Implementation of the 1995 and 2011 Pension Acts
Debate between Caroline Ansell and John Bercow(7 years, 10 months ago)
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Caroline Ansell (Eastbourne) (Con)
I rise to present this petition on behalf of more than 700 residents in Eastbourne and Willingdon in the same terms as the hon. Member for Worsley and Eccles South.
The Petition of residents of Eastbourne and Willingdon.
[P001760]
Oral Answers to Questions
Debate between Caroline Ansell and John Bercow(7 years, 10 months ago)
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Caroline Ansell (Eastbourne) (Con)
On mandarin, I know my hon. Friend will be impressed of the work of St Catherine’s College’s Confucius school and the Eastbourne District Chinese Association. It is clearly important to promote language learning at home. I am pleased to note the uptake in Mandarin, even though I am a French teacher by profession. Can my hon. Friend assure me that we will continue to value opportunities for British students to study abroad?
Oral Answers to Questions
Debate between Caroline Ansell and John Bercow(8 years, 4 months ago)
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Mr Speaker
Order. There is a lot of noise in the Chamber. The Minister must be very disappointed to have such an inattentive audience. Let us hear the words.
Caroline Ansell (Eastbourne) (Con)
T6. To return to individual electoral registration and the question from the hon. Member for West Dunbartonshire (Martin Docherty-Hughes), will the Minister give further assurances that all steps are being taken to reach harder-to-reach groups, such as private renters, of which there are very many in my constituency of Eastbourne?
Immigration Bill
Debate between Caroline Ansell and John Bercow(8 years, 4 months ago)
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Caroline Ansell (Eastbourne) (Con)
We are approaching the last moments of the debate, so I will confine my remarks to one amendment and to one argument within it—the pull factor some have expressed concerned about.
Let me share just something of my experience when I went to Lesbos with Save the Children. I was struck by many things, but one was the extraordinary contrast between the almost biblical scene of men, women and children travelling on foot and in numbers across the country, and the fact that they were carrying mobile phones. All over the camps, people were huddled not around fires, but around charging stations, desperate to keep connected. One worker described to me how any change in border access or the availability of places in the camps would be communicated by mobile to friends and families following on, and shared over and over, inspiring immediate and dramatic change on the ground.
This 21st century migration through Europe is like nothing that has come before. In the light of that, how can we say with confidence that announcing 3,000 open places for minors in the UK would not affect the decisions desperate people would make and would not create risk? I share the hopes and the fears for the vulnerable children who have been mentioned in this debate, but we must look to the long term. It has previously been said that this will not solve the problem, so we must be very clear that we are not exacerbating the situation. There is a body of anecdotal evidence that families separate when they can find only enough money to pay traffickers for one place in a boat. Knowing, as we do, that children’s best chances for the long term are with their parents, every effort must be made to keep families together, and where they have been separated, to reunite them.
To finish, it was said during my time in Lesbos that the time it took to work with lone young people to establish their identity and ask all the right questions when they presented at the camps was one of the main reasons that many left to risk the perilous journey that so many Members have described this evening. We must therefore build the infrastructure, the systems and the confidence of young people that reception centres across the continent, not the open road, are their best route. This is vital work and it will, in the coming weeks and months, see increasing numbers of the children and young people already in Europe resettled with us in the UK.