Speeches by Abbott.

“I want to briefly address the implication or inference that my hon. Friend the Member for Spen Valley, who is leading the Bill, has not produced an incredibly balanced set of witnesses, or indeed a scrutiny Committee. I put it on record that in principle I am in support of assisted dying, but I did not feel that I coul…”

“Yes, I am sure there will be the demand for it.”

“I have a similar comment to Dawn’s. If there were a couple more Opposition speakers to make sure that we have an even split, it would be fantastic, but I am really supportive. Funnily enough, I was a county councillor at Suffolk county council, and we had a modern slavery motion passed a couple of years after the Act. …”

“You say that you want a full-day debate, but we might need some more Opposition speakers to make sure there is a better, 50:50 split. I think there are 36 speakers down overall, which is a really fantastic number, but there are only 12 Opposition speakers at the moment, so we might need a few more to make sure that the…”

“I just want to say that I am a member of the APPG on Holocaust memorial.”

“May I briefly add something, Chair? I am just searching through the Back-Bench Members who have signed your application, and many of the same names came up for the other debate that you mentioned, Chair. I think you will probably have entirely the same people coming to speak at both debates, to be honest.”

“If it falls under SEND, it would technically be Education. The slight issue is that it is the under-fives you are particularly targeting, but I would say that it is a SEND issue, so I would gently suggest that it would be Education.”

“This is a bit of a technicality, but broadly there need to be an equal number of MPs from the Government and Opposition sides. At the moment, there are three Labour Members out of the 11 or 12 Members you have. Would you be confident of getting a couple more Labour speakers? The other thing to say, since we have mentio…”

“T5. When I met the Ukrainian ambassador to the United Kingdom, General Zaluzhnyi, last month he raised the importance of ensuring that Ukrainian children and young people who have been forced to flee this terrible conflict in their own country receive the support and education that they need, so that they can be the ge…”

“Will the hon. Member give way? That is an important point.”

“The hon. Gentleman has just made a case for why we must crack on, and stop dithering and delaying. There is a history of doing bad things slowly, and that should never be repeated. It is not an excuse to do nothing now. We cannot afford to keep kicking the can down the road. We cannot keep relying on our constituents t…”

“It is not horror at all; it is infrastructure that people desperately rely on. The right hon. Gentleman might want to live in a fantasy in which costs do not matter and there are no trade-offs. Well, that is not the case. I also say to the hon. Member for Harwich and North Essex: East Anglia and the fenlands, which he …”

“I will finish my point because it is directly related to the hon. Gentleman’s constituency of Central Suffolk. We already have pylons running through that part of the world. We have Mendlesham mast, which can be seen from miles around. We also have Eye airfield, big business parks, warehouses and farm buildings. We alr…”

“The hon. Gentleman says, “Here we go”, but it is absolutely relevant to this debate. Yes, the Conservative Government passed the Banner report—well done. That is the big achievement of the last 14 years. There was a fundamental opportunity over the last decade to recognise where we were going as a country, and what we …”

“I will speak briefly because I know that many of my colleagues also wish to speak. I echo the comments made by the hon. Member for Harwich and North Essex (Sir Bernard Jenkin). This does not have to be a partisan issue, but equally we have to acknowledge the situation as we find it, not the fantasy that we wish it to b…”

“3. What discussions she has had with the Crown Prosecution Service on ensuring the effective prosecution of covid-19 related fraud.”

“In 2021, the previous Health Secretary said in relation to covid-19 contracts that “where a contract is not delivered against, we do not intend to pay taxpayers’ money”.—[Official Report, 23 February 2021; Vol. 689, c. 758.] Judging from the figures that highlight the enormous scale of covid-19-related fraud, that was …”

“This Budget was about rebuilding Britain after 14 years of incompetence, negligence and chaos. Conservative Members—all four of them who are left in the Chamber today—cannot even bring themselves to apologise for the inheritance that they left, not just to our Government but to the country as a whole. They should have …”

“Mine was relatively similar to Will’s—it was just about confidence in filling the time.”

“It was a former Prisons Minister who identified that short custodial sentences have a higher reoffending rate than sentences served outside prison. Does the Minister agree that we need to look at using technology to curtail offenders’ freedoms outside prison and ensure that we cut the cycle of crime?”