Backbench Business Committee
24 March 2026
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Backbench Business Committee House of Commons
03:12 - 03:42
Speaker 1
Order. Order. Welcome to the meeting of the Back bench business committee where we will be hearing applications for debates in the chamber and Westminster Hall from colleagues. The first application up is in the name of Oliver Ryan, who's not able to be with us today. And so Sean Wilcox is taking the application on.
This is for a debate on a Tuesday morning in Westminster Hall on how to support people living with multiple sclerosis and challenge assumptions about MS. Over to you Shaun.
03:42 - 05:11
Speaker 2
Shaun you very much for having me. As you've noticed, I'm not Ollie Ryan, but multiple sclerosis is tackling multiple sclerosis and treatment of people with it is actually quite personal to me. My wife is somebody who has multiple sclerosis so it's something that, as I said, I'm quite passionate about. Hence my presence as an officer of the APPG for multiple sclerosis. It's as one of the few named conditions in the Equality Act 2010, multiple sclerosis or MS is a progressive and lifelong neurodegenerative condition that affects more than one hundred and fifty thousand people in The United Kingdom and over one over seven thousand one hundred people are newly diagnosed each year.
This means that around one in every four hundred people in The United Kingdom has MS and that each week one hundred thirty five people are diagnosed with the condition. Despite this prevalence and incidence, understanding of the condition and how it impacts people in different ways is limited among policy makers and the public more generally. MS is unpredictable and different for everybody. It is often painful, exhausting, and can cause problems with how people walk, move, see, think, and feel. My wife, I said, has multiple sclerosis, and it manifests itself in a totally different way to, say, her cousin who also has it.
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