Deafness and Hearing Loss

Tommy Sheppard Excerpts

Thursday 30th November 2017 Westminster Hall

[Tommy Sheppard (Edinburgh East) (SNP)]

I will sign this comment: “Today, I will talk to you about deafness and hearing loss in Scotland.”

I will come back to my poor attempt at signing later. I wanted to speak about a number of things, many of which have already been mentioned. I very much welcome this debate and congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for Poplar and Limehouse (Jim Fitzpatrick) on bringing it here. Indeed, I commend him on the work he has done through the all-party parliamentary group on deafness to raise this issue across the House.

There are approximately 1 million people in Scotland who suffer hearing loss, and I am one of them. About 15 years ago, I found that my hearing was deteriorating, and I did not do much about it—I was just very irritating to my friends and family, not hearing things. Eventually, I was persuaded to get treatment. I was diagnosed with degeneration in the inner ear, an inherited trait that means that I cannot hear some frequencies, but I can hear others. I hear some frequencies at full volume, and others at just 30% or 40%, which means I lose a lot of the sense of what people are saying to me.

I am beyond grateful to NHS Lothian and our public health service for what it has been able to do for me. I wear hearing aids, like my hon. Friend, and the degree of technology and sophistication in these little things is quite remarkable. There are mini-computers in here that take in all frequencies and decide to boost the ones that I am weak on, which means that, by and large, I can hear relatively normally. I also want to place on record the efforts of the House authorities. In particular, I find the loop in the Chamber very effective indeed.

Of course, there are still drawbacks; those who, like me, wear hearing aids will be aware of this. For example, when I am in the Chamber taking part in a debate and I have them on the setting for the loop, if a colleague sitting beside me says something, I do not get it; I have to reprogramme the aid and try to find out what they were saying—or quite often I just nod and pretend I got the gist of what they were saying. I also notice that these aids can be irritating to me and others in close proximity, because of the feedback and whistling sound there is sometimes, but it is worth putting up with those minor drawbacks to take advantage of this great technology.

I got these hearing aids on the NHS, and I was very grateful indeed to receive them. These instruments are state-of-the-art technology that match anything available in the private sector. In fact, I have friends who, either through inclination or ignorance, decided to go private, and went to agencies on the high street that retail hearing aids, and their service is far inferior to mine. Eventually, on my advice, they went to the local audiology department and got better treatment.

That is just part of why I have a particular interest in the subject. I am of course also mindful that this is probably one of the most common disabilities that we as a species suffer. More of my constituents probably suffer hearing loss than voted for me on 8 June; that is how prevalent it is.

I want to spend a little time, because others have mentioned it, talking about the situation in Scotland, particularly with regard to BSL. Any BSL users watching what I did at the beginning will understand that I cannot sign, but I tried to learn that opening line because I know that, as time goes on, I will want to learn BSL, as it will be something that I rely on in later years and is therefore important to me, but it is important to me in the here and now because of so many people for whom BSL is a vital means of communication.

It has already been mentioned that in 2015 the Scottish Parliament passed the British Sign Language (Scotland) Act. A Labour MSP decided to bring it to Parliament. The Act was passed unanimously, with all five parties in full agreement. A key thing that the Act did was launch a process to establish a national action plan to promote and develop BSL in Scotland, with the simple objective of making Scotland the best place in the world to be a BSL user and to live, work and play. I say that not to blow Scotland’s trumpet, although it is part of my brief to do that, and not to say that Scotland is better than the rest of the UK, but simply to say that if people took the time and sat down to talk about these things and draw up a plan, they would be surprised at how much can be done. I ask the Minister and the Government to look at the situation as it is developing in Scotland and perhaps see how much of that could be replicated UK-wide.

The national plan was published in September. It is quite detailed and has 70 targets. I will not go into them all; it is available on the Scottish Government website. The process was really important. Once time is provided in a Parliament for a discussion that leads to legislation, because of the statutory force of the discussions taking place, things that people had never thought about begin to go on the agenda and come out of the woodwork. It is a stimulus to all manner of people in civic society and in Government agencies in thinking about how they can improve the situation.

The plan of action has 70 detailed targets set for the next three years. I will give Members a flavour of them. The first is to look at how we can build into the 2021 census a question or series of questions that identify in detail the number of BSL users taking part in the census, so that we have the data on which to plan in future. Target 10 talks about improving access to early years services, so that deaf children can access them. Target 16 is about removing the barriers that prevent BSL users from becoming teachers, so that they can not only teach in the medium of BSL, but teach hearing kids through interpretation. Target 25 is about targets for colleges and universities. Importantly, the next target makes loans available for BSL students. I am pleased to say that just this week the Scottish Government announced that loans will be available for students in Scotland to study throughout the UK if the course is not available in Scotland, so we now have a situation in which we can support BSL users who are students in Scotland, but who are able to go on courses in England and Wales as well.

Target 39 is about making sure that all our health screening and immunisation programmes have the medium of BSL built into them, so that BSL users have full access. Target 48 is about sport, and 53 is about placing obligations on transport and our rail and bus providers to make sure they understand the needs of BSL users and have it available as a means of communication. Target 57 is about access to the arts. Target 63 is about making sure that our emergency services understand the needs of BSL users and have a facility to be able to communicate with them. Finally, the last one I picked out is the target to improve electoral participation and voting in the political process by BSL users.

There is a series of very good targets, but probably the best thing about them is the way in which BSL users themselves have bought into the process and have become part of developing the action plan. A full £1.3 million has been provided to various deaf voluntary organisations to monitor how the targets develop and are implemented. In 2020 the intention is to come back with a full Government review across all agencies to make sure we look at the next stage. Those are practical, achievable steps that can be taken, many of which do not involve a lot of money. They can be done within existing budgets. They require changes in attitudes. We cannot overestimate the importance of having a statutory framework and setting all these things down as targets for Government agencies.

There is always pressure on a legislative programme, but a UK BSL Act that would do some of those things would not take a lot of parliamentary time. It need not be a very complicated Bill. It could be focused. Even if we had to give up three hours of a Back-Bench debate or two to get the measure through, it would be worth doing. I am sure that if the Government were to take the initiative, they would find all parties commending them.

Several people have mentioned Access to Work, but it is important to stress that claimants who had the benefit of the programme and were not limited until now—the cap applied to new claimants—will be subject to the cap as well. That will mean that some people who are in employment will have to reduce or leave their employment. That is the truth of the matter. It might not be a great number of people, but that is what will happen.

I note that the DWP says that only about 267 people will be affected by the cap. That is not a great number, but it really looks like penny-pinching when we compare it to the scale of the DWP budget.

[Jim Fitzpatrick]

The early statistics said that for every £1 spent on Access to Work, the Treasury got a cost-benefit analysis plus of £1.34 or £1.50. A lot of the people the hon. Gentleman describes are senior professionals, chief executives and so on, who will be on a 40% rate of tax, so it is an investment that will give the Treasury more money back than the basic rate of tax does.

[Tommy Sheppard]

I could not agree more. If somebody is in work and gets support through the scheme, not only are they earning money and paying tax, but the people who support them earn money and pay tax as well. There are all sorts of ways in which this makes sense. My key point is that given the small number of people affected, is the cap really worth it? Would it not be better to not have the cap, and assess the situation later? It is expensive because of the nature of the support that people need in this part of the programme if they are deaf and a BSL user. It is expensive because that support is undertaken by hard-working professional people such as the signers here today, who have trained very hard for the job that they do.

Perhaps in the future developments in audio technology and computer graphics will be such that we will get an app on our smartphone that will turn speech into sign in a way that works, but who knows? That is for the future. For now, we need professional human beings to be able to provide the service. We should accept as a society that for the limited number of people affected, the money is a price worth paying. We could perhaps look at other ways, rather than the cap and restricting the services provided, to reduce costs.

I want to finish by talking about Parliament and some of the things that we might be able to do here. It is wonderful that we have our proceedings signed today. I do not know why we do not have a signer standing beside the Speaker’s Chair and filmed for all the proceedings in our Parliament. When we think of the amount of money we spend in this place, the number of staff that we have, the amount we spend on maintenance and the amount we are going to spend on refurbishment, it is not such a big price to make sure that during the 30 hours a week or whatever when the Chamber is in operation and debating, there is a signer there, signing for the people in the Chamber, and, more importantly, for the people who watch live online or wish to check back on proceedings.

Another thing that we could do has to do with the scheme in Parliament, which Members may be aware of—I have not taken advantage of it yet, but I am sure others have—to get tuition in a foreign language. Why do not we add BSL to that? Why does not each MP have an opportunity to learn that as part of our professional development as Members of Parliament, so that we are better able to communicate with our constituents, and more aware of the technological needs?

My central point, which I will stress as I end, is that it is impossible to overestimate the importance of a legislative framework, because of the sense of purpose it creates for civil society and statutory agencies, and the sense of worth, I suppose, that it gives to people who are looking to us to respond to their needs.