Speech in Lords Chamber - Tue 18 Jan 2022
Health and Care Bill
"My Lords, it is a great pleasure to follow the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of Birmingham. I apologise to the Committee for not being able to be here at the start of the debate on this group, owing to a medical appointment.
I shall address my remarks to Amendments …..."Lord Shinkwin - View Speech
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Speech in Lords Chamber - Tue 07 Dec 2021
Health and Care Bill
"My Lords, I congratulate the noble Lord, Lord Stevens of Birmingham, on his excellent maiden speech. I also applaud the work of John Baron in the other place, as my noble friend Lord Sandhurst and others have done, on focusing the Government’s attention in the Bill on cancer outcomes, and …..."Lord Shinkwin - View Speech
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Speech in Lords Chamber - Wed 15 Sep 2021
NHS: Hospital Visiting
"My Lords, I will always remember how my spirits rose the moment my mother appeared at the entrance to the children’s ward when, as a child, I was confined to bed with yet another fracture. Given that the isolation of lockdown has highlighted the importance of human contact to good …..."Lord Shinkwin - View Speech
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Speech in Lords Chamber - Tue 14 Sep 2021
Commonwealth Fund Report: NHS Ranking
"My Lords, of course we must protect the NHS and support social care but, given the proposed tax increase, can my noble friend the Minister explain to taxpayers on low incomes how they will know whether their money is well spent?..."Lord Shinkwin - View Speech
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Written Question
Monday 15th March 2021
Asked by:
Lord Shinkwin (Conservative - Life peer)
Question
to the Department of Health and Social Care:
To ask Her Majesty's Government what assessment they have made of the extent to which NHS shortages of (1) nurses, (2) medical practitioners, and (3) other staff, could be filled by those coming to the UK from Hong Kong under (a) the British National (Overseas) visa, and (b) any other schemes; and what plans they have (i) to identify, and (ii) to recruit, suitably qualified people from Hong Kong for such roles.
Answered by Lord Bethell
Hong Kong is not on the World Health Organization’s Workforce Support and Safeguard List, 2020. Therefore, the Department considers Hong Kong a suitable country for supplying the National Health Service with qualified health workers. Agencies are working in Hong Kong and some nurses have already joined the NHS.
Speech in Lords Chamber - Wed 30 Dec 2020
Health Protection (Coronavirus, Restrictions) (All Tiers) (England) (Amendment) (No. 2) Regulations 2020
"My Lords, it is ironic, is it not, that on the very day that we are considering the European Union (Future Relationship) Bill, which should, in theory, make government far more accountable to Parliament, we are also considering yet more restrictions, retrospectively, which suggest that, in practice, we are moving …..."Lord Shinkwin - View Speech
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Speech in Lords Chamber - Wed 04 Nov 2020
Health Protection (Coronavirus) (Restrictions) (England) (No. 4) Regulations 2020
"My Lords, I shall speak to the amendment to the Motion in my name. As far as I know, I have not had coronavirus. What I do know is that whether I live or die is neither here nor there. In the grand scheme of things, though, whether parliamentary democracy …..."Lord Shinkwin - View Speech
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Speech in Lords Chamber - Wed 04 Nov 2020
Health Protection (Coronavirus) (Restrictions) (England) (No. 4) Regulations 2020
"At end insert “but that this House regrets that a further national lockdown to address the COVID-19 pandemic signals to totalitarian regimes that Her Majesty’s Government have failed to address the pandemic effectively, and that the United Kingdom’s parliamentary democracy is weak.”..."Lord Shinkwin - View Speech
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Written Question
Tuesday 5th May 2020
Asked by:
Lord Shinkwin (Conservative - Life peer)
Question
to the Department of Health and Social Care:
To ask Her Majesty's Government what steps, if any, they are taking to (1) measure, (2) monitor, and (3) reduce, the (a) gender, (b) ethnicity, (c) disability, and (d) LGBTQ+, pay gap.
Answered by Baroness Berridge
Pay gaps are caused by a range of factors. To address them, we must ensure that everybody has equal access to opportunities.
In 2017, we introduced mandatory gender pay gap reporting for large employers, providing an unprecedented level of transparency. The gender pay gap is currently at a record low of 17.3%. However, the gap for full-time employees increased slightly to 8.9%. To address the drivers of the gap, we’ve set out a package of commitments aiming to empower women from school right through to retirement.
The Government ran a consultation from October 2018 to January 2019 on Ethnicity Pay Reporting and received over 300 detailed responses. The Government met with businesses and representative organisations to understand the barriers towards reporting and what information could be published to allow for meaningful action to be taken. We have also run voluntary methodology testing with a broad range of businesses to better understand the complexities outlined in the consultation using real payroll data and will share next steps in due course.
Calculation and monitoring of disability and LGBT pay gaps raises significant issues of self-reporting and data accuracy and this data is not widely collected by employers. Although we have no plans for data collection of pay for these characteristics, we want to achieve practical changes for disabled people, which remove barriers and increase opportunity. The Government will publish an ambitious ‘National Strategy for Disabled People’. We will ensure that the lived experience of disabled people is at the heart of the new National Strategy and focus on the issues that disabled people say affect them the most.
The 108,000 respondents to the National LGBT Survey told us that their priority in the workplace is to tackle discrimination. So the Government Equalities Office is exploring the creation of a package of measures to tackle LGBT workplace discrimination. LGBT people should be able to be themselves in the workplace, so that they can do their best work and achieve their full potential.
Diverse workforces make good business sense. For example, organisations in the top 25% for gender diversity on their executive teams are 21% more likely to have profits above their industry average, and organisations where over 20% of managers are women have been associated with higher performance than organisations with less than 15% representation of women.
Speech in Lords Chamber - Thu 09 Jan 2020
Queen’s Speech
"My Lords, I was really pleased to see in the gracious Speech a focus on enabling individuals to develop their skills and realise their potential. This reminded me of a powerful point made by the Prime Minister during the election campaign that talent is distributed equally but opportunity is not. …..."Lord Shinkwin - View Speech
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