Dear John,

This week saw Parliament return to business as usual with in-person voting after the last 18 months of remote working through the pandemic. It was fantastic to meet with colleagues and more urgently, have the clear opportunity to look across the commons, hold this Government to account on a face-to-face basis and really press them for the answers we’ve been calling for around so many issues including, actions taken on Afghanistan, their plans for social care and activity with Universal Credit.

This week one of the most urgent issues our country faces was debated in parliament: social care reform. I voted against Conservative moves to make lower income working families pay for the Government’s failure to address the cuts and underfunding to the NHS and for the social care crisis. 
 
Not only does this jobs tax represent the biggest rise in taxes on families for over 50 years but as a former care worker myself, I can say with first-hand knowledge that the Conservative plan will not address the social care crisis it has been designed to tackle. Instead, it will simply place an enormous burden on hard working people. 
 
The Conservative plan does: 
- Nothing to balance out the £8bn in cuts over the last decade that their successive Governments took from the sector, and which has caused social care to reach this crisis point.  
- Nothing to help the more than 1.5million people who need care yet, are ineligible for support.  
- Nothing to address the growing 100,000 vacancies in care which is a profession that is supremely undervalued when compared to others. Often it is seen as women’s work who are left to cope by themselves.
- Nor is there anything that will prevent those who need care, from having to sell their homes in order to pay for it. 
 
The pandemic has also entrenched misconceptions about social care. It is often thought that care is only about older people, when in reality, a third of the users and half of the budget for social care is for working age adults with disabilities. People believe that care is about care homes, when there are 11.5 million at home carers. 
 
I fully support the principles of the reforms my colleague, Liz Kendall MP, set out earlier this year, including the steps to ensure more people get care and support in their own homes and those undervalued care workers are paid a real living wage. 
 
Under a Labour government, taxes that pay for social care should be fair across the generations and all forms of income. Those with the broadest shoulders should pay more – not working families now set for an unfair tax rise. 
 
I’m immensely proud that Labour has started to set out our ambitious plans and has offered to work with the Government to fix this crisis – but the lack of any real plan and taxing working families and businesses is just not the way to do it. 

Earlier this week there was a vote in Parliament on the mandatory voter ID scheme which the Government is looking to introduce. I am wholeheartedly against this new scheme and do not support the Elections Bill. It will suppress votes and cost millions.  
 
While on the surface, it seems like a good policy, the reality means everyone has to have photo ID. In the West Midlands alone, over 150,000 people do not have a passport and even fewer people have a driver's licence. Nationally, this accounts for more than 3.5 million people who would become ineligible. 
 
These new measures which the Government wish to introduce will politically silence more than a fifth of people in the West Midlands and is a dangerous precedent to set against our democratic rights.  It will see the elderly, low income and Black, Asian and ethnic minority voters all at risk of losing their right to vote without photo ID.  
 
For those that wish to vote and need to get ID, it will mean that they will have to pay either £85 for a passport or £43 for a driver’s licence. No one should have to pay to be eligible to vote. That is not British democracy. 
 
Moreover, voter fraud is not an issue that needs addressing in this way. At the last general election in Birmingham there were zero cases of voter fraud. Nationally, of the 59 million votes cast, which was considered a high turnout, 1 case of voter fraud was found to have taken place.  
 
To enforce this voter ID scheme, it will cost the Government £120 million over ten years. It seems unbelievable to start paying millions for every election, at a time when the Government can’t seem to find the money to give our nurses a pay rise or fund services to tackle actual crime. 
 
Practically, this Elections Bill means millions of voters will either have their democratic right to vote taken away or be forced to pay up for photo ID all for a scheme which isn’t needed in the first place.  
 
By imposing these measures, the Conservatives are reversing decades of democratic progress and they urgently need to rethink this pointless policy. 

You can catch me taking part in ITV’s Central Lobby tonight at 10.45pm. As the Labour representative, I will be joining fellow guests, Conservative MP Alberto Costa and Liberal Democrat Michael Mullaney, Opposition Leader of Leicestershire County Council, to answer questions on the Midlands’ response to the Afghanistan refugee crisis and the evolving debate around social care reform and our NHS.