Covid-19: BAME Communities

Felicity Buchan Excerpts

Thursday 18th June 2020 Commons Chamber

[Felicity Buchan (Kensington) (Con)]

This debate is very important to me and to my constituency of Kensington. As hon. Members may be aware, Kensington has some of the most extreme health inequalities in the country. The difference in average male life expectancy between my richest ward and my poorest ward is a massive 16 years. Clearly, we need to work on levelling up.

I have a very significant BAME community, and I want to start by paying tribute to my BAME community. Many of them are frontline workers—in the health service, in the police, in education—and many are at the forefront of their communities in providing charity and aid.

I welcome the report from Public Health England and the fact that the Equalities Minister will bring this forward, but I cannot stress enough that this cannot be some academic exercise. There need to be practical plans, and they need to be implemented with a sense of urgency.

One of the key tenets of my general election campaign was equality of opportunity throughout the constituency in health, in education and in housing. I want to stress that this is in all our interests. It is in all our interests that we harness the maximum talent of all our citizens. I am proud to be part of a party that values diversity, and which has a BAME Chancellor of the Exchequer, a BAME Home Secretary and a BAME Attorney General.

[Meg Hillier]

I take the hon. Lady’s comments in good part, and she is right to highlight the rise of people of all backgrounds in government. However, it still disturbs me and many—most—of my constituents that the Prime Minister under whom she serves has described people as “piccaninnies” with “watermelon smiles”. That is completely against the tone of this debate so far. Does she agree with the Prime Minister, or does she call him out, as we do?

[Felicity Buchan]

I would agree with the hon. Lady that language is incredibly important in these sensitive times, and it is not language I personally would have used.

I want to talk about levelling up. We talk a lot about levelling up, and normally it is exclusively in the context of the north versus the south, but clearly there are huge disparities in our inner cities. We have already heard that our cities have been worse affected by covid, often due to overcrowding and deprivation. I therefore urge my hon. Friend the Minister to ensure that, when we focus on levelling up, we focus on our cities just as much as our regions. I also want to talk about prevention and screening, which are critical, not necessarily in the context of coronavirus but in the context of mitigating health inequalities. Only if we have proper prevention and screening can we extend people’s lives. I am glad that the NHS has a diabetes prevention programme, for instance; clearly, that has a comorbidity with coronavirus.

In summary, I thank the hon. Member for Brent Central (Dawn Butler) for securing the debate, and I urge the Minister, on behalf of my constituents, to proceed with pace with this review and to ensure that its recommendations are implemented with a sense of urgency.