Peter Prinsley – 2024 Maiden Speech on Planning, the Green Belt and Rural Affairs

The maiden speech made by Peter Prinsley, the Labour MP for Bury St Edmunds and Stowmarket, in the House of Commons on 19 July 2024.

I am a surgeon from East Anglia, and it is an honour beyond my imagining to have been elected to Parliament to serve the people of Bury St Edmunds and Stowmarket in the most beautiful county of Suffolk. I thank its voters for putting their faith in me and in Labour, and for giving us the chance to change Britain. I am the first ever Labour Member of Parliament for Bury St Edmunds and Stowmarket, which has been a Conservative seat for nigh on 150 years.

I must thank my predecessor, Jo Churchill, most sincerely for her long service to her constituents. I am the first ear, nose and throat surgeon ever elected to Parliament. I am not, however, the first member of my family to be an MP. I recall my uncle, George Jeger, from when I was a small boy in the 1960s—he was the Member for Goole, in the East Riding of Yorkshire.

I thank my teachers at Guisborough grammar school in Cleveland. As a descendant of Jewish refugees, what a pleasure it was to hear my hon. Friend the Member for Middlesbrough South and East Cleveland (Luke Myer) deliver his maiden speech. I went to medical school in Sheffield, and I thank the many surgeons who trained me in the NHS. I thank the thousands of patients whom I have treated during my career, and who put their faith in me and are my lasting inspiration. Indeed, one of the first people I met as I walked into Parliament was one of my patients, Paul from Great Yarmouth, who works here in this place to keep us all safe. I thank my family and in particular my wife, Marian, the former sheriff of Norwich, who has been my greatest supporter and who first encouraged me in politics.

My constituency of Bury St Edmunds and Stowmarket is a wonderful part of the world, with a rich tradition of agriculture and food production. We are home to Greene King and, according to the records in the House of Commons Library, one of my distinguished predecessors urged the House bars to stock the delicious beer created from Suffolk barley. I see that the present Greene King brew in the Strangers’ Bar is called Level Head—something we are all going to need in the years to come as we begin to rebuild Britain. We are also home to Silver Spoon, and the enormous Suffolk sugar beet production is key to the local economy. In Stowmarket, we have a brilliant food museum to showcase that most essential of national services, farming.

I was delighted to see our new Government’s proposals to sort out our buses. Let us think of them as the crucial services they are and support them. There are villages in my constituency that have two buses a day during the school term and no buses at all in the school holidays. How does anyone without a car get to the GP surgery or to the pharmacy in the nearby town?

Very few surgeons are ever elected to Parliament and I will bring my experience of 42 years as an NHS doctor to this place to do something to help mend a service that my right hon. Friend the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care has described as broken. Many of our hospitals are indeed in poor repair and we have seen very little progress on the 40 new hospitals famously promised by the last Government. In Bury St Edmunds, we urgently need to confirm the capital funding to progress the replacement of the West Suffolk hospital which, like my own James Paget university hospital in Great Yarmouth and our sister hospital in King’s Lynn, is supported by thousands of scaffolding poles and is literally falling down. Last week, it was reported that bird droppings had fallen through the roof on to sterile surgical instruments. My predecessor was a strong advocate for the replacement of our hospital, and I will aim to continue her work.

Our brilliant new Government have much to do. Let us use our huge mandate wisely. Let us look after the staff who look after us, end the outrage of food banks for the nurses in many of our hospitals, and sort out the pay and conditions of all who work in our most precious of public services. Let us make the biggest employer in the land the very best employer in the land.

There are things to do to sort out social care and to end the financial lottery at the end of life, which many families fear. The answers are political, and we can do this. Our hospitals are full of patients with a non-medical condition called bed block, because they cannot be discharged safely in many cases. I cannot begin to tell the House how many of my operating lists have been cancelled because of that problem. Whole surgical teams are waiting around for hours and operating theatres are lying empty. If we solve the problem of social care, we will not need to build ever bigger hospitals.

But I am optimistic for our NHS. Britain leads the world in scientific advances. Right in my own region of East Anglia we have world-beating biomedical science and leading universities.

Recently, we celebrated 75 years of the NHS. My father—who, if he were alive and here today, would be astonished—was an RAF medic who joined the RAF in 1948. My son is an A&E doctor right here in London. My sister is a nurse. My family has served the NHS continuously since it began.

When the great Nye Bevan invented the NHS, a painful hip was treated with a walking stick, and a cataract with a thick pair of glasses. Now the miracles of joint replacement and cataract surgery are no longer regarded as the surgical miracles they are, but as an entitlement. Nye would have been amazed.

I am sure we will see in our own time scientific and medical advances beyond our imagination. Already we are at last seeing effective treatments for dementia and neurological disorders, and genetic cures for haemophilia and other inherited problems. We will also have cancer vaccines and other marvels that we cannot yet imagine.

I urge all my honourable colleagues in this brand-new Parliament to do whatever we can to support research and innovation with all our heart and all our soul, for as the great poet Seamus Heaney wrote,

“once in a lifetime

The longed-for tidal wave

Of justice can rise up,

And hope and history rhyme.”

I commend this King’s Speech to the House.