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  • Rob Roberts – 2023 Speech on Immigration and Nationality Fees – Exemption for NHS Clinical Staff

    Rob Roberts – 2023 Speech on Immigration and Nationality Fees – Exemption for NHS Clinical Staff

    The speech made by Rob Roberts, the Independent MP for Delyn, in the House of Commons on 20 March 2023.

    I beg to move,

    That leave be given to bring in a Bill to exempt NHS clinical staff from the requirement to pay fees under section 68 of the Immigration Act 2014; and for connected purposes.

    I declare a partial interest for the avoidance of doubt, as my fiancé is a healthcare professional from overseas. However, he already has his British citizenship, so would derive no benefit from this Bill whatever.

    The NHS is a fundamental part of British life, as it has been for decades. It has been under a particular spotlight for the past couple of years as we have battled with the most significant public health crisis in our lifetimes, and right hon. and hon. Members from all parts of the House have spoken at length about the debt we owe to the NHS clinicians who put themselves in harm’s way to make sure they could provide healthcare to the rest of us, who rely on them so profoundly.

    I have spoken on this topic several times both in the Chamber and in Westminster Hall, and last year I tabled an amendment to the Nationality and Borders Bill to exempt NHS clinical workers from paying the fees associated with applying for indefinite leave to remain. I discussed the amendment with the Minister at the time, the hon. Member for Corby (Tom Pursglove), as well as with the hon. Member for Torbay (Kevin Foster), who had responsibilities in this area. I was told that the amendment, which was unusual in this House in having signatures and support from Members from six different parties, was not acceptable to the Government because we could not make special cases out of certain groups of people. Shortly afterwards, as the Bill was making its way through the House of Lords, the Government announced that armed forces veterans would be exempted from paying fees for ILR applications. I thought that was interesting, given that NHS workers had not been worthy of a special classification just a couple of months before.

    The Home Secretary at the time, the right hon. Member for Witham (Priti Patel), said:

    “Waiving the visa fee for those Commonwealth veterans and Gurkhas with six years’ service who want to settle here is a suitable way of acknowledging their personal contribution and service to our nation.”

    To take nothing away from the veterans who have put their lives on the line in service of the country and the Commonwealth, we would be hard-pressed to find many members of the public who do not believe that our NHS clinical staff are worthy of the same consideration.

    While the entire NHS played a vital role, our thanks and gratitude should go in particular to NHS workers who have come from other countries. Those individuals have travelled huge distances to be here, are often separated from their families, and have put their own lives at risk to help and save our lives—citizens from a different country to their own. Regardless of their or our citizenship, the duty and responsibility to care and contribute to the wellbeing of others always comes first for them. It is amazing, and it should be highly commended.

    I welcome the many steps that the Government have already taken for foreign NHS workers, including the health and care worker visa and the exemption from the immigration health surcharge, but we need to go further. These people want to make the UK their home. They have put down roots, and we have a duty to put in place a framework that allows them to do just that, without thousands of pounds-worth of costs just to stay in a country to which they have already contributed so much.

    With fees for indefinite leave to remain at more than £2,400 and citizenship applications costing another £1,800 or so, plus another few hundred for biometrics, English language tests and all the supplementary things that need to be done, the total cost of the naturalisation process is more like £5,000—among the highest in the world. The process of becoming a citizen for our NHS workers is costly and challenging, and includes the ridiculous “Life in the UK” test, which asks questions about such useful topics as the Great Exhibition of 1851 and which British actors have won Oscars recently. Quite how anyone could be expected to integrate into British society without that pivotal knowledge remains a mystery.

    Doctors, nurses, physiotherapists, occupational therapists, psychiatrists and all manner of clinicians come to our shores to work in the NHS. They pay their taxes every month. They work in intensive care units, high dependency units, paediatric cancer centres and in everything from obstetrics and neonatal units to geriatrics and palliative care. They spend their working life in this country saving lives, and that was especially so during the pandemic. They have to take out loans to pay for their residency applications. As I have said a number of times before, we should not be driving them into debt; we should be in their debt.

    It is our duty to create a new route to citizenship for NHS clinicians—one that will not leave workers in debt, in poverty or in constant worry about funding their next application—by abolishing the costs associated with applying for indefinite leave to remain and citizenship for NHS clinical workers. There would obviously have to be some caveats, in that those workers would need to have worked in the NHS for at least three years and would also need to commit to remaining in the NHS for at least a further three years; otherwise, the fees that they would have paid would become due. That is necessary to stop people gaining the benefit that I hope would benefit clinicians in our NHS, then deciding to go into the private sector immediately after they have received their right to reside. That would be counterproductive to what I am trying to achieve.

    I am proud that our NHS attracts such global talent and recruits from around the world; quite frankly, we would not be able to run it without them. In 2021, over 160,000 NHS staff from over 200 different countries stated that they were a non-British nationality, accounting for nearly 15% of all staff for whom a nationality is known. However, the current fees and process is a huge barrier for both future NHS workers, who are put off coming to the UK to fill our many vacancies, and current NHS workers, who are unable to afford the final step and receive the permanent residency that they have earned through their service to our country.

    Residency and citizenship should not be about cost—whether a person can afford it—but about contribution and inclusion in our communities. NHS workers have perhaps made the biggest contribution of all, saving our lives and keeping us safe. Despite being such valued members of the communities in which they live and work, without being citizens they struggle to be fully part of those communities. Without ILR, individuals face barriers to home ownership, as it is almost impossible to get a mortgage, as well as barriers in higher education and so many other aspects of life. Therefore, scrapping the fees would not only make residency and citizenship more affordable and a viable option for foreign workers in our NHS, but would create a more diverse and, crucially, a more integrated society.

    People from other countries who have worked in our NHS during this pandemic and throughout their lives deserve to be able to call the UK their home, and actually feel as though it is. The pandemic had one benefit, in that it highlighted what many of us already knew: that our NHS workers, whether British or not, are the backbone of our health service and our country. Those who have come here to provide such incredible care should not be penalised for it, but currently, the high application fees do just that. In conclusion, it is time to abolish the fees for indefinite leave to remain and citizenship for those clinical staff who work in our NHS, so that those who spend time helping and treating us can finally feel like they belong, and are welcomed in our country with open arms.

    Question put and agreed to.

    Ordered,

    That Rob Roberts, Dr Philippa Whitford, Martyn Day, Margaret Ferrier, Ben Lake, Sarah Atherton, Mark Fletcher, Henry Smith, Jim Shannon and Claudia Webbe present the Bill.

    Rob Roberts accordingly presented the Bill.

  • Rob Roberts – 2022 Speech on West Coast Main Line Services

    Rob Roberts – 2022 Speech on West Coast Main Line Services

    The speech made by Rob Roberts, the Independent MP for Delyn, in the House of Commons on 15 December 2022.

    It is a pleasure to follow my hon. Friend the Member for Milton Keynes North (Ben Everitt) in this important debate, and I congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for Ynys Môn (Virginia Crosbie) on securing it. Earlier this year, following months of disruption to the rail service on the west coast main line, Avanti was put on notice to improve its service. As we have heard already from a great many Members, everyone who uses Avanti—including me, as I travel between the House and my Delyn constituency—knows that, sadly, it continues to fail to provide us with the service we deserve, or even one close to that.

    But, Madam Deputy Speaker, I have to offer a little note of sympathy for Avanti. Over the past few months, the man who never met a microphone he didn’t like, Mick “Grinch”, the union boss stealing Christmas from millions of people, and his militant arrogance, continues to ensure major operational issues across the network, and untold misery caused by his love of striking, which apparently is a last resort—of course it is. That is after a two-year global pandemic, which saw family gatherings come to a grinding halt to try to control the virus. This is the first year when everything should finally be back to normal and we can be with our families again at Christmas, but RMT members have decided to cause untold misery to families and businesses. They should be utterly ashamed of themselves.

    We have a settled situation of devolution in Wales, which means that for more than two decades the people of north Wales, and the people of Delyn, have grown used to being overlooked and underfunded. We just get on with it, and we do our best to cope with whatever challenges we face. Like all my colleagues in north Wales, many of whom we have already heard from, I am determined to secure the opportunities of the levelling-up agenda, which was at the heart of the UK Government’s manifesto. For so many across north Wales, levelling up is so much more than the investment, jobs, and opportunities it promises, but it is being undermined and made more difficult because of issues that we have heard so much about in this debate.

    As my right hon. Friend the Member for Clwyd West (Mr Jones) said, the west coast main line is a critical piece of UK infrastructure. It is essential cross-border infrastructure linking England to north Wales and Scotland, as identified in Sir Peter Hendy’s connectivity review. The north Wales coast line runs from Holyhead via Chester to Crewe, where it joins the west coast main line and connects directly to London. It is also vital in connecting us to the island of Ireland, and in connecting Northern Ireland with the rest of the United Kingdom through the port of Holyhead, which is the UK’s second busiest roll-on roll-off port, and vital for the infrastructure of north Wales.

    When the trains between Holyhead and Euston do run, which is relatively unusual in itself, there are daily frustrations, which we have heard about many times. These are things that aggravate me and other passengers: the shop is not stocked, the card machine does not work, the wi-fi does not work, the carriages are overcrowded, and people have to sit on the floor—tattoos or no tattoos, sitting on the floor is never good. Recently, people have at times been unable to book train tickets in advance, because they show as fully booked even when they are not. Many colleagues have rightly asked whether Avanti could run a bath, let alone a rail service—although I would never resort to that type of rhetoric.

    Just one train per hour goes from London to Manchester, instead of three per hour, as it was before. There is one train a day from London to Chester, instead of an hourly service, and a shuttle service from Crewe to Holyhead instead of what used to be nine direct trains a day from Holyhead to London. It is astonishing.

    I regularly meet and speak to Avanti’s regional management. It has been reassuring to hear that they are committed to improving services and that they admit that a lot of their promises have simply not been delivered. That has led to job losses, including in some of the most senior positions, but it is now time to deliver. A new timetable is out, with a massive amount of new services on it. That is very welcome, but trains running to the old timetable were constantly delayed, cancelled or unreliable, so I am baffled as to how Avanti will offer the extended service it has promised when the pared-back offering was so shambolic in the first place. Time will tell. I am certain that Avanti is watching this debate very closely, so I say again: it is time to deliver.

    I have stayed out of these debates in the past. In the face of a lot of criticism from colleagues about the service, I have stayed pretty positive, because pressures on the train operating companies have been significant. I try to stay as reasonable as possible and be as patient as I can with them, but I am afraid that I have come to the limit of my patience. If things do not improve now, swiftly, I will be first in line to tell the Minister that the franchise should not be renewed any further, because it simply does not deliver.

  • Rob Roberts – 2022 Parliamentary Question on Financial Education in Secondary Schools

    Rob Roberts – 2022 Parliamentary Question on Financial Education in Secondary Schools

    The parliamentary question asked by Rob Roberts, the Independent MP for Delyn, in the House of Commons on 28 November 2022.

    Rob Roberts (Delyn) (Ind)

    What steps she is taking to promote financial education in secondary schools.

    The Secretary of State for Education (Gillian Keegan)

    I am a passionate champion of an education that gives children the real-world knowledge and skills that they need for later life. A good grounding in maths for children is essential for understanding things like interest rates, compound interest and the changing landscape of financial products. On Thursday, I was pleased to visit Chesterton Primary School in Battersea with the Schools Minister, my right hon. Friend the Member for Bognor Regis and Littlehampton (Nick Gibb), to mark the first ever set of national data on children’s times tables, alongside announcing up to £59.3 million of investment to continue to increase the quality of maths teaching.

    Rob Roberts

    In conversation with my local Jobcentre Plus team earlier this year, I was told that the No. 1 thing missing for school leavers is employability skills, which are partly about understanding finances, bank accounts, loans, credit cards and taxes—all the stodgy, boring, grown-up stuff. Does my right hon. Friend agree that making sure that school leavers are equipped with information about those things will stop them getting into financial difficulty as young adults and will set them up well for the future?

    Gillian Keegan

    I agree that understanding finances is essential; I learned that myself in my Saturday job at St John’s market, where I worked in a shop from the age of 13. Education on financial matters also provides an opportunity to teach about fraud. Pupils receive financial education throughout the national curriculum in mathematics and citizenship; for pupils of secondary school age, that includes compulsory content covering the functions and uses of money, financial products and services, and the need to understand financial risk.

  • Rob Roberts – 2022 Speech on Greenfield Railway Station

    Rob Roberts – 2022 Speech on Greenfield Railway Station

    The speech made by Rob Roberts, the Independent MP for Delyn, in the House of Commons on 28 January 2022.

    It is my pleasure to be able to bring this week’s parliamentary business to a close with today’s Adjournment debate. I thought I would break with convention by leaving aside beer, cake and police reports, and focus on an issue that actually impacts my constituents day to day. Who knows, maybe it will catch on—fingers crossed; we live in hope. Rather than springing it on the Minister at the end, I give him advance warning that I shall ask for a constituency visit, as well as funding to move the project forward. That will give him something to think on while I dilate on the issue.

    Barely a day goes by when I do not hear the term “levelling up”, which has been the central plank of the Government’s communication efforts over the last couple of years, since the general election. Although “levelling up” is still something of a nebulous phrase that has not been particularly clearly defined, it seems relatively clear that it does represent a fundamental shift towards assisting regions and communities that have been left behind. There are, of course, many ways in which that can be achieved, but in the case of my Delyn constituency, I have long maintained that the thing we need most of all is excellent transport links.

    Delyn is one of those constituency names that has people scratching their heads, wondering “Where’s that?” Some residents do not even realise that their particular part of Flintshire in north-east Wales has that name. To our east, we have Deeside and the light industry of its industrial parks, as well as a major manufacturer in Airbus. Even further east is Chester, with connections to Liverpool and Manchester. Those areas offer significant job opportunities. To the west, we have the stunning north Wales coast, which brings not only a joyful experience, but a further opportunity for jobs in the thriving north Wales tourism sector, despite the Welsh Labour Government’s best efforts to cripple tourism and hospitality over the past 12 months.

    My constituency includes a 15-mile stretch of that coastline, from Oakenholt in the east to Gronant in the west, and along that coastal path we find some of the most deprived areas of Delyn. Broadly in the middle of that stretch we find the town of Holywell and its adjoining village of Greenfield. Much of Holywell and Greenfield is in the top 20% of the most deprived areas of Wales, with some parts in the top 10%. With those pockets of deprivation, comes the obvious difficulty of not being able to afford the rising cost of running a vehicle to get to work, even if suitable work can be found locally. Addressing the fundamental causes of that deprivation is key, the most pressing of which is clearly improving the transport network.

    As part of the 2019 general election campaign, the vast majority of the doors on which I knocked in Holywell and Greenfield were consistent and strident in their request that a new train station be established to serve their region. Earlier this week, I asked constituents for their feedback on social media and I have picked out a small selection, but in truth they are all extremely similar. Pam Lloyd said:

    “With the bus service from Greenfield to Chester or Rhyl taking forever to get there—one hour 20 minutes on a good day—a train to the same destinations would take less than 30 mins and be more reliable and comfortable.”

    Margie Roberts said:

    “The roads are so busy, it’s only common sense to have an alternative to using the car; and the bus service is far too slow.”

    Probably the most obvious call for help came from Natalie Edwards, who said:

    “As I only have access to a car at weekends, I am reliant on public transport if I need to go anywhere other than my home town during the week. The bus journeys – even a short hop to the coast – take far too long to make them comfortable for people like me with chronic illness and hidden disabilities. Subsequently, if I can’t walk to where I need to go, which isn’t far as I have arthritis in my spine, I am defeated before I even start. This limits job opportunities as I live in a small town.”

    There were so many more testimonies we would need a lot more than a half hour Adjournment debate to go through everyone’s stories and thoughts on the matter, but suffice to say I received dozens of comments over the past few days since I told people that this debate was happening. Every single one of them was positive and supportive of the project.

    There was a station on the North Wales coast line called Holywell Junction, but it was closed as part of the Beeching reforms in 1966. Re-establishing the station, along with improved bus services from Greenfield up into the main Holywell public transport hub, would be absolutely transformative for the town. It would enable people to get to an increased number of better paid job opportunities. Studies have shown that only 8% of available jobs in the region lie within half an hour’s public transport travel time of Holywell, but more than 160,000 vacancies come into view within a 90-minute journey. Sadly, a 90-minute journey from Holywell on the bus would take you only as far as Chester in one direction and Llandudno in the other. The equivalent journey on the train would take a quarter of the time. Anything that can be done to cut public transport journey times should make those jobs much more accessible in an affordable way and should be an absolute priority to help the residents of these deprived areas to get themselves on to a more solid footing in life.

    It would not just get people out to jobs, however. Holywell in and of itself has some fantastic reasons to visit: the town name—holy well—is something of a giveaway, as it is the location of St Winifride’s Well, which is the oldest continually visited pilgrimage site in Britain; and the beautiful Greenfield valley. Both are well worth the trip. A station would bring more tourism into the town, which would further improve the economic outlook. Indeed, the county council’s local development plan identified the area of Holywell as a tourist hub for the county. In addition to the well site and Greenfield valley, both of which see around 40,000 visitors per year, hundreds of thousands of people use the Flintshire section of the Wales coastal path, which runs adjacent to the tracks.

    For businesses, enabling fast connections to the Deeside industrial parks and beyond would mean companies currently based outside of the region would have the opportunity to expand into local industrial zones in Greenfield, Bagillt and Mostyn. The train station would work in conjunction with the upcoming levelling-up fund bid for the constituency, which is focused on job creation and regeneration of those zones and will in turn make the area much more attractive for new and existing companies to grow into.

    Another of the interesting demographic situations in my constituency is that we have a much higher than average over-65 population. The average UK constituency has 18.6% of residents over 65; Delyn has 23.5%. While five percentage points might not sound like a lot, when we are talking about 70,000 people, that is an extra 3,500 over-65s compared with the average constituency and, as we are all aware, that demographic is more likely to rely on public transport to get around.

    We have a large number of children at one end and a large number of people above retirement age at the other, but in the middle we have a drop in numbers and have a much lower percentage than the average constituency of people in what others have called the “economically active” years. Making it easier for people to stay in the area by ensuring that work opportunities are more accessible in the wider region would do a huge amount to stop the working-age exodus and ensure that those skilled workers that we have in abundance in Delyn are able to get to jobs further afield without having to move out of the area.

    Getting the bus from Holywell to Chester currently takes around 90 minutes—when they are on time, which is rare. Bearing in mind that the journey is just 17 miles, that is an average speed of 11 mph. Getting a train from Holywell to Chester would take around 20 minutes, a quarter of the time. Older constituents would be able to take advantage of massively reduced travel times in the other direction, up to the coast. A significant number of studies have shown how important outdoor coastal and countryside areas can be in maintaining our physical and mental wellbeing, particularly as we get older.

    Other developments in the region would be complemented by a new Greenfield station, making the entire network more viable and user-friendly. They include the upcoming and long-promised development of Chester station, changes on the Wrexham to Bidston line, and an integrated transport plan that will hopefully come to fruition in the north Wales metro scheme, although with the latter it appears that Welsh Government are focusing all their resources on the south Wales metro rather than developing the north. I am keen to work with the Welsh Government to develop that project, which could really benefit the people of Delyn, but sadly so far there has been no engagement and no significant funding allocated to it.

    In terms of the environmental issues, currently 80% of workers in Delyn use private cars to get to work, compared with just 63% nationally. Only 0.8% of Delyn’s workers use the train for commuting, compared with 5.2% nationally. Increasing the proportion of people using trains in that way, as well as for their leisure activities, would make a huge difference to the carbon footprint of Holywell and north Wales generally, particularly when combined with the recommendations in Sir Peter Hendy’s Union connectivity review to electrify the north Wales coast line. I hope the Government will move forward with that recommendation as soon as possible, as it will go some way towards helping to achieve the target of net zero by 2030.

    At this point I pay tribute to some of the members of Holywell Town Council, particularly Councillor Barry Scragg and Community Engagement Officer Martin Fearnley, who have been the main drivers of this project for the past five years or so. They have done some excellent work, including a local community questionnaire that elicited more than 700 responses from residents and businesses. The town council’s working group on the station project has produced an extremely comprehensive report, a copy of which I will happily provide to the Minister, which succinctly lays out the case for a new station. Its figures show that the catchment area for a station in Greenfield would be around 20,000 to 25,000 people, significantly more than existing stations along the line in Prestatyn, Flint, Penmaenmawr and Abergele, all of which are already shown to be sustainable.

    The town council report has since been backed up by a formal transport study from planning specialists Mott MacDonald, commissioned by Flintshire County Council. Its report clearly states:

    “Combined with incremental rail revenue, the total cost of the scheme is negative with revenue more than offsetting investment and operating costs”.

    That is without taking into account all of the wider socioeconomic benefits I have already mentioned. The study recommends moving to a strategic outline business case and the initial steps of the processes announced last year for Project Speed, as speed is certainly of the essence in providing vital transport links to this left-behind town.

    There is no reason for the work to take years. Much of the old station infrastructure is still there, and the access is good. Land for car parking is readily available and the tracks are obviously still in place—and in use. Although transport is in many ways a devolved competence for the Welsh Government to deal with, transport infrastructure, under which this type of project would come, is a reserved matter for the UK Government.

    I will close with a request to the Minister that is twofold and, hopefully, simple to deliver. First, will he find the time to join me on a visit to Holywell to look at the site and hear about the plans from town councillors and local residents? Secondly, will he commit to providing the funding necessary for the development of a strategic business case and the follow-on initial stages of that process to confirm what the feasibility study has already been very clear about? The need for a station to serve Holywell and Greenfield is vital, would be transformative for some of the most deprived parts of my constituency and would truly facilitate the levelling up of these communities. Importantly, it would also confirm to the people of Delyn that, despite the Welsh Government overseeing many aspects of it, the UK Government have not forgotten them or abandoned them and are committed to their success and prosperity as much as that of any other region of the United Kingdom.