Oral Answers to Questions

Bell Ribeiro-Addy Excerpts

Monday 11th December 2023 Commons Chamber

[The Minister for Skills, Apprenticeships and Higher Education (Robert Halfon)]

My hon. Friend is a champion for UTCs and technical education. I am delighted that the Secretary of State recently approved two more UTCs. A couple of weeks ago I visited the brilliant Harlow BMAT STEM Academy, which is a UTC, and UTC Portsmouth. We will respond shortly to Lord Baker’s request for a UTC sleeve pilot, as she mentioned.

[Bell Ribeiro-Addy (Streatham) (Lab)]

Corpus Christi junior school on Brixton Hill has been closed since July due to RAAC. We now have tenders approved for the significant works that the Department for Education said were necessary and that it would pay for, but they must begin in January to ensure that they are completed in time. Could the Secretary of State explain why, despite repeated requests, her Department has still not approved the necessary funding? Any further delay could mean that my young constituents are left with further disruption and no building to learn in for the next academic year.

[Damian Hinds]

We are, as the hon. Lady will know, committed to ensure that reasonable costs for temporary accommodation and so on are covered in the immediate term and beyond, to make sure that capital costs are covered for either refurbishment or, in some cases, rebuild. There will be further detail to come before long.

Pupil Roll Numbers and School Closures: London

Bell Ribeiro-Addy Excerpts

Wednesday 7th June 2023 Westminster Hall

[Bell Ribeiro-Addy (Streatham) (Lab)]

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mr Hollobone. I congratulate my hon. Friend and neighbour the Member for Vauxhall (Florence Eshalomi) on securing this debate and on her excellent opening speech.

What we are seeing unfolding right across London is a vicious cycle of soaring living costs and, as a consequence, falling budgets for local authorities and schools. My hon. Friend pointed to London’s 17% decline in the birth rate, which accounts for 23,000 fewer babies in our capital. That crisis is most acutely felt in inner city boroughs such as ours, Lambeth. Yes, it is true that lifestyles are changing and some people are choosing to have fewer kids, but those who want more cannot afford to have them. Even if they could afford them, they cannot afford the size of house to put the kids in.

Since 2001, our borough has seen a 10% drop in households with at least one school-age child. I am sure other Members visit their schools, as I do. I really enjoy speaking to the wonderful children in my constituency; they always have the best questions. As other Members were speaking, I was thinking that if schools continue to close, I will have to spend a lot more time with all of them instead of with the wonderful children in my constituency. That is really sad, because they really are the best of us, and they show us why we continue to do the work we do here.

Since schools mainly receive cash per pupil, empty desks mean debts. Debts leave schools and local authorities with little choice in practice, given wider budget constraints. Teachers and staff end up losing their jobs; their families are then affected in a vicious cycle. After a decade of austerity, there is nothing left to cut. That is why we face the closure of two of our 19 state-funded schools in Lambeth: St Martin-in-the-Fields High School for Girls in Dulwich and West Norwood, and Archbishop Tenison’s in my hon. Friend’s constituency of Vauxhall.

This is personal for me, as it is for my hon. Friend, because it is happening in Lambeth, but also because my brother went to Archbishop Tenison’s and my sister went to St Martin-in-the-Fields. I spent a lot of time there because my mum was always insistent that we went to each other’s school events—as the youngest, I certainly enjoyed visiting theirs more than they enjoyed coming to mine, but we spent a lot of time in those schools. Being older than me, they were lucky to get a place in Lambeth at the time, because we had a serious shortage of secondary school places. A lot of the kids in our borough had to go to school out of borough.

When academies came in, although there was a lot of scepticism, people were happy that we were getting more schools in our constituency. We did not think it would create a situation in which some academy chains seemed to be given licence to build—we do not understand why—and allowed to increase their numbers. We did not think that that would affect schools that have been in our area for such a long time. Usually, when we hear about schools closing in Lambeth, it is because they are bad schools. These two schools are not bad. They have been the finest in our area for a very long time.

At the root of the issue is the problem of soaring housing costs, but the Government refuse to give us in London the powers we need to tackle them. We often hear Government Members talking about the “metropolitan liberal elite” and making off-coloured gibes about north London Labour MPs, but inner-city London boroughs continue to experience some of the highest levels of child poverty anywhere in the UK. The latest data from End Child Poverty shows that 29.9% of children living in my constituency of Streatham were growing up in poverty last year—that is 7,465 children. The data also shows that 35.5% of children in Lambeth, the borough my constituency is in, were growing up in poverty last year—that is 21,812 children. This is in one of the richest cities in the entire world. It does not exactly scream “metropolitan liberal elite”.

Housing costs are arguably the largest driving factor behind all of this. They are people’s biggest expense. At the heart of the debate is the question of who our city is for: is it a place for families to make their home, or is it a playground for the rich? I will point to a few solutions, focusing particularly on housing.

We need to enhance renters’ rights. Average monthly rents in London have risen above £2,500 for the first time. The Government should be using the Renters (Reform) Bill to close the eviction loopholes and give the Mayor of London power to control private rents. We need a higher proportion of genuinely affordable housing for new build developments, not this dodgy definition of 80% of the market rate, which is not affordable for people in my constituency or for most people across London. We need to get empty homes into circulation, as well as a mass council house building programme. I am glad that the next Labour Government have committed to 100,000 social homes, considering the Conservatives clearly had no plans to build homes, let alone affordable ones.

I heard about a time, way back when, when public sector workers used to get favourable rates on mortgages or even get accommodation to help them. When I think of all the public sector workers who are being priced out with their families, that is something that we should look towards. They should absolutely be paid more and, given what they are doing, we need to keep them in London, but they are all being pushed right out. We need school funding levels to increase and to keep pace with inflation. We need to give local authorities responsibility for in-year admissions, as has been set out in the schools White Paper, and the power to direct all schools to accept local children. They should be given the power to manage academies’ reduction of PAN or closure. That is really important.

Loads of people point to how growing up in the country was lovely. I am sure it was—they have a lot of hay fever and such—but I loved my childhood growing up on Brixton Hill in London. Being able to live in this fantastic city as a child made me who I am, and I am really sad that if we do not fix some of these policies, children will not have the wonderful experiences that I had.

--- Later in debate ---

[Nick Gibb]

I understand the point the hon. Member is making, but free schools have been crucial in raising standards in our school system. The issue was not just numbers, but what we could do to deliver standards. I can think of a school in the constituency of the hon. Member for Ealing, Southall (Mr Sharma) that opened in 2018 and was in January judged as outstanding. These are important factors to take into account. This is about quality as well as numbers.

Some spare capacity should be retained in the system to manage shifting demand, provide for parental choice and support the effective management of the admissions system. Local factors should be carefully assessed, along with considerations of quality, diversity and accessibility of local provision, and the forecast demand for places, in determining the most appropriate approach in each area. Local authorities are well placed to do that. They have seen periods of decline, bulges and shifts in local patterns before, and have shown they are adept at managing them.

The Department expects local authorities to work collaboratively with their partners to ensure that they are managing the local school estate efficiently and reducing or re-purposing high levels of spare capacity, to avoid undermining the educational offer or financial viability of schools in their area. I know that local authorities, together with trusts, are already considering a range of options for the reutilisation of space. That includes, for example, co-locating nursery provision, as well as options for reconfiguration, including via remodelling, amalgamations and closures where this is the best course of action. Lambeth has rightly been proactive in addressing this issue and is consulting on reducing the capacity of eight primary schools.

The Department continues to engage with local authorities on a regular basis to discuss their plans and potential solutions. One solution is the support and benefits obtained from being part of a strong and established multi-academy trust. The Department believes that all schools should be in strong families of schools, benefiting from the resilience that that brings and the support of the best in the group. That is why, over time, the Department would like all schools to be in a strong multi-academy trusts. By centralising operational and administrative functions, schools within a MAT can save time and money, which can be reinvested directly into areas that have the greatest impact.

The hon. Member for Vauxhall referred to housing issues, as did a number of other Members, including the hon. Member for Brentford and Isleworth (Ruth Cadbury), who has just intervened. The provision of affordable housing is part of the Government’s plan to build more homes and provide aspiring homeowners with a step on to the housing ladder. Our £11.5 billion affordable homes programme will deliver thousands of affordable homes for both rent and to buy across the country. For London, £4 billion has been allocated, to deliver much-needed affordable and social housing in the capital. Since 2010, we have delivered over 632,000 new affordable homes, including over 440,000 affordable homes for rent, of which over 162,000 are for social rent. In fact, more than a fifth of overall delivery between April 2010 and March 2022 was in London, with over 89,000 homes for rent.

[Bell Ribeiro-Addy]

Can the Minister please outline how he defines “affordable” and why, if the homes are “affordable”, so many of my constituents find themselves unable to afford them?

[Nick Gibb]

That question is for another debate, I suspect, especially as I have only six minutes left; I would love to debate that issue with the hon. Member on another occasion. However, we are absolutely aware of the concern and the problem, which is why we are investing, as I said, £4 billion in affordable housing in London alone.

Although the challenge facing mainstream schools is evident, it is important to recognise that there is still a need to increase the supply of places, particularly for children with special educational needs and disabilities—a point made by the hon. Members for Richmond Park (Sarah Olney) and for Strangford (Jim Shannon) during this debate.

The number of children with SEND continues to increase in London, providing local authorities with an opportunity to think creatively about how to organise and structure high-needs provision alongside or within mainstream schools. Some £400 million of the £2 billion in additional funding for schools announced in the autumn statement will go to local authorities’ high-needs budgets and we are investing £2.6 billion in capital funding between 2022 and 2025 to help to deliver new school places for children with special educational needs.

Across London boroughs, councils will work with schools and the wider community to find alternative solutions to closure wherever possible. However, the school estate needs to be managed efficiently, which sometimes means reducing or repurposing high levels of spare capacity, including through closure, where places are not needed in the long term.

I know that the hon. Member for Vauxhall is particularly concerned about two schools in Lambeth that are in different stages on the path to closure: Archbishop Tenison’s School and St Martin-in-the-Fields High School for Girls. Both have a rich history going back hundreds of years. Their trustees explored all the options available and came to the difficult decision to seek a closure, through mutual consent with the Department. I understand how troubling that will be for pupils and their families. School closures are always a last resort. When a school closure is proposed, the regional director will work in consultation with the local authority and trust to gather information and assess the options, with the Secretary of State taking the final decision on the closure of academies. Minimising disruption for children at these schools will always be the Department’s top priority.

The hon. Member for Twickenham (Munira Wilson) raised the important point about empty places when pupil numbers fall and the impact that has on school budgets. To support local authorities to meet their sufficiency duty, the Department for Education provides them with revenue funding for growth and falling rolls, through the dedicated school grant. From 2024-25, the Government will additionally give local authorities more flexibilities to support schools seeing a significant decline in pupil numbers, where these places will still be needed within the next three to five years. Local authorities will be able to use their growth and falling rolls funding allocations to meet the revenue costs of repurposing school places.

My hon. Friend the Member for Ruislip, Northwood and Pinner requested a ban on academy trusts disposing of school land. Land and buildings are in fact held in trust, and the most common result of a closure is for the land and building to revert back either to the local authority or to the diocese if it was a Church school.

The hon. Member for Eltham (Clive Efford) raised Avery Hill, which I would be very happy to discuss with him. The free schools programme has been pivotal in meeting the demand for places since 2010, and has provided thousands of good new places across the country. In 2022, pupils in primary and secondary free schools made more progress on average than pupils in other schools. I have already referred to the outstanding free school in Ealing, the Ada Lovelace Church of England High School, which recently received a very good Ofsted report.

The performance of schools within the Harris Federation is even more impressive. Harris is one of the strongest and most successful multi-academy trusts. It educates more than 40,000 children in 52 schools across London, and 98% of its schools have been judged either good or outstanding by Ofsted. The Department continuously reviews the viability of all schools in the free schools pipeline, and we are looking closely at all the arguments for and against the free school at Avery Hill. We will open the school only when we are confident that it will be good, viable, sustainable and successful.

I am proud of the work that the Government have done since 2010 to ensure that we have school places where and when they are needed. As population trends change in London and across the country, we will keep supporting local authorities and trusts to ensure that any changes to local schools come with minimal disruption to our children and young people.

Black History Month

Bell Ribeiro-Addy Excerpts

Thursday 28th October 2021 Westminster Hall

[Bell Ribeiro-Addy (Streatham) (Lab)]

I beg to move,

That this House has considered Black History Month 2021.

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairpersonship, Sir Graham. I thank the Backbench Business Committee for allowing this vital debate and I extend my thanks to the hon. Members who supported my application and have joined to participate today. To some, this might be just another debate, but for black and minority ethnic communities, holding this debate in Parliament shows that we recognise and celebrate that history and their achievements right across the UK and the world. I sincerely hope that general debates to celebrate Black History Month will become a regular fixture on the parliamentary calendar.

This year’s theme for Black History Month is “Proud to Be”. That is so important because so many are made to feel uncomfortable about their ethnic heritage, cultural history and language—seen, or felt to be seen, by others as the other, inferior or a minority. However, black people have so much to be proud of culturally in the ways we have contributed to British history, and we ought to be proud to be both black and British. In her Adjournment debate last week, my hon. Friend the Member for Erith and Thamesmead (Abena Oppong-Asare) highlighted several black British individuals who make us feel proud. I am sure that colleagues will no doubt mention several more individuals who have made significant contributions to our nation’s history and who we ought to be proud of. From Yvonne Conolly, the UK’s first black headteacher, to C. L. R. James, the renowned author, from William Cuffay, the leading figure of the Chartist movement, to my right hon. Friend the Member for Hackney North and Stoke Newington (Ms Abbott), the first black woman to be elected to this Parliament, we see figures who reflect the diversity of our country and who we can all be proud of.

The UK has its own rich civil rights history, which my generation and those before me were unfortunately never formally taught and have had to take it upon ourselves to learn. Not recognising yourself in your history can have a serious impact on your identity. How are we expected to feel “Proud to Be” if we are shown by omission that the contributions of black people are not worth being taught in our schools? Colleagues may be aware of the petition that circulated last year, which called for the UK to teach Britain’s colonial past as part of the curriculum. It achieved over 260,000 signatures and, along with similar petitions, means that the teaching of black history in schools has received the most support of any parliamentary petition in our history.

That appetite has not waned at all, because more than 660 schools in England have signed up for a diverse and anti-racist curriculum developed by teachers and council staff in the London Borough of Hackney. The Black Contribution aims to teach young people about not just the history of black people, but fundamentally the history that we all share because—as I hope everyone has heard many times throughout this month—black history is British history.

Now is the perfect time to pay tribute to the Labour Government in Wales, which have instituted black history as part of their curriculum. Seeing them lead the way and seeing how much support that has had, I cannot understand why the Government still refuse to commit to putting black history in the curriculum, when there is such widespread support. Perhaps when responding to the debate, the Minister can inform us the reason why the Government refuse to take action on this.

Instead, unfortunately, what we have seen is discussions descending into a so-called war on woke and culture wars, and other, very bizarre claims about the phrase “white privilege”, how it has affected us and the idea that it is being widely taught in schools. First, anyone who actually speaks to teachers will find that that is not a feature in any of the lessons. We do not hear about children running home from school talking about it or, indeed, about teachers asking Timmy, “What’s 1 + 1?”, Timmy saying, “2”, and the teachers saying, “Aha! Timmy, you knew the answer because of white privilege.” We do not hear such nonsense. That is not what is happening in our schools. Secondly, teaching children about race inequality, as some teachers will do during Black History Month, is not what is holding back working-class children in our education system. It was not teaching about racism that closed down hundreds of youth services or cut funding per pupil in this country; that was this Government. It is those policies that hold back working-class children from all our communities.

I completely understand why this Government may not want to talk about race, and especially not about their record on race, but ignoring these issues will not lead to the post-racial society that some people believe we are living in. We have to address them. We have to address past issues of slavery and colonialism and their lasting impact, which is the racism we face today, and we have to do it by education and other means. I would be proud to be part of a Parliament that finally apologised for the atrocities of slavery and colonialism. Yesterday I was pleased to officially launch the all-party parliamentary group on African reparations and am looking forward to policy on this. Cambridge University recently returned, and quite proudly so, two of the looted Benin bronzes, but there are over 3,000 in this country and 900 alone in the British Museum. Reparations begin with things such as that: giving back these things that do not belong to us.

We know that over the past few years there has been no shortage of discussions about racial disparities. We have had debates about the impact of covid on black and ethnic minority communities, about the need to teach black history as part of the curriculum, about racial disparities in maternal health outcomes, and about the ethnicity employment gap and the ethnicity pay gap, and of course the Black Lives Matter protests, a tragic reminder that racism can be a matter of life and death. Time and time again, we have raised the ongoing racial disparities in the UK, and time and time again we have called on the Government to act, but the response has been felt to be full of platitudes and empty gestures, with a report that told us, quite famously, that systemic racism does not exist and that in some ways actually attempted to create some racial divides.

Although it seems like we have talked about it quite a lot, given that the last CRED—Commission on Race and Ethnic Disparities—report was only released earlier this year, it would be remiss of me not to mention it. As far as I am concerned, it turns back the clock on ending racial inequality. There are other reports and inquiries that have outlined how racism continues across society, and report after report outlining the social causes and political failings that underpin it.

[Marsha De Cordova (Battersea) (Lab)]

I congratulate my hon. Friend on her amazing speech. She alludes to the fact that there have been multiple reports on racial inequality in this country. Does she agree that if the Government just took some time and looked at beginning to implement some of those recommendations, we might, just maybe, begin to make some headway on racial inequality?

[Bell Ribeiro-Addy]

My hon. Friend is absolutely right. If we had gone down that road, perhaps we would not be having the discussions that we are having today.

We need to think about what that report said, when it decided that there was no institutional or systemic racism, and how that discounts years of lived experience and the things that people from black, Asian and minority ethnic backgrounds have experienced in this country. What I could not understand at the time was whether the Government believed they would get any buy-in for a report that was so widely discredited across our communities or to what extent, given how discredited it has been, it was actually for our communities, even though it was very much about them.

The idea that institutional racism does not exist means that there is no action for the state to take, because it is not an institutional problem. As far as I am concerned, the Government appear to be absolving themselves of responsibility to take action on institutions that fail to deliver racial equality. We did not need that report; we needed action on reports gone by. We certainly did not need a new story about slavery and colonialism, when the one that we have at the moment is not even being widely taught.

My hon. Friend the Member for Battersea (Marsha De Cordova) pointed to the recommendations of reports gone by that have not been implemented, and my right hon. Friend the Member for Tottenham (Mr Lammy) reminded me that the Government continue to stall on implementing fully his Lammy review. In the meantime, BAME youth custody now sits at 51%, which is an increase of 10% on when he was asked to do the review just five years ago.

The Windrush lessons learned review by Wendy Williams was also commissioned by the Government. Even the author of the report has said how woeful it is that, again, the Government continue not to act on the recommendations. Furthermore, the scandal continues, because many people caught up in it have not yet received compensation or their proper status of leave to remain in this country.

[Ms Diane Abbott (Hackney North and Stoke Newington) (Lab)]

I congratulate my hon. Friend on securing this important debate. When we talk about unimplemented reports and inquiries, we could go all the way back to the early ’80s and the Scarman inquiry. If everything that Scarman spoke about had been addressed, we would not be in the situation we are in today.

[Bell Ribeiro-Addy]

My right hon. Friend is absolutely right. That is what we want to bring to an end. We have to stop this cycle whereby something bad happens, we have a report or inquiry, and the Government—successive Governments—just push it under the carpet and wait until the next disaster in which racial inequality is raised. Part of why we are not making headway is that the bodies that are meant to protect us and to apply checks and balances on the Government simply do not have the ability to do so.

The Joint Committee on Human Rights report, “Black people, racism and human rights”, said that overall there was a very damning picture of structural racism right across society, such as in health, immigration, policing, the justice system and electoral participation. It also mentioned, in a key way, the failures of the Equality and Human Rights Commission.

The Equality and Human Rights Commission is tasked with policing equality and, potentially, enforcing such targets. However, it is not fit for purpose in its current form. How could it be? It is supposed to be an independent arm’s length body, but its major appointments are still made by the Government. That must make it difficult to take action when Government policies lead to inequality or human rights breaches. That has been highlighted in many court cases over the past few years. The EHRC also appears to have rarely used and limited investigation and enforcement powers, and it has an ever-dwindling budget. In practice, it has become a body with no teeth.

In my work on the Women and Equalities Committee, we have found that when people—the Government included—refuse to comply with what they are meant to do under equalities legislation, the Equality and Human Rights Commission appears to be able to do very little. Key to that, given that our main purpose here every day is to pass legislation, is that the Government do not produce equality impact assessments of various pieces of legislation. When they do, at times they refuse to publish them. How on earth are we meant to hold the Government to account and ensure that they are complying with our equalities law? Why does our equalities law always have to be an add-on?

Frankly, black communities need fewer champions and more enforcement of what are supposed to be the rights that protect us. Report after report has reinforced not only the issues, but the recommendations that we need to bring about systemic change. If we were clear about our equalities legislation and the guidance, we would be moving forward.

When we discuss racial inequality and call on the Government to introduce policy to change things, we are not asking for anything beyond equality; we are simply asking the Government to recognise how we are treated as a community in this country and to take meaningful action to change it. Likewise, when we ask the Government for black histories to be taught as part of the curriculum, we are not asking for that to be done over other aspects of British history; we are asking them to recognise that black history is British history—it is a part of that history—but that it is not taught widely, as it should be. They should take those key steps to ensure that that is done.

If racism is ignorance, and education is the absence of ignorance, there is an obvious answer to dealing with racial inequality; it is simple and it costs the Government nothing to start just there—with education.

[Sir Graham Brady (in the Chair)]

I suggest an informal time limit of eight minutes to try and ensure that everybody who wants to speak can do so.

--- Later in debate ---

[Bell Ribeiro-Addy]

I want to start by thanking all Members who have participated for their well-delivered contributions. I would like to say that the support of the hon. Member for Wycombe (Mr Baker) for these issues does not go unnoticed. My hon. Friend the Member for Battersea (Marsha De Cordova) took us through the history of great black women and reiterated the shameful lack of quality impact assessments on Government legislation. My hon. Friend the Member for Poplar and Limehouse (Apsana Begum) pointed out quite rightly the shameful lack of representation of black teachers in our schools and wider academia.

The right hon. Member for Dwyfor Meirionnydd (Liz Saville Roberts), whose constituency I know I have pronounced wrong, gave an analogy about discussions about race and our history being fragrant and thorny. I really liked that. As the only Welsh Member here, she probably takes full pride in the launching of the teaching of Black History Month in schools in Wales.

My right hon. Friend the Member for Hackney North and Stoke Newington (Ms Abbott) reminded us of the civil rights struggles here in the UK. She took a lot of time to talk about the other black Members of Parliament without mentioning herself. She is a trailblazer. She talked about the others whose shoulders we stand on, but we know fully that we stand on hers. My hon. Friend the Member for Coventry North West (Taiwo Owatemi), our shadow Minister for Equalities, quite rightly reaffirmed her commitment to tackling these issues. The hon. Member for Argyll and Bute (Brendan O’Hara)—

[Sir Graham Brady (in the Chair)]

Order.

Higher Education (Freedom of Speech) Bill

Bell Ribeiro-Addy Excerpts

2nd reading
Monday 12th July 2021 Commons Chamber

[Bell Ribeiro-Addy (Streatham) (Lab) [V]]

The University and College Union has rightly argued that there is

“no evidence of a free speech crisis on campus”

and, in 2018, the Joint Committee on Human Rights concluded that there was

“no wholesale censorship of debate”,

so why on earth are we here? The Government want us to believe that they are engaged in some liberal defence of freedom of speech, but it is a complete farce. The Bill is in fact a threat that tramples on students unions’ autonomy, overturns students unions’ long-standing no-platform policies, narrows the legal definition of academic freedoms and fails to address the real threats to campus free speech: the ever-failing Prevent duty, casualised employment, insecure research funding and, of course, the Government. The Bill is yet another part of the Government’s authoritarian agenda. For immediate proof of that, it is almost unique in the breadth of its provision. For example, rules on judicial review state that if someone wants to challenge a decision of Government, they must have standing, which means they must be affected by the decision that they are challenging. The Bill requires no standing, so any person, any business or any campaign can sue. What a free-for-all that will create. Where are the safeguards that the Secretary of State spoke of?

I hope that, in my short time in this House, I have proved that I am a civil libertarian. I was also a full-time National Union of Students officer, a liberation officer and the union’s anti-racism and anti-fascism convenor. I defended its long-standing no-platform policy against attack then, and I am proud to defend it today. However, I cannot say how much it irks me to find myself again making those arguments I made 10 years ago and—worse—not on a student campus or at a student conference but in the House of Commons. That is further evidence of how regressive a decade of Conservative Government has been.

The Government need to realise that while we decide who should be allowed on university campuses, for many students studying at colleges and universities those campuses are their homes. What has possessed the Government to put demands in law that students must allow anybody—even fascists—into their home and safe space of living and learning? We routinely saw that whenever speakers who espoused fascist views were even promoted as coming on to campus, racist and homophobic attacks against students increased. The Secretary of State said that holocaust deniers would of course not be allowed free rein on campus, but this ill-advised Bill does not realise that, over the years, the no-platform policy has served as the main line of defence for keeping holocaust deniers and other fascists off our campuses. Who gets to decide the remit? The Government —and they routinely pass legislation that goes against our equalities legislation without even publishing an equality impact assessment. Hon. Members will forgive me for not trusting the Government to defend liberation groups even within the law. Why should students trust the same Ministers who repeatedly endorsed the booing of England players at the start of the Euro 2020 tournament? The racist abuse now directed at them was sanctioned from the very top. Students unions cannot depend on the Government to protect them, and the Bill stops them from protecting their members.

I have heard many arguments about what should be debated and how debate should expose things, but the neo-liberal, supposedly free-speech fanatics do not seem to realise that while they are in a room putting together well-informed arguments for fantastic debates, young black, Muslim, Jewish and LGBTQ people out on the streets are being victimised, verbally abused, physically assaulted and, in some cases, murdered. What exactly is there to debate? What possible arguments are there to pose? They are basically saying that those people face discrimination because they cannot argue their case well enough.

The hon. Member for Dudley North (Marco Longhi) said that we should hear both sides of any debate. Should we debate a paedophile who thinks it is okay to have sex with children? There are people who believe that children should be able to consent. Shall we debate misogynists on whether women should have equal rights to men? We have seen that on the rise with incel groups. Shall we debate people who want an all-white Britain and say that black, Asian and minority ethnic people should not have the right to live and worship as they choose, free from discrimination?

Free speech is not an absolute right. No rights are absolute in a society, because all rights come with responsibilities to others. We legislate for those responsibilities in this House. The right to live free from hate is not up for debate and it never should be. That is not stifling freedom of speech; it is exercising our human rights and defending those of others. The Bill wants to stop that. We do not expose fascist beliefs by debating them. We do not give fascists a platform to give more oxygen to their hate. If we do, we are saying that their views hold the same value as ours, and that is not true in a civilised society. The Government say that the Bill is about freedom of speech, but we know it has got nothing to do with that.

Black History and Cultural Diversity in the Curriculum

Bell Ribeiro-Addy Excerpts

Monday 28th June 2021 Westminster Hall

[Bell Ribeiro-Addy (Streatham) (Lab) [V]]

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mr Gray. I congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for Islwyn (Chris Evans) on securing the debate. Previously—I believe it was the year before last—no subject of parliamentary petitions had received more signatories than black history being taught as part of our national curriculum. That has certainly continued with this petition. I am not surprised, because when it comes to black history, we are not given a complete picture. When it comes to British history, we are not given a complete picture, because black history, and the history of our past slavery and colonialism, are often missing. How can we truly understand this country as it is if we do not address those issues?

Like most people who have grown up in the UK over the past century, I never learned very much about that, and what I did was self-taught. The majority of the information we can find is about the US civil rights struggle. These international perspectives are important, but it was far too long before I discovered the UK’s own rich civil rights history and all the information related to our role in the slave trade and colonialism. I want children in our country to learn about these things and why our country is the way it is today; about why they may, if they are black, Asian or from an ethnic minority, experience discrimination; and about important figures such as William Cuffay, Mary Seacole, CLR James, Claudia Jones, Olive Morris and so many more. I cannot stress enough how damaging it is not to see oneself reflected in what we learn and what we learn about our history. Our Government seem quite obsessed at the moment with patriotism and having children sing certain songs in schools and so on. However, when someone is constantly made to feel like they do not belong, because of rhetoric around immigration, and when that is reinforced by what they learn—or rather, what they do not learn—that can be extremely damaging.

My first black relative born in the UK was actually born in 1806, in Twyford in Winchester. His name was Thomas Birch Freeman. He was the son of a freed slave and a maid and went on to become a Methodist minister. He eventually settled in Ghana but often travelled between Ghana, Nigeria and the UK. When I read about his history, I do not hear how strange it was for a black man to be walking around in the UK at that time. Black people have been part of this country for hundreds of years, but far too often people today are made to feel as if it is very recent—in the past 50 or 60 years—and that they are still very much migrants.

We also know that history is always written by the victors, and that is one obvious explanation for the status quo, in terms of what we learn at the moment. The historical amnesia surrounding our country’s own civil rights struggle and the slavery and colonialism that came before has a pretty blatant function in our political discourse. However, obscuring the past victories of the oppressed and marginalised does not help to prevent history from being repeated.

People often refer to this sort of teaching as decolonising our curriculum, but it is important to note that it is every bit as much about class as it is about race. In school, we have other notable gaps in our history lessons about struggles that were ended—for example, the miners’ strikes, the poll tax riots and the accomplishments of trade unions. The attempt to put the history of slavery and colonialism and black civil rights in the UK into the curriculum is an attempt to put the history of the working class into the curriculum. That is key.

I worry that there is an ideological reason behind resisting this change, despite the fact that we can see in this petition and previous ones just how many people want this change to be made to the curriculum. If working-class kids learn about movements for change and about just how much power they have as citizens, what is to prevent them from recognising parallels between past events and what is going on in the present, and—even more important—from mounting effective challenges and bringing about change?

We know that black history is usually confined to a month. That month is really a means to an end. That end has to be giving everybody a clear picture of our collective past. That is why we cannot keep confining black history to just that one month. Too great a burden falls on busy teachers, who often—I know this from information given to the Women and Equalities Committee—do not feel confident about teaching certain subjects, and there is not much support from the Government for them. The Government should take a lead from the brilliant teachers who do all the work themselves, and organisations such as the Black Curriculum, the Coalition of Anti-Racist Educators and the Black Educators Alliance.

It feels like subjects to do with issues of race are treated completely differently from other subjects, which is wrong. When someone wants to talk about race, it is treated as if they are taking away from talking about something else, which itself is the essence of racism. Far too often, the idea that we should teach slavery and colonialism in schools is dismissed as nonsense; we hear that all that it does is reinforce the idea that at some point people in our country did something wrong, in the process it takes children away from learning other more important things. I cannot understand why some people cannot see just how important it is for people to learn about these issues, so that they are not repeated and so that we understand where discrimination comes from.

Confronting the history of slavery and empire is not about recrimination. We need to address our shameful past to understand why we are living our shameful present, and eventually—hopefully—to change what we see and move to a future of equality. To do that, we need to understand that the process starts with education, because nobody is born racist; it is in what we learn. If racism is ignorance—I am sure that all Members would agree that it is—what is education if not the absence or ending of ignorance? I believe that if we teach these very important parts of our history, it will change our discourse, change the rhetoric and change some of the shameful things that we hear about now.

I wholeheartedly support this petition. I hope that the Government take on board yet another petition that is very clear about what we need to see in our curriculum.

Oral Answers to Questions

Bell Ribeiro-Addy Excerpts

Monday 26th April 2021 Commons Chamber

[Vicky Ford]

Support for the mental health and wellbeing of our young people is important, and the Government are making a major investment in such support. We recently announced a further £79 million boost for mental health services for children, which will accelerate the provision of mental health support teams in schools and colleges. That is on top of the £2.3 billion a year that we have committed through the NHS long-term plan. Since September, our Wellbeing for Education Return scheme has linked schools with local mental health experts in 90% of local authorities.

[Bell Ribeiro-Addy (Streatham) (Lab) [V]]

This country deserves a well-funded, well-valued teaching profession, but the litany of problems affecting teachers has not gone away, and issues such as increased workload, stress, and a lack of professional autonomy have been documented widely, including by the Department. With a looming recruitment and retention crisis, does the Minister have any long-term plans to allow greater autonomy and trust? Would a potential recruitment and retention strategy promise to do away with the excessive scrutiny of teaching professionals?

[Nick Gibb]

The essence of our academies programme is about delivering autonomy for schools, and it is that autonomy—the hon. Lady is quite right—that is driving up standards. We have also, since 2014, been addressing the workload issues of schoolteachers up and down the country, and that has proven successful in reducing the number of hours in addition to teaching time that schoolteachers face.

Tuition Fees

Bell Ribeiro-Addy Excerpts

Monday 16th November 2020 Westminster Hall

[Bell Ribeiro-Addy (Streatham) (Lab)]

They say that a student’s time at university will be the best years of their life, but for thousands of students across the UK at the moment, it is a nightmare. Those of us who enjoyed our time at university are probably thinking that we are lucky that we are not them. They are locked up in their halls of residence, attending freshers events over Zoom and running the risk of contracting the virus during face-to-face teaching.

This year’s first-year university students already had to put up the hellish scandal of A-level results day and now they must contend with the shambles that is this Government’s advice to universities on covid-19. While the pandemic is no one’s fault, the way we deal with it must be. Tuition fees have been a controversial topic of debate over the past couple of decades—I was against them then and am against them now. Although it has been stated time and again, it cannot be said enough that education should be a right and not a privilege. We should not charge for it. Ironically, the Cabinet Ministers who were the driving force behind tripling tuition fees some years ago probably went to university free of charge and at the expense of the taxpayer. They have effectively pulled up the drawbridge behind them.

The commercialisation of higher education is a big shame for this country. Lumbering 21-year-olds with £50,000-worth of debt is absolutely disgraceful. When we look at other countries across the world we see thriving, high-income countries investing in their higher education while we push the cost on to students and their families. We will hear again, “It’s fine. You won’t have to repay it until you start earning £26,000-plus a year,” but the psychological toll that that massive amount of debt leaves on an individual is not mentioned. We all know that pay now or pay later, debt is still debt, and those from lower socio-economic backgrounds will always take longer to pay it back and will suffer harsher consequences.

At the moment, university students are paying £9,250 a year to attend university, or, as some of them say, £9,250 to effectively live in prison-like conditions. Students in Manchester have dubbed their university “Her Majesty’s Prison, Manchester University” because fences have been put up to keep them in. Students are paying to stay in halls while watching their lectures online over Zoom and many other platforms. International students from Europe have been asked to come to this country, but, having left their countries, they are attending their lectures online.

I studied biomedical sciences for my first degree, and I think of all the biomedical scientists at the moment who are in their first year of university and probably struggling to attend lectures online. I think about how they get on without all the laboratory work that they have to do. They are simply not getting the education that they need for that course, and I expect that that is the case for many courses. That is all off the back of shoddy advice that called for face-to-face teaching to resume, despite everyone saying that it was a terrible idea. As a result, approximately 2,600 university students and staff have contracted the virus, and many more have had to self-isolate.

The decision to return to face-to-face teaching was dangerous, as has been said by the University and College Union and unions at Manchester, Leeds and elsewhere. They have explicitly stated that it has put staff and students in harm’s way. It is ridiculous to tell students to return to face-to-face teaching, only for them to get to university to find that they are sitting in front of their laptops in their halls of residence. After sending students back to live in communal halls, what happened next was inevitable: a spike in coronavirus cases in university cities. Once again, that was entirely avoidable if we had planned properly for the second wave. It is a scandal that students are literally being made to pay for this.

It is ludicrous to expect students to continue paying extortionate tuition fees when they are not receiving a full service. With any other service, if a customer was dissatisfied or something prevented them from receiving a service to the advertised standard, it would be reasonable for them to demand a refund, so why is it any different for students? We cannot treat university education as a commodity in one respect and not in others. It is either a market commodity, in which case a refund can be requested for a poor service, or it is not, in which case it should be free.

Charging individuals overall to pursue higher education is wrong at the most basic level, but to continue to charge them now is profoundly wrong. It is simply outrageous. The Government must ultimately consider cancelling tuition fees entirely, but in the meantime they should consider refunding the cost of tuition for the entire time that students’ university experience is impacted by the coronavirus pandemic.

--- Later in debate ---

[Michelle Donelan]

Yes, that is exactly what I said. The Department has allocated that money across educational settings and care leavers in higher education can access that. However, we have encouraged universities to prioritise digital poverty and accessibility. Accessibility is something that the OFS has been strong on, because everyone should have access to education of quality. The Secretary of State has also commissioned the chair of the OFS to conduct a review of digital learning and teaching, including digital poverty.

[Bell Ribeiro-Addy]

Is the Minister aware that, more generally, a number of schools did not receive the devices that were promised by the Government before the end of the summer, and that when many of them came back in September they were sent emails saying that the number of devices they had been promised for the children, on the basis of what is allowed for care leavers and so on, was reduced?

[Michelle Donelan]

You will correct me if I am wrong, Sir David, but I believe that question is slightly out of scope for a petition on higher education. In relation to higher education, my understanding is that the care leavers who have needed those devices have received them. If any hon. Member knows of cases to the contrary, I would be more than happy to pick that matter up.

I agree with many of the points that have been made about the crucial role that universities play in social mobility, including the point, made by the hon. Member for York Central (Rachael Maskell), about the economic recovery. Universities will be vital in that mission as we progress.

This has been an unprecedented year, so it is really important to recognise the tireless work of university lecturers, administrators and support staff over the past few months, and how students have adapted. However, I will make one message clear today: students have not been forgotten. I will continue to work across Government to ensure that universities uphold their obligations under consumer law. We must ensure that students and staff are safe and supported, and that students receive the high quality of education that they rightly expect.