Oral Answers to Questions
Bobby Dean Excerpts(1 week, 6 days ago)
Commons ChamberRead Full debate Read Hansard Text Watch Debate Read Debate Ministerial Extracts
Janet Daby
We respect all our young people who are in the cadets or any other armed forces areas. The hon. Gentleman raises this point, but after 14 years of the previous Government’s failure and the £22 billion black hole, there are difficult choices to be made. We are absolutely committed to children and young people and to doing the best we can do by them.
Bobby Dean (Carshalton and Wallington) (LD)
The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Education (Janet Daby)
The Government are committed to breaking down barriers to opportunities for all young people, including young carers who provide a critical role in caring for their loved ones. We now collect specific absence data for young carers through the school census, and our statutory attendance guidance seeks to ensure that they receive holistic support to overcome barriers to attendance.
Bobby Dean
One thing that might be driving absences from schools for young carers is long-term mental health conditions. The Royal College of Paediatrics and Child Health says that as many as one in five young carers could be suffering from long-term mental health conditions. Can the Minister explain what measures the Department is taking to ensure that sufficient help is in place for people suffering from those conditions?
Janet Daby
We want to ensure that we support young carers in school, as well as other children who may be suffering from mental health conditions. This Government are entirely committed to supporting young people with mental health conditions, and we are making sure that there will be mental health support in every school up and down the country. For young carers who may be experiencing increasing mental health conditions, we are expanding the attendance mentoring programme to ensure that around an extra 10,800 young carers are supported, especially in the area of mental health.
Hongkongers in the UK: Visas, Security and Services
Bobby Dean Excerpts(1 month ago)
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Bobby Dean (Carshalton and Wallington) (LD)
I congratulate the hon. Member for Altrincham and Sale West (Mr Rand) on securing this debate. I associate myself with his comments about how the previous Government should be congratulated on honouring the BNO scheme in the first place.
My borough of Sutton is home to more than 5,000 people on the BNO scheme. I represent the eastern half of the borough in Carshalton and Wallington, and my hon. Friend the Member for Sutton and Cheam (Luke Taylor) will talk about the west side in Sutton and Cheam later. We have had lots of constituents coming to us to share their concerns, some of which have been aired already. The one that came up most on the doorstep and in the events that I hosted was about access to jobs, and qualifications not being recognised. More specifically, in our area it was about social work. There seem to be quite a lot of Hongkonger social workers in my area. Their qualifications were not being recognised because they had not had the required conversion courses or because an unco-operative Hong Kong Government were holding back proof of their careers and qualifications.
I am also a local councillor and I was aware that Sutton council desperately needed social workers, so I reached out to my local council and asked whether there was anything we could do. I am pleased to say that next month we will be launching an innovative internship programme where we have linked up with a local university, Kingston University, which has been providing formal study for Hong Kong social workers that we have identified. They will also get the opportunity to get some in-the-field experience with social workers who are already employed by Sutton council. We hope that that will result in the necessary recognition of their qualifications by Social Work England.
I am sure that that problem is widespread across the UK and perhaps in other professions, too. I know that there are some debates about what constitutes formal study, but I would really like to work with the Minister to see whether we can find a way of scaling up this kind of initiative across the country so that we can get a lot more of these qualified Hongkongers recognised and into the work that they are skilled at.
I have a statistic that I want to share. Somebody told me that up to 98% of the Hongkongers that have arrived in recent years have a degree. They have the skills and we need those skills, so let us make sure that they can put them to good use. My next point around university admissions has already been raised a couple of times. It has been a frequent complaint that despite the fact that all the arrivals are extremely well qualified academically, as demonstrated by the figure that I just mentioned, they are worried about their children not being able to access the same level of education because of the scale of fees that international students face. They tell me that they have British national status, but that it does not feel that way when applying for university, so that is something we need to fix.
Finally, the point about security has been well made already. It is critical that Hongkongers feel safe in the United Kingdom. We all know why they fled, but they are still living in fear of surveillance and persecution here. I have mentioned the Hong Kong Government holding back qualifications so that Hongkongers cannot get the work that they need here, and there is evidence of other records that they need access to being destroyed. They have been holding on to criminal records for things that we should not recognise in this country, such as taking part in protests. Pension entitlements, which I think have already been mentioned, are also being held back.
Closer to home, for a long time there were widespread reports of some sort of secret Chinese police station operating out of Croydon, around the corner from me. I have to put it on record that the Met found no evidence out of that, but that demonstrates the fear among the Hong Kong community. We have also heard repeated concerns about Confucius institutes at universities, which have called for lecturers and others to be sacked and intimidated Hongkongers so that they feel they need to be silent.
The hon. Member for Bermondsey and Old Southwark (Neil Coyle) mentioned cyber-harassment. My borough council experienced that when an event we put on to welcome Hongkongers was subject to a series of threatening posts telling people that they should not attend and making up all sorts of reasons why it should not go ahead.
As a local MP, I will always stand up for my constituents’ rights. As a country, we have a duty to ensure that all our citizens feel this is a democratic, free country, full of opportunity for them. I hope we can deliver that for Hongkongers.