Black History Month

Bell Ribeiro-Addy Excerpts

Thursday 21st October 2021 Commons Chamber

[Abena Oppong-Asare]

I am delighted my right hon. Friend has mentioned that point. It is something I am particularly passionate about as our family worked in the NHS. I am concerned about the Windrush generation, for whom the Government, I have to say, have yet to provide adequate support. I hope the Minister will be able to highlight what support he will be giving to that generation, who contributed so much to the NHS, as my right hon. Friend says.

I also want to mention Lara Alabi, based in Thamesmead, who won a community award for setting up Seniors in Touch, a weekly club for over-50s in Thamesmead, to tackle isolation issues relating to health and lack of confidence.

As well as paying tribute to under-acknowledged black Britons, I want to use this debate to highlight some of the inequalities that continue to affect black people in this country and that I believe the Government must do more to address. The first is black maternity health. There have been two important Westminster Hall debates on this issue over the last year and I pay tribute to my hon. Friend the Member for Streatham (Bell Ribeiro-Addy) for leading them. I also pay tribute to the group Five X More, which has done so much to bring the issue up the political agenda. It has highlighted the stark disparity in outcomes that black women face when giving birth in this country.

Black women are four times more likely to die in pregnancy or childbirth. Black women are up to 83% more likely to suffer a near miss during pregnancy. Black babies have a 121% increased risk of stillbirth and a 50% risk of neonatal death. Miscarriage rates are 40% higher in black women, and black ethnicity is regarded as a risk factor for miscarriage. Put simply, giving birth as a black woman is considerably riskier than for women of other ethnicities. The Government know that this inequality exists and now is the time for action.

[Bell Ribeiro-Addy (Streatham) (Lab)]

My hon. Friend has highlighted well the statistics and she will be aware that the Government still have no target to end this. Does she agree that the fact that the Government have decided not to set a target and not to look at institutional racism in the NHS goes no way to solving the issues that she so eloquently raised?

[Abena Oppong-Asare]

I thank my hon. Friend for the work that she has done on this issue. That is completely accurate.

We need a target to end racial maternal health inequalities and an action plan to achieve it. The plan should include action to improve data collection, to improve the support for at-risk women, to implement the recommendations of the Joint Committee on Human Rights’ report on this issue and to identify the barriers to accessing maternal mental health services. But most of all, I urge the Government to listen to the experiences of black women, to engage with them directly, to hear their concerns and to take them seriously.

I turn to another issue that affects black women and girls: the lack of specialist training for police and other agencies supporting black women who are victims of domestic abuse. Here, I pay tribute to the organisation Sistah Space, a domestic abuse charity supporting women of African and Caribbean heritage. I met its representatives recently to discuss their petition to introduce Valerie’s law. That is named in memory of Valerie Forde, who was murdered by her former partner in 2014 alongside their 22-month-old daughter. She had previously asked the police for help after her ex-partner had threatened to burn down her house with her in it, but this was recorded only as a threat to her property.

While that story is shocking, it is sadly not uncommon. Too many black women do not get the support that they need because the police are not trained to spot and deal appropriately with domestic violence in black communities. That includes things such as missing signs of domestic violence on black skin and a lack of cultural knowledge about how threats can be communicated. We need mandatory, specialist training for the police and others on all of this and more. I hope that the Government will seriously consider that as part of the renewed focus on violence against women and girls, given recent events.

I now wish to return to the asks of the Government that I made during the Black History Month debate last year. The first was action to diversify the curriculum. As I said last year, I want our children, black and white, in every single corner of this country, to better understand our national history and our national culture. This, of course, includes the good and the bad and the full range of experiences that people have had. I am pleased to see some progress on that and I pay particular tribute to the Welsh Government, who have become the first UK nation to make the teaching of black, Asian and minority ethnic histories and experiences mandatory in the school curriculum. The OCR exam board has also recently announced that it is doubling the choice of books by writers of colour in its A-level English qualification. But more action is needed from the Government on this, and I hope that the new Secretary of State for Education, who I congratulate on his appointment, will make this a priority. Black history is British history and we need to teach it all year round.

My second ask from the Government last year was to implement a race equality strategy and action plan. There has been much discussion in the past year about the inequality and structural racism that exist in our country, not least in response to the controversial Sewell report, but we have not seen anywhere near enough concrete action from the Government.

A race equality strategy and action plan covering areas such as education, health and employment is desperately needed. It should include specific proposals to address well-known inequalities such as the ethnicity pay gap, unequal access to justice and the impact of the pandemic on black people. I fully support my party’s policy to

“implement a Race Equality Act to tackle structural racial inequality at source”,

following the excellent work of Baroness Doreen Lawrence looking at how the pandemic has impacted black and other minority ethnic groups. I say to the Government: we have seen review after review, but now is the time for action.

I want to be clear that this discussion should not become a conversation about culture wars. In those culture wars, we end up pitting poor white people against poor black people. Some may say to poor white people, “You are in this situation because footballers are taking the knee.” This place is better than that. In Black History Month, our message should be that we want to give black people hope and white people hope. Our message to white people in Black History Month is “Our history is your history too. A lot of what has happened to us involves you, too. We are not saying that you are responsible, but we are saying that we all need to better understand that.”

I will not allow us to be divided. When we are divided, extremism flourishes. I will not allow that on my watch. Black History Month tells me to tell you that we learn from our past to build a better future. We must learn from our past to build a better future.