British Sign Language Bill

Andrew Gwynne Excerpts

3rd reading
Friday 18th March 2022 Commons Chamber

[Rosie Cooper]

I thank my hon. Friend for those comments. BSL is such a rich, vibrant, brilliant language, which relies not only on signing but on body language and facial expression. It is great fun. When I was Lord Mayor of Liverpool I got the children to finger-spell 26 letters of the alphabet for sponsorship. The money they raised in sponsorship was used to buy minicoms for deaf people—although mobile phones would soon replace those; none the less in those days that too was a revolution.

Where are we today? Deaf representation in the media is at an all-time high. Just in the last year we have seen a deaf superhero using American Sign Language; Troy Kotsur, a deaf actor, is nominated for an Oscar and last week won a BAFTA, and Rose Ayling-Ellis won “Strictly Come Dancing”. In 1987, all those years ago, Marlee Matlin won the Best Actress Oscar for “Children of a Lesser God”, but it took another 35 years for Troy to become the second person nominated for his role in “CODA”, which stands for “child of deaf adults”—I know, I am one, but sadly I will not be getting an Oscar.

Since 1987, other movies have been roundly criticised for using hearing actors to play deaf roles. A sign of the times is that “CODA” actually cast deaf actors in deaf roles—what recognition! That is magnificent. The times they are a-changing. The country is supporting deaf people, and we cannot let Parliament fall behind. I believe we must capitalise on this revolution by passing the Bill and taking every step we can to push it as far as possible.

[Andrew Gwynne (Denton and Reddish) (Lab)]

My hon. Friend started her speech on Third Reading by paying tribute to all those campaigners who went before her and the magnificent landmark changes that they fought for over the years. It would be remiss of us not to get on the record our thanks to her for bringing this Bill to Parliament and getting it through to Third Reading today, and to wish it Godspeed in the other place.

[Rosie Cooper]

I thank my hon. Friend for his kind comments. My dad would be really pleased with himself today—not necessarily with me, but with himself.

[Rosie Cooper]

Absolutely; I will come on to my mum very soon. As with all those things that happened in the ’60s and ’70s, my dad took pole position; my mum took care of home affairs. As Members will see, she played just as much of a role in me being here today as my dad did, but he was more vocal. People would say that I am my dad’s daughter. He did not care; he would just bowl on and try to get what he needed. My mum would be more diplomatic—go it slowly and get there eventually. Sadly, I got too much of the former and a lot less of the latter, but we are who we are.

Before I discuss the incredibly positive things that I believe this Bill will do, I want to address what could not be included in it. Some campaigners have made the fair point that this Bill does not give specific legal rights to deaf people, or feel it does not go quite far enough. To be absolutely clear, this Bill is not a silver bullet for the deaf community that will cure overnight all the injustices they face. As Members of this House will appreciate, this is a private Member’s Bill, one that has been brought forward by an Opposition MP and was drawn 20th out of 20 in the ballot. There are limitations on private Members’ Bills that have to be accepted, but I am pleased to say that working together with the Minister for Disabled People, we have pushed for this Bill to be as strong as it can be. I am proud of the Bill and proud of the work we did. It is going to make such a difference to the lives of deaf people, and they will be proud of it too. They might want it all today, but they can have nearly all of it soon.

Deaf people have long felt that the one-size-fits-all disability legislation that should have given their language the protection it needs is inadequate and disregards deaf culture and heritage. In bringing forward this Bill, I knew that we could not rewrite or replace legislation; instead, we are opening the door for deaf people to have their voices heard and their language protected. With this Bill, we are planting our feet firmly in an open doorway. There are those in the deaf community who used another analogy—they said, “It’s like being in a lift. We’ve gone in the lift on the ground floor; the only way is up.” I really quite like that analogy, too.

The requirements on the Government to produce guidance created by clause 3 of the Bill will be carried out in direct consultation with a non-statutory advisory board. This will be an essential mechanism for deaf people to say, “This isn’t working. This is what would help. This is what needs to change”—and we all accept that a lot needs to change. Since introducing the Bill, I have been contacted by hundreds of deaf people from all over the country, telling me about situations in which a public service has failed them, and I have shared some horrific stories with the Minister. Those stories are truly unbelievable, yet a significant portion of the population faces those issues every day. These are issues that have shaped deaf culture and consequently, I totally admit, make me the person I am today.

Deaf culture is important because it allows individuals to be who they are and live in a way that is unique to them. People who have not been exposed to deaf culture may not know what I mean by that. A simplistic way of starting to talk about it is to say, for example, that deaf people look at each other when they are communicating, but in our hearing culture it is common to look away—to break eye contact. Try keeping up with that if you are trying to lip read! It is impossible. In deaf culture, it is absolutely acceptable to tap another person to gain their attention; it is marked by physical proximity, directness, even thumping on tables and floors—I am not going to go on about that because I will start to recognise my own behaviour. Deaf culture is all about challenging injustices—fighting to be heard and understood through whatever means necessary.

People on the edge of the deaf community sometimes think deaf people are demanding and unreasonable, and sometimes they are, but they need to be—they have to be; they have to challenge in order to be heard. As we know in this place, it is the people who challenge the system who change things, and I am proud to come from a community that does not sit back and complain, but that gets up and challenges perceived injustices again and again and again until they are rectified. That shows why the BSL Bill will be so powerful: if we remove the barriers restricting the potential of deaf people it will be truly amazing to see how much they can and will achieve.

Many years ago my four-year-old niece explained to her young friends, who had never seen people sign before, that her grandparents were actually just the same as them except their ears did not work. When we accept that some people are deaf and accommodate that, rather than just trying to ignore it, deaf people will be able to make so much more of a difference; but before they can make that difference, we must tackle the precise details of the problems deaf people face, and we will tackle that in the guidance accompanying this Bill.

One important matter the guidance must address is the lack of forward planning for BSL use. We must not continually have a system that creates a service for hearing people and then retrospectively and half-heartedly attempts to add the provision of BSL. BSL needs to be a consideration when services are being designed, not an afterthought. This will cut out huge amounts of wasted time and money, because public services have had to scramble to throw some sort of BSL provision together, or, even worse, many do not bother at all. Through this guidance we will start to see the Government becoming proactive in considering deaf people and the need for BSL, specifically with increased and improved interpretation and a wider understanding of BSL as a language.

In every aspect of public service there are failings; I have so many examples to draw on from my own life growing up with my parents, from years of doing casework for my constituents, and from the hundreds of letters I have been sent since introducing this Bill, and, sadly, a lot of these problems are things that a hearing person would never have considered.

In prisons, for instance, frighteningly little is done for deaf people. The isolation a deaf prisoner might experience from not having any other BSL users to talk to, and not being able to watch subtitled TV or make telephone calls, is absolutely terrifying. I have read reports of deaf prisoners committing suicide because they simply could not bear the isolation. This cannot be allowed to happen again and we need to do all we can to stop it. Mental health provision in prisons is already an area of great concern to me; if we add to that the difficulties a deaf person in prison would experience this could be considered a crisis.

As I have said, these are problems that a hearing person would not consider, but a BSL advisory board would be able to draw on its members’ own life experiences to ensure the guidance the Secretary of State issues is much more than just a vague commitment to do more—and it has to be. It will target problem areas and say how they need to be addressed and what needs to be done differently.

I know that a huge focus of the guidance will have to be on education. When I speak to deaf people about what they feel needs to be prioritised, education is more often than not the first thing they mention. Deaf people currently have little faith in the education system. On Second Reading, I explained how my mum would give her three children lessons every day at home, before we were even pre-school age. She would explain, “Because we’re deaf, they’ll think you’re daft.” We had to do those lessons. We had to learn to read and write and to do our sums, and we had to be absolutely proficient before we got to school.

A tale is told that, having had the bit drummed into me that people would think we were not capable because my parents were deaf, when I got to school and found that my classmates could not read and write or do sums as quickly as I could, I came home and expressed, “And they thought we were daft?” I genuinely do not remember that, but the tale is that, when I got home, I could not wait to tell my parents, “It’s not us.” There it goes.

My mum did not trust the system to treat hearing children of deaf parents as capable. I think that, sadly, at the time, she would have thought that deaf children would have even less of a chance than us. That was so very wrong. Of course, that was a long time ago, but while things have improved, many challenges remain. People will simply assume that a deaf student is learning more slowly or struggling when most of the time that is not the case.

[Andrew Gwynne]

My hon. Friend is making a powerful contribution. The nub of what she is saying is that this is a battle for equality: equality of opportunity for children and young people going through education; equality of treatment for deaf people, ensuring that they are treated with respect; equality of access to public services, with deaf people treated like everyone else; and equality of language through communication. Alongside English—the spoken word—British Sign Language is how deaf people communicate. Is it not all about equality?

[Rosie Cooper]

My hon. Friend is absolutely right. That runs right through the Bill and through my comments. Given an equal opportunity, deaf people can achieve so much. This will make my hon. Friend’s case: I was told about a deaf student whose class was visited by a specialist interpreter. At the end of the day, the teacher told the interpreter that he was amazed, because he had never seen the student talk so much. When the specialist interpreter asked the student why that was, he found that the so-called communicator whom the school employed had only the most basic BSL qualification, so he could not do the job. He could not transmit to the deaf student what the teacher was saying; ergo, the student had the ability but no chance to prove it.

We take simple things like that for granted, but deaf people have to battle that day in, day out. It would be outrageous to think of a hearing person being taught history by someone who had taken only the most basic English lessons, so why do we accept that for deaf people? Why are we allowing deaf students to receive information from their teachers through people who know the bare minimum of BSL and who are not qualified interpreters? We are wasting both taxpayers’ money and the untapped potential of that student.

In the past year alone, we have seen a seismic shift in understanding and acceptance of deaf people and BSL. Continuing to fail them over and over is just not right, and it cannot be ignored any more. It never was right, but at least now people are starting to understand the situation.

With social understanding of the need for BSL inclusion, we must address some shameful and frustratingly obvious oversights.

Throughout the covid pandemic, deaf people have been met with a constant reminder that we are not treating them as equals. Every statement made to the nation, every change in lockdown policy, and every announcement of a support scheme was done without a BSL interpreter on many channels. In fact, interpretation was available on one channel only. We had a simple way to include a sizeable proportion of the population and to prevent people from being left behind, but we failed to do so and must ask ourselves why.

Clause 2 requires the Secretary of State to publish a report on what each Department has done to promote or facilitate the use of BSL in its communications with the public. Any public announcement made without an interpreter or any White Paper released without BSL translation will be reported to the Secretary of State, and that failure will be published for everyone to see. That will be another powerful tool by which each Department will be held to account. Deaf campaigners will be able to compare the guidance from the Secretary of State directly with the published reports. Hiring a registered qualified interpreter for a briefing or to create a BSL translation is an easy commitment with such a minimal cost, so we will soon see Departments make their services and announcements accessible.

That aim is the Bill’s central point: the complete and total inclusion of deaf people. They should be able to watch and understand a national address by the Prime Minister. They should be able to go to a meeting at the jobcentre and talk freely with their adviser. They should be able to have a fully trained and registered qualified interpreter available for them at medical appointments. I have talked at length and could go on and on, but I will not. We are failing at all those things on daily basis, but with the support of Members here today and Members in the other place later, we can start along the road towards fixing such injustices once and for all.

As a nation, we cannot afford to waste the talents of our deaf population. When this Bill becomes law, as I hope it will, I say to the deaf community, and to all those watching at home or in Trafalgar Square or wherever, “Now it is over to you to achieve your potential and to live your best possible lives. That will enrich us all.” I thank the Minister for everything she has done to get Bill legislation through, and I hope that we will agree to give it its Third Reading today, and that it whizzes through the other place. I hope that today will mark the end of the campaign to recognise sign language as a language and the start of the campaign to liberate the potential of every deaf person in this country.