Earnings: Mothers and Fathers

Debate between Baroness Janke and Baroness Barran

Wednesday 13th March 2024 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Barran (Con)]

I do not accept that it has been an abysmal failure. I appreciate that the numbers are still modest, but they are definitely going in the right direction, with 13,000 couples taking shared parental leave in 2021-22, up from 6,200 in 2015-16. Clearly, this is part of a broader cultural shift. The noble Baroness may wish the Government to enforce everything, but this Government do not wish to.

[Baroness Janke (LD)]

My Lords, 90% of single parents are women, and 49% of these families are in poverty. Universal credit discriminates against single parents by requiring those with children over three to work a 30-hour week, regardless of their circumstances. What steps will the Government take to end discrimination suffered by single-parent families under universal credit so that their children are not forced into acute poverty and deprivation through unfairness and discrimination?

Children’s School Meals

Debate between Baroness Janke and Baroness Barran

Monday 27th March 2023 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Barran (Con)]

—but I do not accept that they were weakened. As I say, there is sensible flexibility to allow schools to respond to their local community.

[Baroness Janke (LD)]

My Lords, the findings of the House of Lords Select Committee report Hungry for Change found that to pay for government healthy eating recommendations, the poorest 10% of UK households would need to spend 74% of their post-housing disposable income on food. The report also found that the cost of healthy eating did not factor in the calculation of benefit rates. Would the Minister urge her colleagues in government to make sure that realistic benefit rates pay for a healthy diet, even for the poorest people?

[Baroness Barran (Con)]

I am more than happy to share those figures on benefit rates with my noble friend sitting next to me on the Front Bench. More seriously, there are so many variables in this. I remind the House of the scale of support that this Government have given every household over 2022-23 and 2023-24: an average of over £3,300 per UK household.

Plurilingual and Intercultural Education

Debate between Baroness Janke and Baroness Barran

Tuesday 18th October 2022 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Janke (LD)]

My Lords, does the Minister agree that the study of a foreign language provides unique opportunities to young people and to our country, given the growing isolation that has followed Brexit? Is she concerned that the lowest take-up of languages is in the poorest communities? What action will the Government take to ensure that young people in these communities receive their proper entitlement to such important educational opportunities and are not disfranchised from the international identity by recent Brexit developments?

[Baroness Barran (Con)]

The Government are concerned about the level of uptake of modern foreign languages in schools generally, and specifically in the communities to which the noble Baroness refers. That is why we announced in our schools White Paper that we are setting up a network of language hubs, introducing new continual professional development courses for language teachers at both primary and secondary level, and have undertaken a review of the modern foreign languages GCSE curriculum and syllabus, which we think will improve uptake.

Immigration: Community Sponsorship

Debate between Baroness Janke and Baroness Barran

Thursday 25th April 2019 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Barran]

I thank the right reverend Prelate for his question and commend him on his work in this area. The Home Office has commissioned an independent evaluation that is being carried out by the University of Birmingham, which will be published this summer. I can give some early insight from that research, which talks about the,

“ability to count on emotional and practical support from a network of local people”,

providing,

“refugees with an excellent source of social capital that is critical to their integration”.

It is obviously crucial that we work in the most intelligent way with those refugees who have been selected for their vulnerability. If the House will indulge me, it would be poignant to listen to a quote from the young Syrian refugee Amineh Abou Kerech—forgive my pronunciation—who won the Betjeman prize for her poem “Lament for Syria”. In it she says:

“Can anyone teach me

how to make a homeland?”

Let us hope that all these schemes can do just that.

[Baroness Janke (LD)]

My Lords, due to their poor English skills, many refugees find great barriers to finding jobs, getting housing and opening bank accounts, yet over the past 10 years, services providing English- language teaching to speakers of other languages have been cut by 55%. What plans do the Government have properly to resource English language teaching and make it available to all those who need it?

[Baroness Barran]

I thank the noble Baroness for her question. The Government recently published the Integrated Communities Action Plan, which specifically cites working with government and civil society organisations in areas such as English as a second language, employment, mental health and other elements critical for integration.