Speeches by Voaden.

“I would like to talk about housing, which you have referred to previously in your evidence. Many, many contributors to this inquiry—probably most of them—drew the link between the cost of housing and children living in poverty. Your strategy states that the Government will “continue to review the levels of support” pro…”

“I agree that social prescribers do a fantastic job. I recently met members of Veterans Outdoors near Totnes, and visited the Vounder Therapy Garden at the Eden Project through the parliamentary knowledge schemes. Those organisations are doing incredible work, turning lives around, particularly for those with mental hea…”

“So you are confident that as the strategy moves forward, you will be able to look at the intersectionality of poverty and work out which groups are improving, which groups are stalling and where the strategy might need to be tweaked to address that.”

“The strategy recognises that some families are at a higher risk of poverty than others. The Scottish Government have identified six priority family groups in their own work on child poverty. Could you tell us which particular groups at high risk of poverty are going to be included systematically in your monitoring, eva…”

“Do those statistics include a record of children who are bereaved of a parent? I am doing a lot of work about bereavement benefits, which were slashed by the Conservatives, and families falling into poverty when they lose a parent. Are they being tracked?”

“But the Renters’ Rights Act—that’s a distraction. That protects them from being evicted, but we know that there are children who do not even have a bed to sleep in, or children living in cramped accommodation, with families of six, eight or 10 living in two-room flats because they cannot afford anything bigger.”

“I appreciate that you are doing things around social housing and temporary housing. However, there are hundreds of thousands of people in this country living in private rented accommodation. Where I live, a family of three will have to pay over £1,100 a month in rent, but the local housing allowance is just £840. It go…”

“3. What steps his Department is taking to support social prescribing.”

“The NFU is concerned that the £240 million allocated for new sustainable farming incentive agreements in 2026 does not match the scale of farmers’ environmental ambitions and will not allow all farmers with expiring agreements a reasonable opportunity to access ongoing environmental land management schemes funding. How…”

“What do you think is most important? What do you think the priority should be? Is it the children or is it giving parents free childcare so that they can go back to work?”

“I have four coastguard stations in South Devon—Kingsbridge, Dartmouth, Brixham and Bigbury—and hundreds of volunteers, many of whom have written to me with their concerns about these changes. The Kingsbridge team have been out 34 times this year. Last Friday night, they were called out at 1 am and spent all night rescu…”

“There is a lot of talk about the first 1,000 days of a child’s life. We are going to see a private Member’s Bill coming in. Those years are absolutely crucial. You can possibly even predict who is going to become a NEET at 16 or 18 by what is happening between nought and five, so we know that early years are absolutely…”

“You have mentioned some of these already, but, following the recent safeguarding failures, could you tell us whether the Department is going to review whether additional measures such as CCTV coverage and a two-person rule for intimate care are needed in early years settings to strengthen child protection? Could you ju…”

“So you do not have any plans to move away from the attendance-linked EYPP funding so that settings have a longer-term stability over how much funding they are going to get this time next year?”

“I would like to move on to safeguarding now. We have heard concerns about an operational gap between the statutory intent of safeguarding and what is happening in real-world practice. There are things such as staff concerns being raised and not being taken seriously, high turnover of staff leading to practitioners who …”

“Lastly, safe sleep is a crucial aspect of infant safeguarding. How confident are you that early years staff receive sufficient training on safe sleep practices? What action has the Department taken to ensure that this training is consistent across settings?”

“How would a parent contact Ofsted if they had a concern? Is there a hotline or something? Do parents know about it?”

“DBS checks provide only a point-in-time assessment. What will the Department do to improve the sharing of safeguarding information and references when staff move between settings? What consideration has it given to introducing more robust and continuous monitoring arrangements to better protect children?”

“Do you know what sort of new jobs?”

“That is great because I cannot sleep in this heat, so I will call that bedtime reading.”