Digital Markets, Competition and Consumers Bill

Debate between Lyn Brown and Andrew Gwynne

Consideration of Lords amendments
Tuesday 30th April 2024 Commons Chamber

[Andrew Gwynne]

It comes back to the point about bots. Even the most tech-savvy person cannot beat the bots, and once those bots get going, they sweep away all the tickets and genuine fans cannot get them. That is so unfair—almost as unfair as the extortionate prices that these companies charge for the tickets they have swept up using those bots.

[Ms Brown]

My hon. Friend is absolutely right. We have families struggling to buy tickets for their children who are desperate to go and see x band or y band, and then they find themselves ripped off and unable to have that treat, which was massively looked forward to.

I give huge credit to my hon. Friend the Member for Washington and Sunderland West (Mrs Hodgson) for her years of dedicated campaigning in this area. Her work has helped to bring this issue to the forefront of debate, and to make it clear that legal change is necessary to protect our cultural industries and consumers from the touts. We on the Opposition Benches have a clear policy to stamp out ticket touting so that no one is able to charge a large mark-up on resold tickets.

Community Payback

Debate between Lyn Brown and Andrew Gwynne

Tuesday 28th June 2022 Commons Chamber

[Andrew Gwynne]

My hon. Friend is making an excellent speech. There is another bonus because, when community sentences are done correctly, they provide payback—the clue is in the name—to communities affected by crime and they provide a form of restorative justice to victims of crime. A price cannot be put on that. It is justice in action, is it not?

[Ms Brown]

My hon. Friend is absolutely right. Community sentences work because they include punishment while maintaining a link to the community and enabling progress on the problems that drive crime in the first place. The link to the community is perhaps the most important thing, because it helps people to maintain the hope that is necessary to change their life. Community payback orders can give people experience of work that helps their neighbourhood to thrive. The work can and should be hard, but it should also be rewarding, which can, in and of itself, create a motivation for further change.

What are the barriers to making this kind of sentence work well? A lack of investment in the probation service is part of the problem. When I was a shadow probation Minister, I frequently heard of probation staff taking on huge, extraordinary numbers of cases. Good, valued probation staff are not just an early warning system for when an individual is going off the rails; they are agents of hope, healing and personal change. That can only happen if professionals are given the time and resources to develop the real relationships that are essential if we are to turn lives around. It is about understanding the needs, vulnerabilities and risks of the people they are supervising. We need probation staff who organise unpaid work to have good links with employers, councils, colleges and local charities. They need a range of opportunities to be available so they can tailor the service to a person’s skills and needs. Most of all, they need the necessary time and trust to inform the courts of the most effective, most appropriate and fairest type of sentence.

Civil Proceedings

Debate between Lyn Brown and Andrew Gwynne

Tuesday 29th March 2022 Commons Chamber

[Andrew Gwynne]

My hon. Friend is absolutely right. Many of the people who are classed as clinically vulnerable, clinically extremely vulnerable or immunosuppressed are looked after by members of the family or friends who will come into the house to look after them, rather than by paid carers. Were free lateral flow testing to be extended at least to the CV, CEV and IS communities—not for those people themselves, but for the people coming in to communicate and interact with them—it would at least give them some degree of confidence that coronavirus is not being brought through the front door.

[Ms Lyn Brown (West Ham) (Lab)]

I reiterate what my hon. Friends the Members for Oldham East and Saddleworth (Debbie Abrahams) and for Chesterfield (Mr Perkins) have said about the immunosuppressed community and the most vulnerable. I too have had numerous emails from those who are very concerned about the direction of travel. The lack of access to lateral flow tests is particularly concerning, not only for those people, but for those they come into contact with. My general practitioner has spoken to me about his concerns about antivirals. Does my hon. Friend agree that the limited cohort to whom antivirals are available is very small? My GP and I are concerned that the Government are missing a trick on this one: allowing GPs to prescribe antivirals where they think it is essential might help massively to keep people out of hospital.

[Andrew Gwynne]

My hon. Friend hits on an important point for debate at some stage in the near future. There is a concern that the cohort that has been drawn up for access to antivirals is not as wide as it could be, and certainly not as wide as in other European countries. We must also think about how we provide the maximum level of confidence to those communities.

For me, an ideal package to protect the immunosuppressed and clinically vulnerable would be the availability of free lateral flow tests for people coming to visit those who are clinically vulnerable or immunosuppressed, a drug such as Evusheld that would give at least 70% confidence—similar to the efficacy of the vaccine—to those people who are not able to be protected by the vaccine, and then access to antivirals if they become symptomatic.

I have asked the Minister on a number of occasions when we can expect information on the eligibility for free testing and have not even received an approximate date for when it will be published. That is totally unacceptable. We urgently need that clarity, given that we are three days away.

I draw colleagues’ attention to the provisions in the motions relating to sick pay that are set to expire. Here in the United Kingdom, we have one of the worst levels of sick pay in the OECD. Statutory sick pay currently sits at just £96.35; that, I am afraid, is shameful. I could not live on that and feed my family, and I am not sure the Minister could either. The 2 million low-paid workers who earn less than the lower earnings limit of £120 receive nothing. That is before we consider self-employed people, who continue to remain ineligible for statutory sick pay. Self-employed people were badly let down over the course of the pandemic. A recent study by the Community trade union shows that a majority of self-employed people were rejected from vital covid isolation support payments. In suspending the temporary provision that allowed workers to receive statutory sick pay from the first day of their illness, the Government are stubbornly sticking to their regressive attitude to sick pay, which will continue to have a lasting negative impact on public health.

In recent remarks, the Prime Minister urged the public to exercise “restraint and responsibility” to avoid spreading the virus. This Government love to lecture us on personal responsibility while also pricing people out of making the right decisions. We should not be forcing people to choose between putting food on the table or infecting their colleagues. As well as being morally reprehensible, the sorry state of sick pay in this country will lead to more workers getting sick, leading to worse public health outcomes and, in the long term, costing the country far more in reduced productivity.

British Sign Language Bill

Debate between Lyn Brown and Andrew Gwynne

Friday 28th January 2022 Commons Chamber

[Ms Lyn Brown (West Ham) (Lab)]

I am here to support the Bill, but I am also here to support my friend. My hon. Friend the Member for West Lancashire (Rosie Cooper) and I came into Parliament together in 2005. She has been open and generous in talking to us about her life and her life experiences—sometimes funny, often sad—and I know that her mum and dad will be so massively proud. God is indeed good. I know how personal the Bill is to her, and I was surprised that she managed to get through the entire speech without having us all in tears. I am really grateful to the Minister for enabling the Bill to come to the House today, and with such a good wind.

I will not speak for long because I have seen the number of hon. Members who are present, and I am always worried that just a little bit too much enthusiasm for a Bill can cause it not to succeed. As a former Whip, I have used those tricks in the past, but I am sure that the Whips Office will be as good as gold today.

I think we in the UK should be very proud that our sign language has developed in the way it has over hundreds of years, through constant use and refinement by the deaf community. It is only right that British Sign Language be legally recognised, so that its tens of thousands of regular users are afforded the legal protections and equal respect that they are absolutely due. It is important that we all remember that for many people across this country, English is their second language and is used for writing and lipreading, while British Sign Language is their first language and primary language.

When public services and others do not recognise those facts and do not work together effectively to ensure that their communications and services are equally accessible to British Sign Language users, that is a major form of discrimination.

[Andrew Gwynne]

My hon. Friend is making a powerful case in support of this excellent Bill. Our hon. Friend the Member for West Lancashire (Rosie Cooper) gave her really personal experience of how, as a very young child, she had to communicate with adults and the adult world on behalf of her parents. That is a social justice issue for her parents and people like them, who have no other form of communication if British Sign Language is not provided by public services. The Bill recognises British Sign Language as an official language. Does that not push this agenda forward to ensure that public services serve all the public?

[Ms Brown]

I absolutely agree. The story about a child of a parent—we are all children of our parents—having to tell the parent about a terminal diagnosis when they are obviously coming to terms with it themselves, having heard it for the first time, is just so devastating. I genuinely do not think I would have been able to sit with my mum or dad and explain what a doctor had said, and tell them that their life was about to close. I just do not think I could have done it. To think that that is something that those in the deaf community have to experience often is tragic. It is unfair and it is discriminatory.

Discrimination in all its forms has to be tackled, because it harms us all. What my hon. Friend the Member for West Lancashire talked about most eloquently was the fact that there is so much talent in the deaf community that is simply not allowed to be unlocked.