Calais: Refugee Camp

Baroness Jenkin of Kennington Excerpts

Thursday 15th September 2016 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Jenkin of Kennington (Con)]

My Lords, I thank the noble Lord, Lord Dubs, for this debate and for his relentless campaigning on this subject.

I declare an interest as a board member of UNICEF UK, which arranged for me and my noble friends Lady Morris of Bolton and Lady Hodgson—neither of whom can be here today, sadly—to visit the refugee camp in Calais at the end of July. This was a trip facilitated by Citizens UK. I take this opportunity to thank it and the volunteers, not just for arranging the visit but for the wonderful work they do in the camp, especially their support for children. All the volunteers, including those working in the kitchens to feed the refugees, are doing amazing work. I also pay special tribute to the extraordinary Liz Clegg, who lives with those children in horrible circumstances. She has no background in humanitarian aid but is loving and caring, and is supported only by contributions from those who visit. We felt humbled by them all.

We too were shocked by what we saw and heard: children afraid to leave their tents during the day, in case everything they had was taken from them, while every night they risk their lives in trying to enter the UK illegally. We saw no government advice on the Dublin III family reunion process, or the provision in the amendment of the noble Lord, Lord Dubs. Instead, those children are reliant on the relationships built by a small voluntary group formed by Citizens UK. We were told that before the intervention of these volunteers, children who have family members in the UK had no idea that there was a safe and legal way of being reunited with them.

It is difficult to discount the pull factor with regard to the broader stance on the French and European migrant crisis; indeed, we met a number who wished that they had not come and were trying to get the message home to others not to make the journey. But when it comes to unaccompanied children who are eligible under Dublin III we must take action, as the noble Lord, Lord Dubs, said—and fast. I fear history is likely to be unkind to us if we do not. There is no valid reason for our Government to keep children in Calais when they have families in the UK ready to receive them, take on the responsibility and have a duty of care. This is distinct from opening the floodgates and being overwhelmed.

Let me give an example. Earlier this week, I met a volunteer who has been working in the Jungle. She met two such children in Calais: Huda, who is 14, and her brother Ibrahim, who is 16. They are Iraqi Kurds whose mother is in Birmingham and whose father was killed in 2005 by a bomb in Iraq. They became separated from their mother immediately after the bomb, in tragic circumstances, and left Turkey on their own last August—Huda having begged Ibrahim, as she was desperate to find her mother. My contact was heartbroken to see these children cold, vulnerable, upset and hungry. They were insulted and belittled by the CRS police in front of her eyes. She quickly raised £3,000, got them out of the camp and paid a local host family in Calais —themselves volunteers—to look after them while legal proceedings ensued. The process took over nine months and involved two separate tribunals, Home Office lawyers, UK lawyers, barristers, French lawyers, French care systems, DNA testing and hundreds of hours of correspondence before the UK finally took charge of the children. This example demonstrates the psychological trauma that so many children experience. The apparent inertia of the French and British authorities ultimately meant a greater cost to our taxpayer, while causing extreme emotional hardship on these children.

From a cost-benefit analysis—economically, politically, and socially—it seems that we should expedite processing Dublin III children. For those lacking UK family ties the solution is more complex, although a child’s safety should be paramount along with a concern for their future, be it in the UK, France or elsewhere.

I have three ideas for my noble friend the Minister to consider. When the previous camp demolition occurred, hundreds of children went missing. This makes it critical that the processing of these children is speeded up and that they are kept safe in appropriate accommodation during this period with access to the legal and social care they need. A group should be mandated to identify unaccompanied children with a legal right to be in the UK and to provide the legal advice they need to be processed. We should take on the traffickers and smugglers by ensuring that refugees are aware of their legal rights at the start of their journey as well as in Calais, as the noble Lord, Lord Dubs, said.

Collectively our countries have achieved so much for humanity and have so much to be proud of, and it saddens me that there appears to be no solution to the plight of these desperate children in Calais.

Crime: Domestic Violence

Baroness Jenkin of Kennington Excerpts

Tuesday 13th May 2014 Grand Committee

[Baroness Jenkin of Kennington (Con)]

My Lords, I am grateful to the noble Baroness, Lady Thornton, for raising this important issue. I thank the Home Secretary for prioritising it, for commissioning the HMIC review that looked into the police response to domestic violence, and indeed for acting on it by chairing the new national oversight group.

Domestic violence is a real concern. It affects so many of us. On average, the police are contacted every 30 seconds for assistance with related incidents. In my home county of Essex, for example, I am proud that our PCC, Nick Alston, has identified domestic abuse as a top priority in the Essex police and crime plan, after figures showed that more than 3,600 offences were recorded between April and September last year, including three women killed in their own homes. This equates to 20 such crimes reported in Essex each and every day.

As Mr Alston has said:

“Too often the front line is the front room. We surely can’t accept this level of harm. I want to work across communities to create an environment where domestic abuse is not tolerated and where our children and young people grow up to recognise the value of healthy relationships”.

Essex residents have welcomed the newly constituted Essex Domestic Abuse Strategy Board, chaired by the PCC, which has representation from across all the agencies that have a role to play in tackling domestic abuse, including the police, councils, probation, prosecution authorities and health. This new board is overseeing an ambitious programme of work in supporting victims, tackling perpetrators and, most importantly, working to prevent domestic abuse happening in the first place. I congratulate Mr Alston on this initiative and urge other PCCs to follow the example.

The reality is that the crime is embedded within the perpetrator’s need to exert power and control over their victim. As such, the abuser will often use a combination of psychological abuse, coercive control as well as physical abuse to create real fear in order to contain their victims—as we have heard already in this debate. However, as we have also heard, psychological abuse, coercive control and a pattern of abuse are not criminalised, sometimes allowing perpetrators to evade the law. This puts real pressure on the police, the Crown Prosecution Service and other agencies when tackling the issue, as they do not always appear to have the right tools to do so.

As the noble Baroness, Lady Gardner, pointed out, in March last year the Home Office changed the definition of domestic violence to include,

“any incident or pattern of incidents of controlling, coercive … behaviour, violence or abuse between those aged 16 or over who are, or have been, intimate partners or family members regardless of gender or sexuality”.

I thank the Home Secretary and welcome the change as it depicts the fundamental nature of the crime. Currently, the state cannot effectively intervene, nor translate and consequently penalise the crime before the abuse has escalated, leading to current or former partners killing two women every week.

Statistics show that women experience between 30 and 40 incidents before they have the courage to pick up the phone and dial 999. I do not know whether it is declaring an interest, but as corroboration of this statistic, I can tell your Lordships that I have a close relation who was physically and psychologically abused by her husband for nearly 30 years, without any of us being aware, before it was finally brought to the attention of the police and he was prosecuted. According to research, 53% of men whose cases are reported to police in the UK have been reported for at least three other assaults against their partner. However, even if a victim does report, unless there is physical evidence of assault there is little that can be done. As a victim of abuse explained in a Victim’s Voice survey conducted by the Sara Charlton Charitable Foundation:

“Currently it’s too easy for abusers to get away with it because they know that if there is insufficient physical evidence of assault they will not be convicted. In my case, my abuser didn’t feel the need to physically hurt me very often because the emotional and psychological abuse kept me ‘under control’. It transpired that the police knew exactly what he was like, (I was by no means his first victim), but there was mostly no official crime he could be charged with. Consequently, he was pretty much free to behave exactly as he pleased, safe in the knowledge that unless he left visible marks on any of his victims, there was nothing anyone could do”.

We—or should I say the taxpayer?—currently spend £15.7 billion a year on the symptoms of domestic violence, but we should also focus further on its eradication. We need to be able to target perpetrators effectively through our legal system, ensuring that government spending is focused on where it is lacking and creating an effective cross-agency response to this epidemic.

The courts are bound by current laws, which can prosecute only for single incidents of violence. Without being able to see the true pattern of violence and without an offence that is fit for purpose, the courts are unable to ascertain the real threat that the perpetrator’s course of conduct poses to a victim and consequently are unable to impose the appropriate sentences. As another victim in the Victim’s Voice survey wrote:

“Why should we have to suffer in silence? The only way I could finally get away was to arrange everything in secret and be absolutely petrified that he was going to find out before I had everything in place to be able to leave safely. I then had to go into hiding for a while so that there was no risk of backlash. If the law had been there to protect me I would have felt a lot safer and stronger to have been able to leave sooner”.

Thanks to the welcome stalking law reform brought in by the Government, a course of conduct that constitutes psychological abuse and control has been criminalised. However, the law protects those who experience these behaviours only once they have left the relationship. Should this protection now be extended to those who suffer such abuse within the relationship?

Like the noble Baroness, Lady Thornton, I am grateful to the domestic violence law reform campaign team, the Sara Charlton Charitable Foundation, Women’s Aid and Paladin for their briefing for this debate and for their continued campaigning for this change. I look forward to hearing the Minister’s comments and hope that he and the Home Secretary will consider the points made in today’s debate.

Food Security Policy

Baroness Jenkin of Kennington Excerpts

Thursday 24th May 2012 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Jenkin of Kennington]

My Lords, like other noble Lords I thank the noble Baroness, Lady Miller, for securing this extremely important debate. As many noble Lords said, the issue should be extremely high on both the domestic and international agendas.

While there is a high level of food security in the UK, there is also, as other noble Lords mentioned, a very high level of food waste. I will concentrate my remarks on that area. Shockingly, some 30% to 50% of all food produced is never consumed. In the developing world this is for a variety of reasons, which boil down to inadequate infrastructure or adverse weather conditions. In the developed world the problem is far more behavioural. People buy too much, are resistant to buying wonky fruit and vegetables and demand new and exciting food every night, with leftovers not being used. Food that is safe to eat—a total of 7 million tonnes a year—is chucked in the bin, largely because people are scared by stringent food labelling and cautious about sell-by and best-before dates.

Until a couple of decades ago, the old adage, “Waste not, want not”, was well understood, but today it no longer rings true. It is absolutely wrong that wonky and ugly fruit and veg, and offcuts of meat that we have forgotten how to cook, are thrown away. I recently came across Rubies in the Rubble, an admirable social enterprise based in Covent Garden market, which makes jams and chutneys out of surplus produce that would otherwise be sent to anaerobic digestion. Organisations such as this should be nurtured, encouraged and supported to ensure that productivity is born out of what would otherwise be wasted.

Earlier this month I participated—along with a number of other noble Lords including the Lord Speaker, who bravely took part during the week of State Opening—in the Live Below the Line challenge, living on £1 a day for five days for all our food and drink to draw attention to the 1.4 billion people who live on the equivalent of £1 a day every day of their lives for much more than their food and drink. Although we all found the challenge difficult, in this country we have such an abundance of choice that if I could not find a cheap tin of baked beans in one supermarket, I was bound to in the next. Incidentally, I was struck by the fact that cost of a tin of value baked beans had increased from 25p last year to 29p this year. We in this country have become accustomed to this huge choice, even when living on a tight budget, but is it really sustainable in the long term?

I should like to take this opportunity to draw attention to a couple of examples of innovative campaigns, all in their different ways making a real difference. Incredible Edible is a scheme that started in Todmorden in Yorkshire and has now spread to 23 towns and villages across the UK. From their beginnings with herb gardens, local people now plant and grow vegetables and fruit all around their town. They use land outside the fire station, the railway station, the health centre—where they replaced thousands of pounds worth of shrubs with apple and pear trees—turning all available local space into vegetable patches and herb plots for anyone in the town to come along, pick and take home their produce, promoting healthy living and a real sense of community, as well as the start of genuine local food security.

I commend the Mayor of London’s Capital Growth campaign, which aims to support 2,012 new growing spaces in London by the end of 2012. Currently at 1,719, it is an eminently achievable target. Jamie Oliver’s Kitchen Garden campaign and the Government’s task force, led by Garden Organic, are promoting vegetable patches in every school in order to further educate future generations and address the issue of food security, and at the same time are helping to reduce the growing epidemic of obesity in this country, which, as was referred to earlier, is another huge problem waiting for us down the track.

An appropriate infrastructure must be created to connect up demand and supply. As mentioned by the noble Baroness, Lady Parminter, FoodCycle, with its community cafés, and FareShare, which distributes surplus food to local charities and organisations—they are both known to the Minister—are tackling these issues at different levels of the supply chain, making sure that food that is still good gets to those who are at risk of food insecurity. For each of these different models, all tackling waste and food insecurity in different ways, there are many other local initiatives and examples. I ask the Minister please to do what he can to make it easy for such organisations to innovate and flourish.

I end by reading a short e-mail I received from a friend who sponsored me on my Live Below the Line challenge, which sums up in a very human way the challenge facing us all. It states:

“starting last Sunday I voluntarily decided I would see if a human could live off porridge for breakfast and dinner and 2 eggs for lunch, a glass of milk and a bunch of grapes a day (and as much water as wanted). This was sparked by something that occurred to me on a run—‘how much of the food we eat do we actually need or do we just believe we need it’. The surprising thing for me was that, even still running 15 miles a week, I did not feel hungry and actually felt quite energetic. It is hard seeing so much very appealing food around and ignoring it but my body seems to have coped well on what seem very meagre rations. Importantly here though, in preparation, I did strongly empower my beliefs with the notion that this limited amount of food was adequate which I think is an important part of why it felt OK. I guess the point here is that I wanted to reinforce, in myself, my belief that there is absolutely plenty of food and water to feed the whole planet. It just feels that it is distributed in an inefficient manner. Clearly yours and my little experience prove that we in wealthy countries probably consume, in general terms, far more food than we need … the challenge though is how to best share the food around the whole world population”.

This seems to be the nub of the question we are debating today, and it is one that our generation cannot afford to duck.

International Women’s Day

Baroness Jenkin of Kennington Excerpts

Thursday 1st March 2012 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Jenkin of Kennington]

My Lords, like a number of other noble sisters, I made my maiden speech during this debate last year, and I am glad that my heart is not pounding quite as fast as it was on that occasion. Preparing for today's debate has given me an opportunity for reflection. I take this opportunity to thank many noble Lords on all sides of the House for their welcome, advice and friendship over the past year in helping this new girl to find her way.

Unlike many noble Lords, I did not come here with a particular focus, background or expertise, which meant that I have had the chance to develop my own interests. I am honoured to be chair of the new Conservative Friends of International Development. From the successful launch and subsequent activity of that group, I have started to learn more about where our international efforts should be focused. Everyone in this Chamber knows that empowering women is a top priority for DfID. To quote the Secretary of State:

“Educating girls, along with vaccinating children, are two of the most decisive interventions you can make in development”.

As we have discussed, educating girls has the chance over a generation completely to transform societies. There are 3 million girls in school in Afghanistan today, where there were none 10 years ago.

Today is the 101st International Women’s Day. Let us take a brief look, with the glass half full, at our own country’s successes. As I have mentioned previously, every party increased its number of women MPs at the last election. As co-chair of women2win, I assure my noble sister Lady Thornton that our eyes are firmly fixed on ensuring that we increase our numbers in the next one, but I am not going to reveal how. Twenty-one new women have been appointed to FTSE 100 boards since the report of the noble Lord, Lord Davies, was published last year. The 30 Percent Club is also doing excellent work in raising awareness, transparency and accountability for gender representation in the private sector. As the noble Baroness, Lady Nye, mentioned, the work conducted at Cranfield University in creating the female FTSE to assess and urge boards to act has been vital. Its report has proved crucial in identifying solid reasons to have women on boards—and putting to task those companies which have failed to act.

We also use today to celebrate what now seem to be the milestones of generations gone by: a woman’s right to vote and my right to speak in this very Chamber. However, we also recognise that these rights are still denied to millions of women who are nowhere near equality as we know it here. As long as these women are struggling, we should continue to focus our thoughts on them on International Women's Day, so that, by the 110th International Women’s Day celebrations, issues such as representation will have been resolved.

As the noble Baroness, Lady Morris, and others have mentioned, the past year has been a milestone for democracy as we have watched the populations of Middle Eastern and north African countries rise against their authoritarian leaders. On our televisions screens, we have seen men and women stand side by side in their fight for democracy. These women must be allowed to do more than protest. They must be given an opportunity to become active participants in the new Governments. All the statistics show that, by empowering women, countries grow and become more stable.

But we now know that empowering women is not just about doing what is considered “right”. By engaging in paid work, women become economic actors, not only improving their own families’ quality of life but giving them the opportunity to send their children to school. By simply investing in sexual and maternal health, which we all take for granted, a woman's life can be transformed. A thousand women die giving birth every single day and these deaths globally cost $15 billion each year. With the correct access to information, family planning and maternity care, these women can take charge of their own lives.

Let us take a look at some specific examples where women are making progress. In India, 94 per cent of women are in the unorganised sector, earning a living through their own labour or small businesses. However, their work is not counted and hence remains invisible. The Self Employed Women’s Association is a unique example of support for women led from within—more than 100,000 Indian women are now members of SEWA and campaign to address problems they experience with self-employment. Their campaigning has led to many improvements within India for women.

Let us take a look at opportunities for women to start up businesses and some practical ways in which we in the West can support them. Other noble Lords have mentioned microfinance, but one example of an inspirational organisation is Kiva, a non-profit organisation with a mission to connect people through lending to alleviate poverty. Leveraging the internet and a worldwide network of microfinance institutions, Kiva lets individuals lend as little as $25 to help create opportunity around the world. Once the business starts growing with sustainable revenues, the loan is paid back and is in turn reinvested in the next start-up. The Conservative supporters of Kiva alone have lent $11,000 in start-up funding. From providing loans to farmers and shopkeepers to helping meet the cost of buying a taxi, the Conservative Kiva Group has helped many women increase their quality of life. Such women are far more likely to pass on this knowledge to their children while contributing to the economies of their country.

I would like to draw your Lordships’ attention to the launch next week here in Parliament of the Women’s Empowerment in Agriculture Index. Largely developed at the University of Oxford, the index will bring science and rigour to the measurement of empowerment in agriculture. By identifying where and for what reason women are being excluded, and by analysing their inclusion in decision-making, involvement in production and control over income, the index brings us closer to knowing how truly to tackle the problems that lie ahead in terms of bringing equality to women.

Encouraging and financing women’s business potential, letting women have control and choice over their family lives, as well as increasing access to education and full employment, will help further to empower women.