Leaving the EU: NHS

Debate between Sandy Martin and Andy Slaughter

Thursday 22nd March 2018 Westminster Hall

[Andy Slaughter (Hammersmith) (Lab)]

Thank you for calling me relatively early in the debate, Mr Stringer. I apologise to hon. Members, particularly those on the Front Bench, because I will not be here for the closing speeches, but I will of course read them assiduously. I and some other MPs have a meeting with Imperial Healthcare Trust that has taken a long time to arrange. Given the pressures and crisis of funding in many parts of the NHS, I think I need to be there. It is not entirely irrelevant to the subject of the debate. I will, for the reasons I have given, try to be brief and confine my comments to the issues that affect my constituents.

I am extraordinarily privileged to have some of the finest healthcare and medical research facilities not only in this country, but across Europe and the world, in Hammersmith and Shepherd’s Bush. I have three of the five hospitals in Imperial Healthcare Trust: Queen Charlotte’s and Chelsea, Hammersmith, and Charing Cross. I also have, being built as we speak on a 23-acre site in White City, the major new campus for Imperial College. They are amazing institutions that this country is proud to have, and they are truly international in the staff who work there, their research and co-operation, and the funding that they receive. We cannot avoid the fact that they are grievously affected by the consequences of Brexit. They are resilient organisations and they will do what they can to mitigate the effects.

Just a few weeks ago, Imperial College announced a joint venture with the National Centre for Scientific Research, one of the major French scientific research institutions. There is already a lot of international co-operation, but one of the main purposes of the joint venture is to allow continued access to vital European funding. We welcome attempts to mitigate the effects of Brexit, but when we talk about Brexit it always seems to be about how we can achieve a second-best position. Like my right hon. Friend the Member for Exeter (Mr Bradshaw), who eloquently expressed the variety of damage that Brexit will do to the healthcare sector, I find it difficult to see any positives. Yes, it is possible to see mitigation, but very difficult to see how we are going to be any better off in any capacity as a result of Brexit.

[Sandy Martin (Ipswich) (Lab)]

Does my hon. Friend agree that, given the research facilities he has described in the hospitals in his constituency, we are talking about not only the effect on the institutions, but the ability of the entire health sector to produce the best outcomes for patients in this country, because they get new treatments faster because of the co-operative work being done internationally?

[Andy Slaughter]

Yes, the system is fully integrated across EU countries, and the whole is greater than the sum of its parts.

Last November, the president of Imperial College, Alice Gast, revealed that some of the 2,000 staff at Imperial College who are EU nationals have already left. I will come on to why that should be the case, given what the Government have said on EU nationals. Half of them—1,000 people—have taken legal advice on their positions post Brexit. A quarter of the staff and a fifth of the students at Imperial are from the EU. In the healthcare sector across London there are 20,000 staff from the EU, which is about 15%.

A good example is another of my local hospitals, the Royal Brompton, where 30% of the clinical staff are EU nationals. I have visited the Royal Brompton, and it has the most extraordinary paediatric cardiac surgery unit doing the most advanced and delicate operations on newly born babies. When I visited, all the surgeons who were operating were EU nationals, I think from five different countries. The Government may say, “Well, so what?”, but I do not imagine that they maintain, as has been said previously, that we can give a sudden opportunity to replace many doctors and nurses with home-grown doctors and nurses. That is not going to happen overnight. We know that the demand is such that we will continue to rely on clinicians from abroad for the indefinite future.

Refugee Children: Family Reunion in the UK

Debate between Sandy Martin and Andy Slaughter

Thursday 22nd February 2018 Westminster Hall

[Andy Slaughter (Hammersmith) (Lab)]

I will endeavour to be brief, particularly as I hope to speak in the next debate on child poverty in London.

I begin by referring to my declaration in the Register of Members’ Financial Interests. On 4 September last year, along with my hon. Friend the Member for Plymouth, Sutton and Devonport (Luke Pollard), who is present for this debate, and the hon. Member for Crawley (Henry Smith), I went with Safe Passage UK to the Calais Jungle camp, or rather what remains of it. I had been there once before, at the very beginning of 2016, when it was in full swing, as it were. Although there are substantially fewer refugees there now, because of the demolition and the behaviour of the French authorities, the conditions are substantially worse, particularly for the hundreds of young people who are there. That is partly because of the violence being shown to them and partly because any recourse to the authorities has been moved hundreds of kilometres away, so that even those who have the right to apply under Dublin III are unable to do so. Of course, that means that there is far more risk of them risking very dangerous ways to reach the UK, such as under lorries or on the rail tracks.

[Sandy Martin (Ipswich) (Lab)]

Does my hon. Friend agree that the danger to young people who are in limbo in camps such as Calais is not just physical danger but the danger of their being recruited into crime, drug-taking and in some cases even prostitution?

[Andy Slaughter]

I absolutely agree. I feel for all the refugees in that situation, but particularly for children and those who have a legal right—whether they are Dubs children or Dublin III children—to be in the UK. Frankly, it is shameful that the Government did not honour their promise to Lord Dubs. Lord Dubs is a constituent of mine and last month I went with him to the Holocaust Memorial Day commemoration here in Westminster—of course, he came to the UK on the Kindertransport—and we met other survivors. I think that he is puzzled, as well as horrified, that we are unable to show to children who are being persecuted abroad now the charity that we showed in much more difficult times in the 1930s.

I will make two specific points. When we returned from that most recent trip to Calais, I asked the Secretary of State for Exiting the European Union what would happen if we leave the EU and the Dublin III regulations fall away. I asked him what the Government intend to replace them with, whether they would replicate them in the immigration rules, and whether they would apply—somewhat anomalously—just to the EU27 countries or more generally. I received what I thought was quite a helpful response at the time, which was 5 September last year. We know that the immigration Bill is delayed, but the Secretary of State said that that issue is

“precisely the sort of thing that that Bill should address. A more general point I made to the European Commission negotiators…is that a legal requirement is not the only reason for doing things. We are a country with a strong tradition of tolerance and generosity, and if anything, I expect that to grow after we leave, not diminish.”—[Official Report, 5 September 2017; Vol. 628, c. 64.]

Some months on, I wonder whether the Minister for Immigration is able to update us today on the Government’s current thinking on that specific issue. In other words, will there be what I think all Members taking part in this debate would like to see, which is an end to anomalies where there are clearly people in this country who can care for children but who are not their parents? They might be their grandparents, uncles or aunts. A very good example is given in the case studies provided to us by the NGOs: despite being a refugee herself, a grandmother is able to be a sponsor but does not have the necessary finances, and there is an uncle who is a British citizen and does have the necessary finances, but so many hoops have to be jumped through in order to achieve a resolution.

I will conclude by repeating what a number of colleagues have said about legal aid. I had the dubious privilege of leading for the Opposition on the Committee considering the Legal Aid, Sentencing and Punishment of Offenders Act 2012, which stripped out so much of our legal aid system. The LASPO review is going on as we speak and is due to report soon. I wish that the whole of that iniquitous Act could be swept away and that we could go back to there being an entitlement to legal aid, which was then qualified, rather than simply having a very frugal approach of giving legal aid in only a few cases. I am sure that this Government are not going to do that, but I have some hope that they will genuinely review LASPO and correct some anomalies—and this issue is clearly an anomaly.

The people we are talking about cannot use the legal system, because it is complex and, as has been said many times by senior members of the judiciary, simply having the right to go to court is not enough unless someone has the ability to do so as well, and in many cases that means having a lawyer.