Christmas Adjournment

Thank you for giving me the opportunity to speak in this Christmas Adjournment debate, Mr. Deputy Speaker. Christmas is a time for celebration and looking forward to the new year; however, a group of my constituents—the pigeon men and allotment holders of Ryhope—do not have that pleasure. Their Christmas will be very different from ours, because they face the arrival of bailiffs, eviction from the land that they have worked and the loss of the pigeons that they have cared for over many decades, often by members of the same family going back three generations. This brutal and unwelcome Christmas present comes courtesy of a dormant company—essentially a shell company—that does not appear to have any assets other than that piece of land, called Worktalent Ltd, which is based in a Newcastle firm of solicitors called Mark Gilbert Morse.