Speeches by Hall.

“It is a pleasure to serve under your chairship, Mrs Hobhouse. I thank the hon. Member for Horsham (John Milne) for securing this hugely important debate and for his powerful speech. Just a few weeks ago, I stood outside Downing Street alongside women living with invasive lobular breast cancer, their families and campai…”

“Trish is a phenomenal campaigner—a lot like Susan—and she wants to work together to create an awareness campaign so that women understand that there is a difference between types of breast cancer. We are looking to establish a support group for women who have lobular breast cancer; that is in the works. On training, my…”

“I absolutely agree; the NHS system as a whole is very fragmented, and the lack of connectivity is a big issue. Social care is a core component and it needs to be a priority going forward.”

“I agree with my hon. Friend and will touch on that point in a second, using Warrington as an example. I am pleased that our local trust has already taken steps and is rightly treating corridor care and waiting times as a priority, but there is more to do. That is why I have been working closely with our local NHS, Mini…”

“Let us be clear from the beginning: corridor care is unacceptable. No patient should be treated in a corridor. No family should watch a loved one receive care without the privacy and dignity that they deserve. No member of our brilliant NHS staff should be put in the impossible position of delivering care in an environ…”

“Why was that decision taken, given the amount of work that had gone into it?”

“It is fascinating, but has any decision been taken to remove the core funding for this? I ask given how critical it is.”

“I will touch on a couple of specific projects. First, has any decision been taken to mothball CLARA as of yet? RUEDI, too, seems to be up in the air. I know that in late 2024, they were told to continue the research, but information since has been to pause on that piece of work.”

“So you know.”

“We have been talking about supercomputing and just how essential that is. Obviously there is the Hartree centre and the Mary Coombs supercomputer, which is phenomenal. These are just some of the facts that we have been given; this is just a little piece of information. It is a 24.4 petaflops system; it can perform 24.4…”

“Rather than a strategic decision, it is a short-term budget decision.”

“Has a wider decision been taken on whether the HNCDI is going to be ending?”

“I would say that it is quite a critical programme, not least because of the AI—”

“But there is also the announcement of, for instance, the data centre in Warrington—”

“Which is fantastic—don’t get me wrong.”

“When do you think you might revisit it?”

“I would hate to see what we have seen in the past in Daresbury. Years ago, we lost tech that was conceived there and developed there—created there—to Oxfordshire. We lose a lot of the talent in the process, so I would hate to see that again. I am thinking of the wider north-west innovation ecosystem and the impact of l…”

“But that is completely different tech from what I am talking about and the surrounding skills and connections that they have. We were talking about universities in the north. They have fantastic connections with universities like Liverpool and Lancaster. There is a massive ecosystem, and my worry is that if in the nort…”

“Okay. I will ask a question that Rupert very generously gave to me, not related to Daresbury. In terms of assessing business cases for genuinely novel research infrastructure, what do you need to do differently?”

“I would hope that that cluster is part of the strategic thinking.”