British Sign Language Bill

Sarah Olney Excerpts

Friday 28th January 2022 Commons Chamber

[Ms Brown]

I absolutely agree. The story about a child of a parent—we are all children of our parents—having to tell the parent about a terminal diagnosis when they are obviously coming to terms with it themselves, having heard it for the first time, is just so devastating. I genuinely do not think I would have been able to sit with my mum or dad and explain what a doctor had said, and tell them that their life was about to close. I just do not think I could have done it. To think that that is something that those in the deaf community have to experience often is tragic. It is unfair and it is discriminatory.

Discrimination in all its forms has to be tackled, because it harms us all. What my hon. Friend the Member for West Lancashire talked about most eloquently was the fact that there is so much talent in the deaf community that is simply not allowed to be unlocked.

[Sarah Olney (Richmond Park) (LD)]

I am enjoying listening to the hon. Member’s speech. I was first made aware of the issue of British Sign Language not being an official language by one of my constituents, Feras al-Moubayed. He came to see me because he was really keen to impress upon me, as his local MP, the barriers that he is experiencing in getting work, keeping work and engaging as a full member of society. He is a very talented tailor. He has worked in the past for Harrods and other high-end manufacturers of clothing. He has so much to offer, yet he faces barriers daily. He faces barriers when dealing with local government and with the banks. He frequently finds himself in positions of great stress and anxiety because of the situations that he routinely finds himself in, but he has so much to offer. I am here today because I really want to support this Bill—I am so glad that the Government are supporting it—on behalf of Feras and so many other people like him who have so much to offer.

[Ms Brown]

The hon. Lady is absolutely right. She reminds me to name-check Lister Community School. The pupils of the deaf community from that school spoke to me earlier this year and requested that I come here today to support the Bill. I am glad that the hon. Lady reminded me to name-check them, and she is absolutely right: frankly, if we are not allowing parts of our community to participate fully in culture and the economy, the whole of our community and all of us are the lesser for it.

I am really grateful that this Bill will allow some very basic and practical steps to be taken to right this wrong. I want to enable it to proceed today, so I am going to sit down now and hope that it passes as quickly as possible.

Oral Answers to Questions

Sarah Olney Excerpts

Monday 8th November 2021 Commons Chamber

[Guy Opperman]

I have heard it all. How on earth the Scottish Government, were they in any event to get independence, would be able to pay ongoing state pensions is a mystery that no Scottish politician has ever been able to answer. The factual reality is that the state pension, by reason of the triple lock, is up £2,000 per person, something that would never happen under an independent Scotland—that is for sure.

[Sarah Olney (Richmond Park) (LD)]

3. What steps she is taking to support families affected by the end of the uplift to the standard allowance of universal credit.

[The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Work and Pensions (David Rutley)]

The Government have always been clear that the £20 uplift was a temporary measure. Universal credit recipients in work will soon benefit from the reduction in the taper rate from 63% to 55%, with work allowances increasing by £500 a year, meaning that nearly 2 million working households will keep about an extra £1,000 a year on average.

[Sarah Olney]

My constituent Simon Holroyd lost his mother to covid and is a single father to 10-year-old twins. He worked in the hospitality industry all his life to a senior level, but since the pandemic he has struggled to find work and is reliant on universal credit. His life before the uplift was removed was, in his words,

“a revolving mess of balancing debts”.

Now his situation is desperate. The Minister and the Secretary of State have both referred to the uplift as temporary, but for claimants such as my constituent who were not claiming universal credit before the uplift, the removal of the £20 is experienced only as a loss. Will the Minister commit to reintroducing the uplift?

[David Rutley]

With 1 million vacancies and above in the UK and with a comprehensive plan for jobs, our focus absolutely has to be on helping people into work, particularly in the hospitality sector, where there are vacancies. I hope that there might be a vacancy for the hon. Member’s constituent.

Oral Answers to Questions

Sarah Olney Excerpts

Monday 28th June 2021 Commons Chamber

[Justin Tomlinson]

Absolutely. I am grateful to all the stakeholders and those with real-lived experience, including disabled people themselves, who have been working with the Department on: the proposed changes to SRTI; our forthcoming health and disability Green Paper, which will look at both disability benefits and support and disability employment, of which we have delivered record amounts; and our national strategy for disabled people, which has the Prime Minister’s personal support and will, for the first time, bring genuine cross-Government focus to create more inclusivity and remove barriers. All of those are due very soon, and I am confident that they will be well received.

[Sarah Olney (Richmond Park) (LD)]

What recent assessment she has made of the potential merits of bringing forward legislative proposals to provide British Sign Language with full legal status.

[The Minister for Disabled People, Health and Work (Justin Tomlinson)]

On 18 March 2003, the UK Government formally recognised that British Sign Language is a language in its own right. Provision for accessing services by users of BSL are already covered by the Equality Act 2010 and the public sector equality duty.

[Sarah Olney]

My constituent Feras Al-Moubayed is engaged in a dispute with a high street bank but has been unsuccessful in his attempts to secure time with a BSL interpreter to sort through and categorise evidence documents for his case. As a result, he has missed several Financial Ombudsman Service deadlines, which has caused considerable stress and anxiety. If the Minister will not commit to bringing forward legislative proposals to provide BSL with a full legal status, will he commit to making more provision available to support people such as Mr Al-Moubayed in my constituency in the interim?

[Justin Tomlinson]

I thank the hon. Member for raising that matter; I encourage her also to raise it with our Treasury colleagues, because it sounds like additional support is needed. On the broad principle, I welcome the fact that the hon. Member for West Lancashire (Rosie Cooper), who has a great deal of personal experience in this area, is looking at a potential private Member’s Bill, for which I have offered my full support by hosting a roundtable with the Equality and Human Rights Commission, stakeholders and cross-Government officials to look at how the public sector equality duty and the Equality Act 2010 are or are not providing sufficient support for those who rely on BSL. I welcome all support in that area.

Income Tax (Charge)

Sarah Olney Excerpts

Thursday 4th March 2021 Commons Chamber

[Sarah Olney (Richmond Park) (LD) [V]]

In common with so much of what we have seen from this Government during their handling of the pandemic, this was a Budget for selected beneficiaries. Carefully picked groups are going to do well, but it was quite clearly not a Budget for the nation as a whole.

We could have had, for example, a bold move on business rates. Real reform in this area to level the playing field between high street and digital retail has been long overdue. Consumer behaviour is changing, and that change has been accelerated by the pandemic. What is the long-term future for our town centres? How will our communities thrive without the retail businesses that traditionally provide the heart of our towns? We need to lower the barriers to entry to retail and other town centre businesses, and invite new entrepreneurs to try new ideas.

But instead of business rates reform or devolution of power to local authorities, which could have allowed for real change across the whole country, a select few high streets, mostly in Tory-supporting constituencies, get a cash bung. The Chancellor’s bold new plan is for a super deduction that will enable cash-rich firms to get an extremely generous tax deduction on expenditure on plant and machinery across the next two years before being hit with a corporation tax hike. I can tell the Chancellor that after 12 months of little to no trading, many firms in my constituency simply do not have the cash in the bank to make these kinds of investments. Many of them will be burdened by a great deal of debt and unable to take on any more, and will face a long, slow road back towards profitability. Demoralised and exhausted after the effects of the past year, their reward will be a huge hike in corporation tax rates. I am concerned that many will consider it not worth their while. It would have been better to have a windfall tax now on the companies that have continued to prosper during the pandemic and then cut rates again in a few years to encourage those who are rebuilding. Again, only a select number of businesses will benefit from these changes.

We need to see policy for real stimulation and growth in the green economy. We know that we need to transition from carbon-emitting industries if we are to achieve net zero, so we must grasp the nettle of investment in green jobs. There is real opportunity for growth there, but the private sector is waiting for Government strategy and policy to set a direction. The Chancellor could have set that direction yesterday with promises to invest in green technology or to come up with a bold new plan for retrofitting to replace the green homes grant, but he did not.

What is the Chancellor’s plan for investing in sectors that will create jobs in the future? It is freeports, in selected sites, yet there is little evidence that they create economic activity rather than displace it. Again, we see the benefits concentrated in preferred areas of the country rather than a strategy for the country as a whole. The one advantage of freeports, of course, is that they can avoid customs duties and paperwork, currently creating such a barrier to trading thanks to the Government’s terrible deal with the EU. I find it extraordinary that the Chancellor made no mention of how he plans to offset the OBR’s projected 4% hit to the UK’s GDP as a result of leaving the EU. The Chancellor is bringing forward planned economic activity or concentrating it in specific areas of the country rather than investing in new sources of wealth and future jobs. This Budget ignores the real needs of our economy, both for the immediate challenges of the pandemic and for its long-term future.

Universal Credit: Delayed Roll-Out

Sarah Olney Excerpts

Tuesday 4th February 2020 Commons Chamber

[Will Quince]

I thank my hon. Friend for his question and the constructive way in which he put it, but I must respectfully disagree with him. There is no five-week wait. People are able to access their advance on day one.

[Sarah Olney (Richmond Park) (LD)]

Can the Minister tell us whether we can now expect to see an improvement to the kind of delays that many applicants are experiencing in their applications being processed? Will the Minister commit himself to publishing some statistics so that we can see whether the impact of this delay has resulted in an improvement to those kinds of delays?

[Will Quince]

I am a little confused, because my understanding is that those performance stats are indeed available. The Department has a very good record on payments and payment timeliness. Can we improve? Of course we can, and I meet with officials on at least a weekly basis to discuss that. In many cases, it is down not just to the Department but to how the claimant provides information. We are putting in additional resource, where appropriate, to help people to help themselves to get us that important information that we need to process the claims.

Jobcentre Plus Offices: Closure

Sarah Olney Excerpts

Monday 30th January 2017 Commons Chamber

[Caroline Nokes]

My hon. Friend is exactly right. We should celebrate not only the high number of people in Kettering in work, but the additional skills with which they have been helped by our hard-working work coaches.

[Sarah Olney (Richmond Park) (LD)]

Unemployment may be falling now, but numerous forecasts suggest that the effects of Brexit might reverse or stagnate this decline. What assessment have the Government made of the ability to scale up support in the already overstretched jobcentre pluses if, as many expect, unemployment begins to increase in the future if the cuts go ahead?

[Caroline Nokes]

I would like to direct the hon. Lady’s attention to the National Audit Office report of 2005, which says:

“One of the Department’s main needs is flexibility in the amount of accommodation it uses.”

I reassure the hon. Lady that we are ensuring that we retain enough flexibility within the system to be able to cope with future changes in the jobs market.