the community. I am incredibly proud that my constituents Sian Tasker and Lawrence Chappel in Oswestry and, beyond my constituency, Darren Childs in Ludlow, and other campaigners, are working tirelessly to keep this issue in the public light and are campaigning to keep their community ambulance stations open. It is partly because of their hard work that we are finally discussing this issue in Parliament.

    I am afraid to say that, so far, the Government have refused to listen to the countless warnings by campaigners and those working on the frontline. The Care Quality Commission’s “State of health care and adult social care in England” report last year, gave a stark warning that overstretched ambulance services and emergency departments are putting patients at risk. The numbers speak for themselves. The Association of Ambulance Chief Executives has found that, nationally, 160,000 people a year are coming to harm because of delayed handovers to A&E. Of those, a shocking 12,000 experience severe harm.

    I have repeatedly asked the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care to meet me and the West Midlands Ambulance Service to discuss how we can tackle local issues together. I am deeply disappointed that, so far, he has refused my request. It seems to many people in Shropshire that the Department of Health and Social Care is burying its head in the sand and refusing to acknowledge the seriousness of the issue we face. I take this opportunity to urge the Minister to meet me and my colleagues across the county to discuss the crisis and to hear some first-hand accounts of those left waiting in distress so that we can come to some sort of solution together.

    I have no doubt that all hon. Members present, including those on the Government Benches, want to ensure that people at their most vulnerable are kept safe. I welcome the recently announced additional £55 million of support for ambulance services. I fear, however, that that money may not go far enough or may not be targeted in the areas of greatest need. The hopes of the Shrewsbury and Telford Hospital NHS Trust are pinned on the Future Fit hospital transformation programme, which kicked off in 2013. It is reliant on £312 million of funding, the source of which may be an interest-bearing loan—I will happily correct the record if I am incorrect, but that is my understanding. Unfortunately, more than eight years later, a strategic outline case has still not been signed off. The estimated costs have spiralled by almost 70% and it is likely that they will not be covered by the Government.

    The initial promises of urgent care centres in more rural areas—for example, one was guaranteed for Oswestry—investment in community hospitals and local planned care centres were all quietly dropped in the summer of 2015. Promises of investment in public health and prevention, which is a good idea and would have been welcome in Shropshire, are also apparently no further forward. We are consistently told that there is no more money in the pot for faster, better-resourced ambulance services or urgent care staff, yet the Government wasted more than £10 billion on personal protective equipment that is not up to scratch. It is time that they listened to the warning signs that they have been ignoring and finally step up to provide proper support for ambulance services and accident and emergency departments.

    There are several steps that the Government could take right away to get to the bottom of the causes of the issue. The Secretary of State could commission the Care Quality Commission under powers laid out in section 48 of the Health and Social Care Act 2008 to conduct an investigation into the causes and impacts of ambulance service delays. That is a fairly simple step and the law already allows for him to commission the CQC. Once the Government have a professional assessment of the complexity of the causes of the delays to ambulance service response, they can take the correct steps, targeted at the correct causes of the problems, to make some rapid improvements to the service. As I have outlined, the causes will most likely lie in a number of areas across emergency and social care, but until they are fully understood by the right people, they cannot be resolved.

    The Government could also pass the Ambulance Waiting Times (Local Reporting) Bill of my hon. Friend the Member for St Albans (Daisy Cooper), which would require accessible, localised reports of ambulance response times to be published. Once the data was available, it would enable central and devolved Governments to accurately understand where the delays are and how best to tackle them, because we should be following the data and the facts to provide the right solutions and the right resourcing in the areas that need them most. That Bill is already written, it has had its First Reading and it is ready to go.

    I brought this debate to Parliament to ensure that the Minister and the Secretary of State understand the scale of the problem in Shropshire and, crucially, the urgency in resolving it. How many more elderly citizens will have to wait for 10 hours, with their front door open, for an ambulance? How many more people will have to wait at the roadside with a stranger who they believe might be close to death? How many more young adults will develop hypothermia when they initially have a trivial injury, such as a dislocated knee? How many more cases of serious harm, or even avoidable death, will it take?

    I thank the Minister for being here this evening and responding to my speech. I also thank Mr Speaker for granting this Adjournment debate. I take the opportunity to thank everybody in the Chamber for coming along and to wish them a happy Easter and a restful break.