Your Latest Briefing from the Liberal Democrats in Parliament.

Last week, Jeremy Hunt delivered the Autumn Statement.

Sarah Olney (MP for Richmond Park), our Treasury spokesperson, responded in the Commons by calling out the deception the statement brought after years of unfair tax hikes on hard-working families from this Conservative government.

Conservative chaos has sent mortgages and tax bills soaring, and the Chancellor’s announcements won’t even touch the sides.

Worse still was the deafening silence on health. Hunt failed to mention GPs, dentists or ambulances once in his Autumn Statement. That’s just how out of touch he is.

It beggars belief that this Conservative government is slashing funding for our NHS, while giving billions in tax giveaways to big banks. We must reduce NHS waiting lists if we are going to get people back to work and the economy back on track.

This week, Baroness Brinton led Peers to win two significant motions against the Government's unscientific and harmful immigration age assessments.

The Royal College of Paediatrics and Child Health has categorically said that there is not a single reliable method for making precise age assessments.

And yet this callous Government wants to subject asylum seekers to illogical, mediaeval testing.

This move from Sal ensured that the concerns of the House were firmly expressed and included a call on the government to revoke these harmful measures.

You can watch Baroness Brinton explain why this was so important here:

In this week’s Prime Minister’s Questions, party leader Ed Davey grilled Rishi Sunak on the Conservative’s promise three years ago for 40 new hospitals and significant upgrades to hospitals in most need, highlighting the severe lack of progress since.

With our NHS is in crisis and around 6.5 million people, waiting for 7.8 million courses of treatment, the government must take urgent action to ensure our hospitals and healthcare facilities are fit for use and safe for patients and staff.

Without that investment and progress, our NHS will continue to fall behind.

Our newest Peer in the House of Lords, Earl Russell, secured a three-hour debate this month on the important topic of improving mental health support for our children and young people.

We have a young person's mental health emergency in this country, with 1 in 5 experiencing problems.

Watch Earl Russell discuss the debate:

Following the ruling by the Supreme Court on the Government’s unlawful Rwanda plan, Munira Wilson (MP for Twickenham) asked the Justice Secretary if he agreed with the Prime Minister and fellow senior Conservatives that the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR) shouldn’t apply to their immoral scheme, with some suggesting they should go ahead with the plan regardless.

The Liberal Democrats strongly believe that the ECHR is an important guarantor of human rights, which the Conservatives have all too frequently disregarded while in Government.

At our Autumn Conference in September, we passed a motion which saw us calling on the Government to commit to staying in the European Convention on Human Rights, ensuring all future legislation is compliant with the Convention, and scrapping the Illegal Migration Act in full.

The Liberal Democrats have taken the lead in addressing the issue of conversion therapy, with Baroness Burt presenting the Conversion Therapy Prohibition Bill for its first reading in the House of Lords earlier this month.

This legislation, set to be debated early next year, aims to prohibit any person practising or offering conversion therapy in the UK.

The Conservatives haven’t acted upon their promise to ban such practices for five years now, so we will take action to end this harmful practice. There is cross-party consensus for dealing with this awful practice and we are pleased with the support our Bill has received so far.