British Sign Language Bill

Anthony Browne Excerpts

Friday 28th January 2022 Commons Chamber

[Anthony Browne (South Cambridgeshire) (Con)]

I pay tribute to my hon. Friend the Member for Hertford and Stortford (Julie Marson) for her speech, and in particular to the hon. Member for West Lancashire (Rosie Cooper). I was moved throughout her speech—I think it was the most moving speech I have heard since I came to this place. It was incredibly powerful, and included her background and her parents. She is proud of her parents, and her parents absolutely have a right to be proud of her. While you were making that speech I thought, “This is what politics is about”. You are bringing experiences from your life to here—[Interruption.] Sorry, Madam Deputy Speaker. It is a very personal thing and it is difficult not to say “you”. The hon. Lady comes here bringing her experience from her life, background and childhood, and turns it into legislation to help people and, as she said, to pay forward the benefits of her upbringing to help other people in the community. I am struck by many of the examples she gave about how her parents dealt with things, the first language she learned, and particularly that she had to be the interpreter for her parents when dealing with the health service. There were also the anecdotes about being a student, studying for exams and having to rush out between exams to be an interpreter for her mother. She said it was not right that that had to happen, and I fully agree.

I agree with several of my colleagues who have said that one of the great things about this debate is that it is cross-party and consensual. It is a positive thing and we can make a real difference to a wide number of different people. That is what the House of Commons should be about. As the hon. Lady said, debates such as the one we had on Wednesday at Prime Minister’s questions, when everyone was baying at each other, are a bit depressing. These debates are the diametric opposite of that.

It was not until I became an MP that I realised quite how widely BSL was used. I saw two of my councillors—neither of them deaf or hard of hearing—speaking to each other in BSL, and I was slightly surprised. One of them, like the hon. Member for West Lancashire, grew up with parents who were deaf, and the other worked with deaf people. They used it to communicate comfortably with each other.

As we have heard, 1.2 million people in the UK have quite strong hearing loss, of more than 65 decibels, and there are 50,000 deaf children; 87,000 deaf people have BSL as their preferred language and 151,000 can use it overall. That is not including the various interpreters and so on.

As we have heard—I have really appreciated the contributions today—BSL really is a full language. It is not just something that you can communicate with. It has different accents, it has humour, it has gestures, it has all the richness of any other language. It was recognised officially in 2003, but it is as rich and strong as any other language that is officially recognised. Clearly, public awareness of BSL has grown a lot in recent years and decades, not least due to Rose Ayling-Ellis winning “Strictly Come Dancing”. It has been far more widely used. We mentioned PMQs, and the covid briefings from No.10 had sign language interpretation. All that is good. The hon. Member for West Lancashire pointed out how far we have come—that is the positive side—in recent years, but clearly we need to go an awful lot further and recognise it as an official language. As many others have said, I am surprised that it has taken quite so long to do so. I welcome the fact that the Government support the Bill and that the Department for Education is looking at a GCSE in BSL. Maybe I will be tempted to learn it myself; I certainly would have done when I was at that stage.

It is obviously important that legally recognising BSL as an official language is not the end of the matter. We need the council that is in the Bill to help drive it forward. We need to make sure that all public services, as widely as possible, give full access to BSL interpretation so that people in the hon. Lady’s position in the future do not have the frustrations that she had. We must make sure that people who are hard of hearing or deaf who use BSL have full access to all the services, can lead a full life in terms of employment and do not face any of the barriers that currently exist. The Bill will be a big step towards that full equality and inclusivity of deaf people in the rest of society.

This has been a fantastic debate with very positive and powerful speeches. I have certainly learned a lot. One of the things I have learned today is how to say “thank you” in BSL. [In British Sign Language: “Thank you.”]