Oral Answers to Questions
Rupa Huq Excerpts(7 years ago)
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Damian Green
My hon. Friend has made a number of important points, particularly about Manchester airport, which I know has been a significant driver of the excellent growth figures of the increasingly excellent economy of Manchester and the surrounding areas. Everything that he has said is true, and I think it is a tribute to the work that has been done on the northern powerhouse that we are now spreading that prosperity across the north of England.
Dr Rupa Huq (Ealing Central and Acton) (Lab)
Q9. The First Secretary said the other day that we needed a national debate on tuition fees, and admitted that student debt was “a huge issue”. Given that the Prime Minister is touting for ideas, may I recommend page 43 of our manifesto, and ask the Government to adopt Labour’s pledge to abolish tuition fees—[Interruption.]
Mr Speaker
Order. I do not remember the contents of page 43, so I would quite like to hear this.
Damian Green
People often stand at this Dispatch Box and say, “I am pleased that the hon. Lady raised that question.” I am genuinely pleased that the hon. Lady raised that question, because it allows me to draw attention to the very slight problem with her argument, which is that her own party’s Education spokesman has admitted that the tuition fees policy has a £100 billion—[Interruption.] The hon. Member for Ashton-under-Lyne (Angela Rayner) has admitted that there is a £100 billion black hole in Labour’s student fees policy. That is nearly as much money as we spend on the NHS in a year, and it is equivalent to two years’ worth of disability benefits.
The Labour party was particularly incredible on this issue at the general election, and I am astonished that Labour Members now want to bring it up at Prime Minister’s Question Time. I remind them that misleading students and young people is a very dangerous thing to do. If they do not believe me, they can ask the Liberal Democrats.
Foreign Aid Expenditure
Rupa Huq Excerpts(8 years, 1 month ago)
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Steve Double
I understand the hon. Lady’s point, but my point is that it cannot be a simple either/or. We need to fulfil our responsibility in the world and address some of the challenges facing it; that is in our national interests. If we do not, those issues will come closer to us. It is still the right thing to do, although I understand the concerns of her constituents and, indeed, many of mine.
Although I had visited Kenya a number of times before in my previous charity work, my most recent visit was a chance to see Kenya with a different focus. I spent three jam-packed days in the country, meeting members of the Kenyan Government, UK representatives, campaigners and charity workers. On one occasion, I visited an extremely rural area, where the impact of climate change is felt most acutely, and met a local farming community. Rainfall is now much less frequent but heavier, which creates significant challenges of soil erosion and flash flooding. I visited a farm where a partnership of the UK and Kenyan local government has helped to fund the construction of water-capture pits for the farmer. When it rains, the pits enable him to store water, which can last for several months during a drought. This means that farmers can expand their farms and provide employment for more local people—so simple, yet so effective.
Having met these people and heard their stories, which begin with anguish but have a positive and hopeful outcome, I understand much more clearly why this spending is so necessary. My trip made it very clear that climate change, as well as every other single issue facing those who receive aid, is being felt in the poorer countries of the world, where people are less resilient and less able to adapt.
Dr Rupa Huq (Ealing Central and Acton) (Lab)
The hon. Gentleman makes a very powerful point about the environment and natural disasters. Does he agree that in a country such as Bangladesh, which has been ravaged by floods year after year, a strong reason for keeping the 0.7% commitment is that it has particularly helped women? He has given many reasons, but he has not mentioned women yet. Women have been lifted out of poverty. That has been particularly apparent in Bangladesh, where Muhammad Yunus has helped to provide microfinance for women’s start-up businesses.
Steve Double
Just to be equal, I have not mentioned men either, but I totally agree with the hon. Lady’s point. I shall press on and finish my contribution, rather than taking any more interventions.
The next reason why overseas aid spending is so important is to protect our national interests. Whatever we may feel about the moral responsibility we have to other countries, it is in our own interest to continue this spending. One of the biggest ongoing challenges facing the world is the migration crisis. People are fleeing not only war and conflict, but poverty. If people find, as a result of our changing climate, that life is not sustainable, especially in rural areas that are totally dependent on farming, the likelihood of them migrating to western Europe will only increase, putting more and more pressure on our country. Granting aid that can help communities to adapt and enable people to live sustainable lives in rural areas is not just the right thing to do, but the sensible thing to do.
The choice is simple: we tackle the issues at their roots or we wait for them to arrive on our doorstep. As a result of global communications, people in poorer nations are far more aware than ever of the huge gaps between the quality of life in different countries. Young people growing up in places such as Africa are bombarded with visions of the affluence of life in the west. On a global scale, there are very few poor people in the UK. I strongly believe that those of us who have had the luck to be born British have already won life’s lottery. Nearly half the world’s population—2.8 billion people—survive on less than $2 a day.
The generosity of the British people never ceases to amaze me. Reacting to major incidents around the world, we step up and help those who have fallen to get back on their feet, instead of just peering down on them from our platform of relative comfort and safety. A phenomenal £372 million was raised by the UK public in response to the 2004 Indian ocean tsunami, and £107 million was raised in response to the earthquake in Haiti in 2010. Our foreign aid spending is no different. It follows the same principle of us, as human beings, wanting to help others; it just comes in the form of Government budget. The Government are committed to ensuring greater transparency and even better value for money.
I hope that I have made my point clearly. I believe it is both the right and the practical thing for the UK to maintain its commitment to international aid. Although I acknowledge the right of those who have signed the petition to do so, and I understand the strong feelings that many people hold on this issue, I respectfully disagree with them. The UK has a proud history of playing a leading part on the global stage in assisting countries that are desperately in need. That is something we should continue to do. It is part of what makes us who we are; it is part of the values of our country; it is part of what makes Britain great.
Oral Answers to Questions
Rupa Huq Excerpts(8 years, 2 months ago)
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Justine Greening
Yes, I do. We have supported 11 million children into school over the last five years and distributed 47 million bed nets, which has seen malaria deaths fall by two thirds over the last 15 years. We are helping 60 million people to get access to better water and sanitation. VSO, of course, is delivering a fantastic project for the International Citizen Service, too.
Dr Rupa Huq (Ealing Central and Acton) (Lab)
T3. People are fleeing war zones in developing countries across the globe. Will the Government now heed Lord Dubs and Sir Erich Reich, two prominent Kindertransport children, and think again about providing sanctuary for unaccompanied child refugees from Syria?
Justine Greening
The hon. Lady will be aware of all the work that DFID has done in Syria and in the region, and it has been particularly focused on supporting children affected by that crisis. We should be proud of the fact that no member state has done more financially to support refugees arriving in Europe. As she will be aware, we are looking at how to continue to work harder on ensuring that we support children who are in Europe and unaccompanied.
Violence against Women and Girls (Sustainable Development Goals)
Rupa Huq Excerpts(8 years, 2 months ago)
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Mark Durkan
I thank the hon. Lady for that point. So much work has been done under the sustainable development goals. We have a target that gives examples, and we now have awareness of other things that might well have been included as examples, such as breast ironing. Her point proves that the sustainable development goals should not be seen as frozen in cold print on the page. They are meant to be an ongoing, changing, ever-improving and ever-strengthening commitment on all our parts. Remember, they are universal goals. That is one reason why we need to demarcate the sustainable development goals from the millennium development goals in terms of their universality. We want to see the infrastructure of commitment, investment and intervention underpinning the sustainable development goals.
The Minister will face many questions and hear many suggestions in this debate on assurances that he can give on behalf of the Department for International Development and the Government more widely. He is responding on behalf of DFID, but the universal goals are not just about what happens in other countries. We should be supporting and helping to foster those goals, but the goals also involve commitments and standards in our countries and jurisdictions. That is not just the responsibility of Ministers and all of us who serve in this House, but people at other levels, including devolved levels.
Dr Rupa Huq (Ealing Central and Acton) (Lab)
I completely agree with the hon. Gentleman’s point that this is not just a DFID issue. These things happen in this country every day. The pressure group End Violence Against Women has pointed out that 146,000 domestic violence incidents were recorded in London in 2015. There were 5,500 rapes, 300 cases of forced marriage and honour-based violence and thousands of prostitution cases. Specialist support services for all those things are being cut. Does the hon. Gentleman agree that we need to be looking at the issue at home, too?
Mark Durkan
Absolutely. The issues do not just happen elsewhere; they happen here, and we need to fully understand that. We also need to understand the range of interventions and support required not only to raise awareness and improve behavioural standards and expectations, but to respond better to violence against women and girls where it happens. We need to ensure that women and girls feel more empowered, more enabled, much better supported and truly vindicated and justified when they come forward to report and to tell. We have to give them that comfort and confidence.
There are huge issues that we need to address, and that is why the universality of the goals can be so important. It allows Governments and Parliaments in the developed world to make it clear to our colleagues in the developing world that this is not just about us saying that they have to catch up with us; we, too, are on a page of learning and a journey of understanding in our awareness of the issues. In that context, I acknowledge the range of briefings we have received from many different charities, non-governmental organisations and campaign groups.
I am sure many Members will have questions for the Minister, but we have to ask questions as parliamentarians about how we do our bit to ensure meaningful coherence around the range of sustainable development goals and their interpretation and application. We also need to ensure better adherence in their implementation and realisation. We therfore have to ask not only how Government will provide joined-up management and oversight of the issues, but how we as a Parliament can get better at providing joined-up scrutiny of and support for such initiatives and investments.
It will not be enough for us just to say, “The International Development Committee will be able to oversee all these things, and we are leaving domestic and sexual violence at home to the Home Affairs Committee and the Justice Committee.” We need to think about something more bespoke and dedicated. We need to recognise that though some of the goals and targets will be amenable to particular scrutiny and oversight by respective Select Committees, others will fall in the shadows between Select Committees and perhaps need a more dedicated audit mechanism to pick them up.
David T. C. Davies
I absolutely agree with my hon. Friend. I shall mess up my speech a bit now by saying something I was going to say at the end. One of the more respected organisations in the Muslim community in the UK is the Muslim Council of Britain, yet looking at some of the organisations affiliated to it gives rise to a lot of concerns. For example, one affiliated group is the Blackburn Muslim Association—another organisation that is in receipt of public funds. My hon. Friend mentioned women in the workplace; the Blackburn Muslim Association says:
“It is not permissible for a woman to travel a distance exceeding 48 miles without a Husband or a Mahram (those men who can never marry the woman)”—
in other words, a close male relative. It goes on to quote from chapter 74 of the Book of Hajj, and then ends by saying—this is all in English, by the way—that
“it will not be permissible for a woman to travel individually or with a group of women except with a Mahram or her husband, and this ruling applies to any form of travel including the journey for Hajj”.
This is an organisation that is publicly funded and affiliated to allegedly one of the most moderate Muslim groups in Britain saying that a woman should not be able to travel more than 48 miles because, presumably, that is how far a woman would have been able to travel in three days in 7th-century Saudi Arabia. How on earth will we be able to integrate women in the workplace and encourage equality when there are publicly funded organisations putting out such nonsense?
Dr Huq
I completely accept the hon. Gentleman’s point. All of us elected officials in this Chamber must be wary of community leaders who command airspace and the ear of officialdom and purport to speak—I say this as, I think, the only elected Muslim woman in the room—for the faith of Islam, which is a worldwide religion. We should not give these people who speak in the name of an entire world faith the credence that they have.
David T. C. Davies
The hon. Lady is absolutely right. Muslim women in London recently pointed out to me that whenever we see these organisations, we always seem to be talking to the men. We are not doing nearly enough to talk to Muslim women. Presumably, there are Muslim women’s organisations, but why are they not at the forefront, and why are women not at the forefront of these other organisations? The hon. Lady is absolutely correct that we need to address that.
Very quickly—I cannot see how long I have been speaking on this clock—[Hon. Members: “Four and a half minutes.”] In that case, very, very quickly, I am extremely concerned about sharia courts, which are spreading across the UK, because sharia law in some ways advocates violence against women and allows beating. I do not suggest that that is going on in the sharia courts that we have at the moment, but unless the people running them are willing to reject that notion absolutely, I have grave concerns about allowing sharia courts to make any judgments in the UK. I am particularly concerned to learn that one High Court judge sits on those courts.
I am also concerned about the rise of the wearing of the veil and the fact that it is going on in schools. I think the veil is a symbol of violence against women. It sends out a message to women that they are property and should not be looked at, and it gives men an excuse. It almost sends out a message that a man has a right to sexually attack an uncovered woman. I know that that happens on only a minority of occasions, although there was a dreadful instance of it in Cologne. The message has to go out to all men in all communities that they have absolutely no right to attack women under any circumstances whatever. The veil gets in the way of that.
There is much more that I could say. I thank the hon. Member for Foyle again. If we cannot get things right in our own country—
Marriage Registration Certificates
Rupa Huq Excerpts(8 years, 7 months ago)
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Mrs Spelman
I quite understand the hon. Lady’s point, but as she will see in the course of my speech, there is an opportunity to step forward, right into the 21st century, in the way that we register marriages, which will secure the mother’s name on the register. If she will bear with me, I think she will see that some other benefits could flow from a practically different way of registering marriages.
If we ended up having to replace the books, few would disagree that it would not be a good use of that sum of money. There is another, more efficient way that marriages could be registered, which is to adopt a system very similar to that which already exists in England and Wales for the registration of civil partnerships and which is already in use for the registration of marriages and civil partnerships in Scotland and Northern Ireland.
Under the alternative system, known as the schedule system, marriages are registered in a single electronic register instead of in marriage register books. Changes to the form of the register entry can be made easily without the need to replace all the register books. Instead of signing a register book at the ceremony, the newlyweds sign a document that is then returned to the register office to be entered in the existing electronic register so that a marriage certificate can be issued.
Having all marriages registered online would create a central database without the need for any further administrative processes, but changing the way we register marriages requires a change to primary legislation. Depending how this debate goes, it is my intention to introduce a marriage registration Bill, which may look remarkably like the one that the hon. Member for Neath proposes to introduce. I would be very happy to make copies of that as soon as possible. There is a great desire across the House to find the best possible vehicle to make the change.
Dr Rupa Huq (Ealing Central and Acton) (Lab)
I congratulate the right hon. Lady on bringing the important subject to the House. On Friday, we debated the Riot (Damages) Act 1886, and some Members here were present. That Act has not been changed since 1886, which is quite recent compared with the legislation that the right hon. Lady mentioned. I understand that the Home Office Minister, James Brokenshire, said in October that there would be a timetable in due course. Does the right hon. Lady have any insider information as to whether there has been any progress on that?
Mr Graham Brady (in the Chair)
Just before the right hon. Lady continues, may I remind Members not to use the names of other Members of the House?
Mrs Spelman
Nor can I, off the top of my head. The hon. Member for Ealing Central and Acton (Dr Huq) might have been present at Prime Minister’s questions—I think it was the week before last—when her hon. Friend the Member for Hampstead and Kilburn (Tulip Siddiq), who is here today, secured a promise from the Prime Minister that if we cannot succeed in getting marriage registration certificates changed through private Members’ legislation, the Government will do so through Government legislation. Maybe like the Riot (Damages) Act, which the hon. Member for Ealing Central and Acton described—clearly I missed the action on Friday—this subject is an example of something that is really good to come from the Floor of the House of Commons. It is something that we feel strongly about and it is an example of a good opportunity for private Members’ legislation.
My draft Bill would contain powers to amend the Marriage Act 1949 by regulation, subject to the affirmative resolution procedure, to make provision concerning the registration of marriages in England and Wales. The Bill would not make mention of marriage certificates or the inclusion of mothers’ names for an important reason: the Bill would be an enabling measure. If enacted, the actual content of the marriage register, and therefore marriage certificates, which are a copy of the entry, would need to be prescribed in regulations made by the Registrar General with the approval of the Secretary of State.
Simply updating the marriage entry to include the mother’s name in addition to the father’s would not go far enough in today’s fast-changing society. Already, some families do not have a legally recognised mother and father, but instead have a mother and a second female parent, or, as in surrogacy cases, two legally recognised parents. In fact, there have always been cases that the current form of the register failed to accommodate properly, including where a child had been brought up by a guardian and might not know his or her father. As family composition continues to change, the marriage register must be capable of adapting.
Christina Rees
He said that he would ask the Home Office how it could be addressed.
Dr Huq
I apologise for my keenness to intervene. My hon. Friend mentioned the Prime Minister. I think that he said at the time that marriage certificates do not reflect modern Britain. Given that he declared recently at Prime Minister’s questions that he is now a feminist, is that not an example of how he seems to say one thing and do another? There has been zero progress on this important subject since August 2014.
Victoria Prentis (Banbury) (Con)
It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mr Brady, and to speak in this debate, which we are all grateful to the Second Church Estates Commissioner, my right hon. Friend the Member for Meriden (Mrs Spelman), for securing. I should probably declare an interest, given that two members of my staff intend to get married—not to each other—in the next year, so I was under a certain amount of pressure to attend this debate. We talk of nothing but wedding dresses in the office.
It is almost 19 years since I married my husband on a cold and frosty December day. Since then, the idea of marriage has evolved considerably, but it remains important to many of us. It is noticeable that the mothers in this debate—I hesitate to call it “the audience”—go particularly shiny-eyed when we talk about our daughters getting married. As the mother of a 14-year-old and a 12-year-old, I am already thinking of those happy days that I hope will happen one day—but not too soon.
We should recognise that families today look very different to how they looked even 20 years ago, when I thought about getting married, and extremely different to how they looked two centuries ago, so I will focus on how we adapt to that change.
Dr Huq
I did not declare my interest as a mother before; I do so now.
The hon. Lady makes an excellent point that the constitution of families has changed dramatically. Is she aware that, according to Gingerbread, there are now 2 million single parent households, which is 25% of all families with children, and 90% of those single parents are women? Given those figures, this erasing of women from history, as my hon. Friend the Member for Hampstead and Kilburn (Tulip Siddiq) has called it, seems even more anomalous.
Victoria Prentis
The hon. Lady makes a point that I will come on to shortly.
First, however, I will again quote the Prime Minister, from his speech to the Relationships Alliance summit, which I referred to earlier. He said:
“We all know that a strong family begins with a strong relationship between two loving people who make a deep and lasting commitment to each other…in Britain we recognise and value the commitment that people make to each other. And that’s just as vital whether the commitment is between a man and a woman, a man and a man or a woman and another woman.”
As we have heard from other Members this afternoon, it was in that same speech that the Prime Minister announced plans to address the “inequality in marriage”, to enable mothers’ names to be included on marriage certificates as well as fathers’ names.
I have discussed this issue at length with one of my constituents, who has been in a relationship for a considerable time; in fact, we are all eagerly awaiting her engagement as well. She pointed out that she is estranged from her father, who subjected her and her siblings to sexual abuse over a number of years, and has not seen him since she was 10. As a result, she would not want his name to be included on her own marriage certificate.
I looked into this matter and I understand from guidance from the General Register Office and from my own diocese in Oxford that
“If either party does not wish to put their father’s details in the Register or they do not know who their father is, you should not put ‘unknown’ or leave the column blank. You should put a horizontal line through both columns to show that no information was given.”
Although that would reflect in some ways my constituent’s wishes, it would also mean that there would be no mention of her mother, who understandably had to act as both mother and father to her during the very difficult circumstances of her upbringing. I feel strongly that a marriage certificate should recognise such a scenario.
Tulip Siddiq
I absolutely agree.
I have also found that men and women who are interested in family history often find it very difficult to trace it through a family line and official documentation. It is about time that situation changed.
However, my main reason for raising this issue in Prime Minister’s questions is the sheer number of my constituents from Hampstead and Kilburn who have written to me about it. In particular, I will highlight the case of a single mother who wrote to me recently. She was brought up by her mother and has had no contact whatever with her father. She told me that she was devastated to learn that the outdated practice that we are discussing is still a requirement of marriage. She said:
“When I get married, I will be expected to put my absent father’s name and profession on my marriage certificate whilst my mother who brought me up will not be included.”
It puts a dampener on this important day in someone’s life—when they are getting married—if they cannot acknowledge the person who raised them.
We must remember that our discussions today reflect the deeply held anxieties of the people we represent in our various constituencies.
Dr Huq
I want to draw my hon. Friend’s attention to The Daily Telegraph, which is not normally sympathetic to the Opposition—it has been known as the “Torygraph”. Its Wonder Women section backs a campaign on this issue, and a report in the paper in October included a quote that sounds very similar to the one my hon. Friend read out. Someone who is interviewed in the report says:
“I cannot believe it that in a developed country such a primitive reality would stare me in my face in the UK. I am deeply distressed”.
Tulip Siddiq
Well, if the Torygraph says it, we must agree with it. I agree with my hon. Friend, who puts a lot of hours into managing her life and her son—he is 11 years old and a delight.
I should point out that my constituent’s case is not a stand-out case. As my hon. Friend pointed out earlier, there are now 3 million lone-parent families in the UK—an increase of 500,000 over the past decade. According to the Office for National Statistics, there are now 2.5 million lone-mother families, compared with 437,000 lone-father families. The number of families with single mothers is therefore significantly higher than the number of families with single fathers. Although circumstances will differ from family to family, we need to bear those figures in mind while we fight to rectify the injustice we are talking about.
When I spoke to colleagues about marriage certificates and other issues, several of them—particularly one from London—talked about the large amount of correspondence they receive about certificates in general. Although the issue I want to raise is slightly different from the subject of the debate, I want the Minister to be aware of it.
It is virtually impossible to put fathers on birth certificates if they die before the birth of their child. Such cases are for another day, but I would like the issue to be reviewed. In one case, a father died a month before his child was born, and the mother is having to go to court to put his name on the certificate. She is having to deal not only with her grief following her bereavement, but with the fact that her child’s birth certificate will not mention her partner’s name. Will the Minister meet me and my London colleague to discuss the issue and see whether the Government will launch a comprehensive review into the various injustices that seem to occur with official documentation as a whole?
We operate in a political culture where policies do see U-turns. Earlier today, I was pleased that our Justice Secretary said that the criminal courts charges will be reversed. We also have the example of tax credits. If those polices can go through U-turns, almost on a whim, is it not possible to implement a policy that has been talked about endlessly? Early-day motions have been tabled, and questions have been asked at Prime Minister’s questions and at other times on the Floor of the House. We do not want the public to think that gender equality is not among our top issues. We must make sure that this change in policy gets through.
This is not the first injustice the Government have been slow to correct. However, there is something rather surreal about the Prime Minister demanding a change, and that change still not happening.
Oral Answers to Questions
Rupa Huq Excerpts(8 years, 8 months ago)
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The Prime Minister
I can certainly confirm to my hon. Friend that no options are off the table. As I have made clear, if we do not get what we need in our renegotiation I rule absolutely nothing out. I think that it is important that as we have this debate as a nation we are very clear about the facts and figures and about the alternatives. Some people arguing for Britain to leave the European Union, although not all of them, have pointed out a position like that of Norway as a good outcome. I would guard strongly against that. Norway pays as much per head to the EU as we do and takes twice as many migrants per head as we do in this country, but has no seat at the table and no ability to negotiate. I am not arguing that all those who want to leave the EU say that they want to follow the Norwegian path, but some do and it is very important that we are clear in this debate about the consequences of these different actions.
Dr Rupa Huq (Ealing Central and Acton) (Lab)
Will the Prime Minister join me in congratulating my 17-year-old constituent, Jessy McCabe, on her 3,800 name e-petition, which has managed to get the exam board Edexcel to accept women composers on the syllabus for the first time ever? While he is at it, will he tell us whether he is a feminist?
The Prime Minister
If feminism means that we should treat people equally, yes, absolutely. I am proud that women make up a third of the people I have sitting around the Cabinet table, which we promised and we delivered. I congratulate the hon. Lady on this e-petition, which sounds thoroughly worthwhile. Her constituent and her have done a good job.