Commonwealth Personnel in the Armed Forces

Debate between Carol Monaghan and Richard Graham

Wednesday 8th May 2019 Westminster Hall

[Carol Monaghan (Glasgow North West) (SNP)]

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mr Sharma. I congratulate the hon. Member for Glasgow North East (Mr Sweeney) on securing this extremely important debate. I also congratulate the hon. Member for Gloucester (Richard Graham) on his campaign and on raising the issue with many of us in this place. It is an extremely important campaign, which we support.

Commonwealth citizens who risk their lives in our service are valued members of our society. The Army Families Federation observes:

“Commonwealth members of our Armed Forces make up a significant and vital part of the UK’s Defence capability and, as a nation, we ask them to make significant sacrifices to do so.”

Their families pay a high price, too, and many find themselves living across the world from their partner or loved one. Those of us who have experience of military life know that the family is a support for serving members of the armed forces. It is a no-brainer that we should do everything in our power to ensure that the families are able to be there as the support that serving personnel need. We should be celebrating the contribution of our Commonwealth service personnel who have come to this country to serve in our armed forces. Instead, we find the Government separating members of our armed forces from their families and, on top of that, hitting them with exorbitant visa fees.

We know there are serious issues in recruitment, as has been mentioned by the hon. Member for Glasgow North East. The Defence Committee noted that the Government’s 10-year partnership with Capita

“has been abysmal since it started”

and that Capita has

“failed to meet the Army's recruitment targets every single year of the contract”.

The Army has embarked on further recruitment campaigns across the Commonwealth to meet the minimum troop numbers required to defend our nations. Commonwealth citizens who have stepped forward to fill the gaps and to serve in the country’s armed forces deserve to be rewarded, but it seems as though we punish them instead.

The Government must reconsider the income requirements for Commonwealth serving personnel. The minimum income requirement has been mentioned by the hon. Member for Strangford (Jim Shannon), who talked about the requirement for an income of £18,600 for a spouse and the additional costs of £3,800 for the first child and £2,400 for additional children. If we look at the military pay scales and assume that Commonwealth members enter at the lowest rate, it could take up to six years before they earn the £24,800 required for a typical family to join them. The Government’s current advice to Commonwealth personnel earning below the thresholds is simply: “If you cannot meet the requirement, you are advised not to bring your family over.” We can surely do better than that.

The application fee for veterans to settle with their families has more than doubled in the past four years to £2,389 per person, so we are talking about nearly £10,000 for a typical family of four. Those figures are simply not attainable for people earning £24,800 per annum.

In addition to the Commonwealth personnel here, the families living in the Commonwealth are greatly affected. My hon. Friend the Member for Inverness, Nairn, Badenoch and Strathspey (Drew Hendry) recently campaigned for his constituent, Denis Omondi, a British citizen and a serving solider in the British Army, who was denied a visa for his daughter in Kenya, for whom he had uncontested custody, to come and live with him. Thankfully, after my hon. Friend’s campaign, the Home Office made a U-turn on its decision to keep them apart, but such cases are not unique. We need to deal with such issues and look at them in a more serious manner.

[Richard Graham]

One of the things that has surprised me most about the letter campaign—the hon. Lady kindly signed the letter—is the number of Fijian servicemen who have logged on to my Facebook page and expressed strong support for the campaign. Pockets of servicemen and women from different countries are much more focused on this issue than many of us in the House realise, so I support what she says.

[Carol Monaghan]

I thank the hon. Gentleman for his intervention. We could also mention the Hong Kong service personnel caught up in this. They are not able to apply even for British citizenship, despite the service they have given to our nations’ armed forces. There are many examples.

The hon. Member for Caithness, Sutherland and Easter Ross (Jamie Stone) talked about his personal experience of Commonwealth personnel. I want to add to his story and say that the person who taught me to cook curry properly was a Commonwealth submariner from India, who spent an afternoon showing me how to mix and crush and all sorts. Unfortunately, I do not have much time these days to make a proper curry, but I remember it well.

The Minister for Immigration said last month:

“it would be unfair if certain applicants or routes benefited from free applications or reduced fees”

at the expense of others. Such inflexibility does not reflect well on the Government. Veterans from the Commonwealth should not be prevented from settling in the UK, or forced into debt by ridiculous fees, which the Government should commit to abolishing. It is not up to them to get veterans into debt and not up to veterans’ charities to help veterans pay the fees, which simply should not exist.

We know that the Home Office is in need of drastic reform. The Minister has mentioned that he does not like talk of the hostile environment, so I will not refer to it directly, but I will say that we have had immigration scandals that have highlighted the deficiencies in our system. Scrapping the income requirements for Commonwealth armed forces personnel is an essential place to start. As I said at the start, it is a no-brainer.

We have a debt of gratitude to the people who have chosen to serve. That, coupled with the positive contribution that Commonwealth veterans will make in our society, means we should ensure that indefinite leave to remain is granted without charge, for both personnel and their families. All of us here this afternoon are keen to hear how the Minister is collaborating with the Home Office to ensure that that takes place. I look forward to hearing his contribution and what positive steps are being taken to sort out this—I will not call it an injustice—serious issue for our Commonwealth personnel.

University Tuition Fees

Debate between Carol Monaghan and Richard Graham

Monday 27th November 2017 Westminster Hall

[Carol Monaghan]

I am happy to talk about PISA and Scottish education. It is amazing that throughout the world Scottish education is lauded as a shining example; it is only here that it is not. We come here and we hear about how awful Scottish education is, but Scottish education is ranked extremely highly.

As for the PISA tests, they look at pure knowledge—rote learning. They ask pupils to recall facts. That is not what the Scottish education system is about. There is an element of that, but it is also about problem-solving, employability, communication skills—in fact, it is about everything that employers are looking for that are not captured in any PISA tick-box tests.

[Richard Graham (Gloucester) (Con)]

I am interested in the arguments that the hon. Lady would use when meeting her constituents or others in Scotland about why those in vocational education should subsidise the children of their neighbours who are in higher education. One of the issues for many of us in England is that the huge rise in apprenticeships, whereby people are earning while they are learning and becoming self-sufficient, does not begin to justify those people subsidising their neighbours’ children. What does she say to that?

[Carol Monaghan]

I thank the hon. Gentleman for that intervention. We place a huge value on vocational training as well and I invite him to join me at City of Glasgow College, where people are looking not only at degree-level courses but at vocational courses. Nobody there considers those students taking vocational courses to be subsidising anyone else. City of Glasgow College is a fabulous new facility right in the heart of the university sector in Glasgow; we have Glasgow Caledonian University on one side of it, with Strathclyde University on the other side, and Glasgow University just a mile and a half away. City of Glasgow College is now the shining example to all of those universities, and many young people at the college are the envy of those in the higher education institutions.

[Richard Graham]

I am very grateful to the hon. Lady for giving way again. I have been to Glasgow, although not for a few years, and I would be interested to see how the City of Glasgow College is doing things. However, at the end of the day, if we are going to reduce university fees in the way that she suggests, someone will have to pay for that. The truth about our system at the moment is that we have 20 of the best 100 universities in the world, not least because of the investment that has gone into them. We have overseas students who are effectively subsidising our students and if we lower the fees, someone will have to mind the gap that will be created. Who will that be?

[Carol Monaghan]

It is quite simple; once again, look north. One of my party’s fundamental principles is that education is about the ability to learn and not about the ability to pay, as I have already said. Paying for education is a duty of Government, of business and of society, which includes the taxpayer, to ensure that we have a well-educated population that can provide economic growth in different businesses and different sectors. Post-Brexit there will be a struggle to create economic growth. It is a duty of us all to pay our taxes so that those taxes can fund the higher education of our young people.